2

Make Our Communities
More Self-Reliant

Growing up in the 1940s in Winsted, Connecticut—a typical New England factory town—I always knew when my father was making ice cream at his restaurant on Main Street. Almost before I could place my order, it was pouring right out of the machine into my cup—just delicious. The milk and cream he bought from local dairy farmers, whose cows could be heard mooing in the morning on the neighboring hillsides; nearby residents received freshly filled bottles delivered directly to their front doors.

Today, the ice cream we buy in stores and restaurants comes from large national producers. The local dairy farms are mostly gone. We can only wonder what additives are in the ice cream and milk we buy—including bovine growth hormone, which many Western countries have banned—and such questions are not easily answered. The degree of tampering with our dairy and other foods, for the profit and convenience of the sellers, grows more complex and unknowable each year.

At one time, the community of Winsted, home to ten thousand people, also harbored about one hundred factories and fabrication shops, manufacturing everything from appliances to textiles, pins, electrical equipment, clocks, and wire. They’re long gone too. Today Winsted is largely a bedroom community, with most of the dwindling good jobs an hour’s commute away in the Hartford/Waterbury/New Britain area. It’s been decades since the great New England factories went south for cheaper labor, or were merged and shut down, or (more recently) have been displaced by China.

On Route 44 to Hartford, twenty-six miles away, scores of businesses line the highway. Most of the money spent along this motorway goes to the national chains, with their familiar logos hoisted on backlit signs along the roadside. Few family-owned businesses remain.

This local economy has largely been replaced by regional outposts of national companies, whose leaders make decisions that are far removed from the interests of local residents but which affect their lives every day. Big banks have replaced many smaller community banks; big supermarket chains have pushed aside grocery stores. In area after area, the big guys have taken over—either directly or through franchise arrangements that amount to fine-print contract servitude.

For years, the old debates about this kind of displacement have raged back and forth. Now, however, the terms of the debate have changed dramatically. There are several reasons.

For one thing, more and more Americans recognize how the big multinationals have abandoned America, facilitated by trade agreements of their own making. The evidence—empty factories, hollowed-out communities, unemployed workers, looted pensions—is everywhere. Lately, white-collar jobs have been outsourced to India and other English-speaking countries as thoroughly as they once shipped our blue-collar jobs overseas.

For another, the large producer companies have begun exacting heavier and heavier tolls on local communities, especially when it comes to environmental health issues. Hydrofracking for natural gas in the mid-Atlantic states is just the latest peril to our land, water, and other natural resources. Local consumers are being whipsawed by price manipulation and speculation by faraway entities with no stake in their communities. Exhibit A is the price of gasoline and heating oil, manipulated by speculators at the New York Mercantile Exchange. As health care and pharmaceuticals become more corporatized and centralized, costs are also rising sharply, leaving millions more Americans uninsured and at serious risk each decade.

These discomforts can lead to positive popular responses. Our growing awareness of nutritional issues has led consumers to reject the plastic, processed foods sold in supermarket and fast-food chains. For more consumers, processed white bread is out, farmers’ markets are in. As banks have heaped more and more burdens on their customers in the form of fees, penalties, and other fine-print costs—and as the subprime mortgage–assisted crash of Wall Street and the economy revealed the outrageous practices of many of our largest lenders—Americans have been learning to expect more from our vendors.

Old and new technologies, and a greater appreciation for the importance of sustainable economic activity, are leading more and more Americans to go local. Communities are harnessing their assets—sun, wind, water, money, and unused fertile land—and putting them to work. Community and backyard gardens are providing fresh produce for increasing numbers of American shoppers. Cleaned-up rivers and ponds are allowing recreation and tourism to thrive in areas that may have been neglected for decades. Long-dormant factory buildings and storefronts are being repurposed by local arts and crafts centers. Farmers’ markets, cooperatives, and recycling centers are fostering greater social interaction and neighborhood spending. Bicycle pathways, often replacing disused train tracks or other rights-of-way, have flourished. The results are bearing out the argument of E. F. Schumacher’s classic bestseller Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered—that a grassroots effort to harness alternative models, designed to serve local residents and their traditional rhythms, can benefit a community far more than an economic landscape imposed unilaterally by absentee multinational corporations.

Even though these alternative models are working on the ground here and there throughout America, they are not yet on a fast track to spread fully throughout the nation. They confront many kinds of obstacles, chief among them the big companies’ dominant control of our political institutions—legislative, executive, and judicial; at the national and state levels. But if the American people are to turn around our declining standard of living, we must start by reversing our dependence on global corporations and shifting our spending to community businesses that interact face-to-face with their customers and are rooted deeply enough in their communities that they will not threaten to leave. (None of which is to idealize local communities, of course; it’s not uncommon in small towns for one or two wealthy families to rule the community’s fiscal and political fortunes. But even a powerful small-town family is more likely to serve its community’s interest than a distant, profiteering corporation.)

Opportunities for sustainable community economies may be more apparent in towns and villages than they are in larger urban and suburban areas. Population density does tend to foster the ability of certain services, such as credit unions, to develop and thrive. But the opportunities are everywhere. As Gar Alperovitz and his associates at the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland have noted:

Restraining corporate power requires changing the way we think about business. This means changing who owns, controls, and benefits from it. Profits, for instance, can flow to workers, consumers, or the community—not just to outside investors. And these [community] businesses succeed.¹

Alperovitz has called attention to seven “cool companies” as alternatives to corporate power:

W. L. Gore in Newark, Delaware, with forty-five locations worldwide, produces Gore-Tex fabrics, heart patches, and synthetic blood vessels. It has 7,500 employees who own the company and tallies $1.84 billion in annual sales.

