A national conversation has begun which is alarming, yet also familiar. It talks about costs and trade-offs, losses and accounts. It is a conversation about human lives framed in the language of economics.

A recent study by Philip Thomas, professor of risk management at Bristol University, suggests that ‘If the coronavirus lockdown leads to a fall in GDP of more than 6.4 per cent more years of life will be lost due to recession than will be gained through beating the virus’.

Research like this presents us with a terrible dilemma, even leading some people to wonder whether the trade-off for trying to save elderly and vulnerable lives is really worth it, when it would cripple the economy for decades.

In times like these it helps to remember that we are presented with this misleading narrative every time we decide to act on our conscience. We are told we cannot halt the arms trade, because we will lose jobs. We are told we cannot reduce carbon emissions, because we will lose jobs. Now we are told we cannot save people’s lives, because we will lose jobs. For decades governments have used the threat of recession to badger us into maintaining an economic system that has made the poor poorer and the rich richer at the expense of the Earth’s support system. We are told this makes economic sense, but does it? 

Economics vs Chrematistics

In their book ‘For the Common Good’ economist Herman Daly and theologian John Cobb, Jr explain the difference between the practice of economics (from the Greek word oikonomia ‘the management of the household so as to increase its use value to all members over the long term’) and chrematistics (from khrema, meaning money and referring to ‘the branch of political economy relating to the manipulation of property and wealth so as to maximize short-term monetary exchange value to the owner’):

“Oikonomia differs from chrematistics in three ways. First, it takes the long-run rather than the short-run view. Second, it considers costs and benefits to the whole community, not just to the parties to the transaction. Third, it focuses on concrete use value and the limited accumulation thereof, rather than on an abstract exchange value and its impetus towards unlimited accumulation…. For oikonomia, there is such a thing as enough. For chrematistics, more is always better… “

In this definition of economics financial wealth does not trump the wellbeing of the community, as it is distinct from the actions a society must undertake to look after its members. The threat to our livelihoods that a fall in GDP represents is due to a conflation of economics with chrematistics.  

If for a moment we were to prise them apart we would see a different picture.

Whereas the lockdown has caused a drop in GDP growth (chrematistics) with the threat of recession and likely hardship for many people, apart from restricting our movements, it generally does not make us less able. It will mean many of us will not have access to society’s current means of exchange (money), but it does not represent a loss of ability, talent and willingness to contribute in the population at large. 

In fact, despite the fear and anxiety generated by the crisis, what we are witnessing is a phenomenal upsurge in generosity and creativity as people pull together to support each other with whatever they have. We are collectively defying the popular economic notion of humans as selfish utility maximising individuals and mostly showing solidarity and kindness. In the process we are realising who the real wealth creators are. They are the frontline workers in the caring economy: the nurses and doctors, the shop assistants and delivery drivers, the shelf stackers, the cleaners, the 750.000 (and counting) volunteers that have come forward to help the NHS. Online, they are the people offering free education, performances, exercise classes, financial advice, museum tours, mental health support, the list just goes on.  Behind closed doors it is those managing the domestic life: the family members doing their best to keep their children and themselves healthy and happy and sane, the friends joining together at a distance via a multitude of platforms. 

In this moment of crisis the fragilities of a globalised system have been exposed and it is ‘ordinary people’ and communities working together that are heading off socio-economic breakdown. They are demonstrating in the words of Naomi Klein in her book No is Not Enough, that ‘If the goal is to move from a society based on endless taking and depletion to one based on caretaking and renewal, then all of our relationships have to be grounded in those same principles of reciprocity and care —because our relationships with one another are our most valuable resource of all.’

The effects of Covid 19 will continue to place an unprecedented strain on societies that will require international cooperation, imagination and courage to overcome, but these efforts must not be geared towards returning to business as usual. Instead, we need to foreground the countless social and economic practices that have been developed over the last four decades by academics and practitioners dedicated to creating economic systems that serve all life on earth, and put in place mechanisms that reward people for generating real wealth and value. 

Time for bold solutions

After years of waiting in the wings Universal Basic Income (UBI) has now entered public discourse. Many pilots are underway, but the oldest ongoing experiment, The Alaska Dividend Fund, has shown no decrease in labour market participation and has ‘significantly mitigated poverty, especially among Alaska’s vulnerable rural Indigenous population.’ 

Currency experts such as Bernard Lietaer have shown that diversifying our exchange systems will make them more resilient to shocks in the global market and enable us to support social and ecological regeneration. The Human Scale Development framework developed in Latin America in the 1980s can help us evaluate whether what we are currently producing is actually meeting our real needs or pseudo satisfying manufactured wants. Together with Doughnut Economics and Steady State Economics such frameworks can help us steer a course that keeps our economic activity within the Earth’s limits. 

Vulnerable international food chains must now be replaced by regenerative local food systems. Building a vibrant food culture could simultaneously tackle obesity and youth unemployment, while ensuring future food security and restoring our soils. Land and property ownership must come under scrutiny and re-imagined to ensure food sovereignty, the regeneration of natural habitats and truly affordable and secure housing for all. The creation of worker cooperatives and support for local businesses have been shown to multiply local wealth and wellbeing, and will be needed to create more cohesive living and working communities.

In order to give people a say in shaping their lives and their communities, local authorities could introduce participatory budgeting, citizens’ assemblies and community charters.  Both nationally and internationally we must look at ways to abolish the crippling debt that is forcing people into unsafe work or destitution. We must also urgently start a discussion about the internet as a public utility. Work done by the P2P Foundation and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance can provide a guiding framework for sharing the wealth created by our communal efforts and make sure we all have access to its vital services.

The unintended social experiment precipitated by the virus presents a once-only window of opportunity to re-think our economic and social organisation in ways that can help us survive both the Corona epidemic and the greater threat of climate change that is now playing out. Instead of making people and planet fit around the numbers, it is time for numbers (financial mechanisms, exchange systems) to start fitting around people and planet. 

GDP does not measure what we value most. This crisis must be an opportunity to challenge what we have allowed corporations around the world to do with the natural environment (conveniently referred to as resources) and people (labour) in the name of economic growth. Thatcher was wrong: there are alternatives. Many of us have been working on them for decades. We are ready to take our rightful place at the table to help us turn the corner into a possible and hopeful future.  

Lead image by Tim Mossholder

The post No more business as usual – Rethinking economic value for a post-Covid world appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Report: Affordable Space. How Rising Commercial Rents Are Threatening Independent Businesses, and What Cities Are Doing About It. By Olivia LaVecchia and Stacy Mitchell. Institute for Local Self-Reliance, April 2016

We find that the sharp rise in rents isn’t limited to affluent neighborhoods. It’s happening across a range of communities, with some of the most intense pressure falling on businesses in lower income neighborhoods. The problem is especially detrimental to people looking to start new businesses, further raising barriers to entrepreneurship and stunting economic dynamism.

Just as there’s a public stake in the availability of affordable housing, so too is there a public interest in the commercial side of the built environment. Having a healthy independent business sector is closely tied to other municipal policy priorities, including reducing climate emissions, expanding jobs, lessening economic inequality, and strengthening the social fabric of neighborhoods.

Download report here

Summary of Policy Recommendations

• STRATEGY 1: Broaden Ownership.
• STRATEGY 2: Reduce the Power Imbalance in Landlord-Tenant Negotiations
• STRATEGY 3: Zone for a Local Business Environment
• STRATEGY 4: Set Aside Space for Local Business in New Development
• STRATEGY 5: Create a Preference for Local Businesses in Publicly Owned Buildings
• STRATEGY 6: Recognize Businesses as Cultural Landmarks.

“This report outlines a range of ideas that elected officials, business owners, and community leaders have come up with for keeping space affordable and ensuring that entrepreneurs continue to thrive:

1. Broaden Ownership

Although not suitable for every small business, owning rather than leasing is one of the best ways to ensure stable occupancy costs. Only a small minority of independent retailers currently own their space. Several cities are exploring programs to increase that share by helping businesses buy their buildings, or buy their spaces as commercial condominiums. Another approach involves expanding community ownership of commercial buildings. Through various structures, such as real estate investment cooperatives, neighbors can invest in commercial buildings and guarantee local businesses long-term stability and reasonable, cost-driven rent increases.

2. Reduce the Power Imbalance in Landlord-Tenant Negotiations

Another set of policy ideas would give small businesses certain rights when it comes time to renew their leases. These protections might include an established timeline for negotiations, an option for a long-term lease, and recourse to arbitration. Cities are also looking at ways to provide property tax credits to landlords who provide affordable leases to locally owned businesses.

3. Zone for a Local Business Environment

Zoning can be a powerful tool for creating a built environment that provides plenty of opportunity for local entrepreneurs. Key strategies include protecting the varied fabric of established commercial districts, ensuring an ample supply of small spaces, and adopting business diversity ordinances that encourage a mix of different types of businesses.

4. Set Aside Space for Local Businesses in New Development

Several cities have required that a portion of the space in select new development projects be set aside for locally owned businesses. These requirements could be codified and applied across all development projects that meet certain size or location thresholds.

5. Create a Preference for Local Businesses in Publicly Owned Buildings

Cities often own and invest in real estate themselves. Some are establishing a preference for leasing spaces in city-owned or -financed buildings to locally owned businesses. In underserved communities, this could include offering space at below-market rates to local, neighborhood-serving businesses.

6. Recognize Businesses as Cultural Landmarks

Following in the footsteps of Rome, Paris, and London, San Francisco has established a program to recognize and support longstanding, culturally significant businesses. The program provides incentives to landlords who agree to 10-year leases, and it could also evolve to help businesses purchase their spaces.

The post What Cities Are Doing About Affordable Space appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Community composters serve an integral and unique role in both the broader composting industry and the sustainable food movement. They are the social innovators and entrepreneurs that are collecting food waste by burning calories instead of fossil fuel, employing youth and marginalized groups, and developing innovative data-sharing applications and cooperative ownership structures. They are the compost educators and facilitators that are building equity and power in our communities from the ground up, by supporting businesses, schools, farmers, community centers, and other communities in need. They are the front lines, grassroots, boots-on-the-ground that are cultivating awareness of and demand for compost and its associated benefits. They are transforming landscapes, urban and rural (and everything in between), by getting compost into the hands that feed the soil that feeds us.

Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.

Reposted from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance

The post What is Community Composting? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Small, community-owned ISPs are spreading – and could help to protect open internet access

Sammi-Jo Lee, writing for Coop News, gives us the lowdown on the P2P alternative to ISP big players.

Sammi-Jo Lee: In 2011, brand new fibre-optic cables lit up for the first time across the forested terrain of the Ozarks and up and down the farmlands of central Missouri, USA.

Here among the hickory and red oaks, you might expect to be in the land that the internet forgot. That’s what it could have been, had residents not decided to stop waiting for large for-profit telecommunications companies. They built their own internet instead.

They turned to their electric utility for a solution, and Co-Mo Electric Cooperative, established in 1939 to bring power to the region’s farms, answered the call.

“What got the project off the ground was the membership demand,” said Randy Klindt, who at the time was the general manager of Co-Mo Connect, the co-op’s internet branch. “The members all drove it from the grassroots. They went door to door. They paid their neighbours’ $100 deposit.”

Later at a community meeting, a local bank surprised the room by paying the deposit of everyone present. They quickly crowdfunded enough money to begin construction, and in 2011, just before Christmas, its first members came online.

There are hundreds of small internet service providers owned by member co-operatives.

Co-Mo’s members aren’t the only people who can say they own their own internet utility. In cities and rural swaths across the country, there are hundreds of small internet service providers owned by member co-operatives, local municipalities, or tribal governments. Over the past two decades, these small internet service providers (ISPs) have been spreading and gaining notice. As success stories travel and inspire other communities to ask how they can do the same thing, they’re multiplying faster than ever.

These locally owned networks are poised to do what federal and state governments and the marketplace couldn’t. One, they can bring affordable access to fast internet to anyone, narrowing the digital divide that deepens individual and regional socioeconomic disparities.

Two, these small operators can protect open internet access from the handful of large ISPs that stand to pocket the profits from net neutrality rollbacks announced by the Trump administration. That’s according to Christopher Mitchell, who is the director of Community Broadband Projects, a project of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Mitchell, who has been tracking and advocating community-owned broadband networks for a decade, hopes that this will be the moment when people rebel against the administration’s attack on net neutrality and expand rural cooperative and municipal ISPs.

“The FCC is basically taking the regulations off of big companies, but local companies can still offer high-quality internet access at good prices,” Mitchell says.

Without net neutrality, broadband providers will be able to charge more for better access and faster speeds or be able to restrict traffic to preferred business partners over competitors. More independent ISPs can offer consumers a wider variety of choices.

Internet connectivity is a crucial economic leveller, without which people fall behind in schools, health, and the job market.

“No one will have to offer prioritised content in the ways that we fear AT&T and Comcast will. So local investments can preserve access to the open internet,” Mitchell says.

Can internet co-ops offer an open alternative to big ISPs like Comcast?

But, for many, before the question of an open internet and net neutrality comes to the question of whether people can have access to and afford the internet at all.

Remote, sparsely populated areas like the rural Ozarks are often synonymous with the digital divide. Large carriers don’t have a financial incentive to enter those markets where getting high returns on their investment are unlikely if not impossible. According to the FCC, 39% of rural Americans – 23 million people – don’t have access to broadband speeds.

Before Co-Mo Connect got off the ground, Klindt says, only one out of five members had access to broadband. Many still crawled along on obsolete dial-up connections. By 2014, however, nearby Tipton (population 3,351) enjoyed connection speeds in the top 20% of the US and the fastest in Missouri. By 2016, Co-Mo’s entire service area was on the digital grid.

ILSR estimates that there are more than 300 telephone and electric co-ops that provide rural fibre-optic internet service. Since the late 1990s, these co-ops have been installing more cable and leveraging existing infrastructure to provide faster service to their communities. A few have even built networks from scratch, such as RS Fiber in Minnesota and Allband in Michigan.

Matthew Rantanen, the director of technology for the Southern California Tribal Chairmen’s Association, tells another story of access and adoption from reservation lands, where the FCC estimates that 68 percent of residents – 1.3 million people – lack access. Rantanen directed the initiative, which introduced wireless internet to 17 tribal reservation communities in San Diego County.

“Whatever is right for the local culture and the local government capacity is probably the best way forward.”

The initiative, Rantanen says, inspired Valerie Fast Horse, the IT director of the Coeur d’Alene tribe in Idaho, to build an entirely fibre tribal network. “Networking is in its very early stages, and I can’t wait to see some of this blossom,” Rantanen says. He estimates that just 30 of more than 300 tribal reservations in the US have broadband access.

Internet connectivity is a crucial economic leveller, he says, without which people fall behind in schools, health, and the job market. “Without that resource,” Rantanen says, “You’re a different class. You’re [on] a different level of participation in the US and the world.”

Though unequal access is primarily thought of as a rural problem, it affects urban centres, as well. ILSR estimates 90 cities are connected with high-quality municipal networks, while more than 200 are connected with more basic networks.

“Customers want reliable, fast, and inexpensive service. The market is not solving this problem,” says Deb Socia, the executive director of Next Century Cities, which works with 183 mayors across the country in hatching plans to fund locally based solutions in 19 states.

“The biggest dilemma for cities is that there has been an erosion of the capacity for communities to solve their own problems, and that has happened primarily at the state and federal level,” Socia says. Some networks, like the one in Ammon, Idaho, lease their networks to other providers. Others, like the one in Chattanooga, Tennessee, sell services like a conventional ISP.

“There are a lot of workable models,” says Mitchell, “and whatever is right for the local culture and the local government capacity is probably the best way forward.”

Cobbling together local solutions is the common challenge across all of these community projects, says Mitchell, whether it’s cracking the funding code, slashing through the governmental red tape, or cultivating enthusiastic leadership to convince communities that, in order to have their own internet service provider, it’s worth it to try something new.

Looking down the road, Mitchell believes that a strong network of small, competitive community-owned ISPs is possible. By syphoning revenue away from the monopoly ISPs, they could disrupt their ability to dominate their markets. And also, if net neutrality does indeed get rolled back, competition could make it less appealing for large ISPs to restrict content.

“I would say that if we had a flourishing of these local networks, it would still significantly hurt the ability of Comcast and AT&T to create tollbooths,” to prioritise content, Mitchell says. “It’s going to be fascinating to see what’s going to happen in coming years.”

• This article was originally published in Yes! Magazine.

Photo by Stephen D. Melkisethian

The post In the battle for net neutrality, can co-ops keep the internet open and democratic? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Institute for Local Self-Reliance: Christopher Mitchell, the director of ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks initiative, interviews Hannah Trostle and Karlee Weinmann, research associates for the Community Broadband Networks and Energy Democracy initiatives, respectively. The three discuss the cooperative model of ownership and how this model can enable investment in gigabit internet connections for their member-owners, but also how they are subject to a low participation rates in their elections.

The trio details the challenges of cooperative ownership and the myriad of benefits for active and engaged cooperative boards and administration structures. “There are co-ops out there that are finding ways to…have their members understand how solar can work for them,” says Weinmann on the benefits of cooperatives for renewable energy. “[They’re] finding ways to implement solar in a way that is financially feasible and financially beneficial.”

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For full transcript of this episode of the Building Local Power podcast, click here.

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About ILSR: We work to create sustainable, home-grown economies across the U.S. New episodes of the Building Local Power podcast are published bi-weekly on Thursdays. Sign up for new podcast notifications and monthly email updates from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright, 2016.

The post Podcast: The Power and Perils of Cooperatives appeared first on P2P Foundation.