Pioneer Human Services, a Seattle nonprofit organization, offers recovering alcoholics and drug addicts assistance via drug- and alcohol-free housing, employment, job training, counseling, and education. With a thousand workers, it finances 99 percent of its $60 million annual budget through fees for services and earnings from manufacturing, distributing, and selling products, businesses that range from sheet metal fabrication to wholesale food distribution.

As a cooperative owned by approximately ten thousand consumer-owners and ninety worker-owners, the Weaver Street Market in Carrboro, North Carolina, draws on local food to supply its restaurants and stores, has several community events a week, and invests in local suppliers. According to the company, 50 cents on every dollar spent at the co-op remains in the community—compared to 15 cents at chain stores.

Another alternative model is exemplified by ONE DC, which stands for “Organizing Neighborhood Equity DC,” in the nation’s capital. As one of 4,600 nonprofit community development corporations (CDCs), ONE DC focuses on developing local business while promoting affordable housing, living-wage jobs, and community control over development.

In Burlington, Vermont, a community land trust known as Champlain Housing Trust, with five thousand members and annual revenues of $5.9 million, provides affordable housing for more than two thousand households. Its volunteer board of directors includes residents in this housing community along with representatives from four towns. Land trusts stem gentrification by holding land in trust and off the market. The trust then sells houses with restricted deeds that keep title to the land, thereby allowing lower-income people to buy homes at lower prices. In return, the homeowner agrees to limit the resale price and share any profit with the trust, which ensures that the homes remain affordable for future buyers.

California’s Public Employees’ Retirement System (Cal-PERS), with almost $250 billion in assets, uses its leverage as a large shareholder in certain companies to push them for more information disclosure, better environmental practices, and stronger human rights in emerging nations. It invests some of its funds in California’s low-income communities to stimulate businesses there.

None of these organizations was founded by huge groups of people. Rather, a few people with cultivated imaginations and visions who sensed unfulfilled needs and, understanding why they were unfulfilled, were able to enlist broader community support from residents who were willing to purchase their goods and services. The more such efforts reach critical mass, the more this community movement will spread.

In 2006, the Seattle Local Economies Mapping Project (www.seattlemap.org) collected, according to Yes! Magazine writer Ethan Miller, “inventories of alternative economic initiatives, from cooperatives and local currencies to volunteer fire companies and community food banks. Inspired by what is sometimes called ‘asset-based community development,’ other groups are cataloging forms of wealth left out of the dominant economic equation, such as subsistence skills, traditional arts and crafts, local stories and lore, and natural landscapes.”²

Making the transition to community-based economies is a tough challenge when large corporations—with their massive daily advertising budgets—have spent decades lulling the American people into caged routines and dependencies. We are reluctant to look beyond our habits, to envision a radical shift in the way our economy works.

For example, we have become so reliant on centralized energy sources—oil, coal, gas, and nuclear—that we have ignored other solutions that have been available for decades. Consider this September 2011 report on solar energy from RenewableEnergyWorld.com:

A recently released solar map of New York City found enough room on building rooftops for solar panels to power half the city during hours of peak electricity use. . . . and create tens thousands of jobs. . . . Almost 60 million Americans live in areas where solar prices are competitive with retail electricity costs, but this opportunity is often kept out of reach by utilities and the antiquated rules of the U.S. electricity system.³

Physicist and energy conservation expert Art Rosenfeld has argued that simply painting roofs white “over the next 20 years could save the equivalent of 24 billion metric tons in carbon dioxide emissions,” the New York Times reported in 2009.⁴

Once we start investigating alternatives to the global corporate model, our common sense and spirit of discovery may start liberating our thinking. Consider, for instance, the fact that there is often a fundamental conflict of interest between buyers (consumers) and large sellers. When buyers lack the information they need to make smart decisions, they become vulnerable to higher prices, misleading sales pitches, and outright fraud. When we buy fuel (such as gas and heating oil), for instance, it’s in our interest to get more for our dollars through efficient cars, furnaces, and air-conditioning and lighting systems. When companies sell us their product, on the other hand, it’s in their interest that our cars, trucks, and HVAC systems are inefficient, because that inefficiency forces us to consume more fuel, leading to greater sales and profits for the fuel companies. For a century, the wastefulness of our technologies was basically unchallenged. But in recent years that has started to change, as public pressure led the government to tighten its efficiency standards. Even the Pentagon is moving into renewable energy for economic and security reasons. The Department of Defense is pledging to obtain 25 percent of its huge energy needs from renewable sources by 2025.

Such conflicts of interest may seem endemic to a market-based culture like ours. But there are other, perhaps even more troubling conflicts between the interests of global corporations and those of the American people.

For decades, our corporate economy has been shifting its focus from fulfilling basic human needs (food, shelter, warmth) to fulfilling (and creating!) more trivial wants and whims. From commercial entertainment, video games, and spectator sports, to stylized snack foods, communication gadgets, and even redundant weapon systems, corporations have invested billions of dollars into research and development (R&D) on items that rob consumers of endless amounts of their not-so-disposable income. And this continues even though large segments of the population are suffering from inadequate nutrition, employment, capital ownership, shelter, transportation, and health care coverage.

Entrepreneurs who develop businesses that serve civic interests as well as their own often discover that our inner cities, and lower-income rural families, can offer fertile and sustainable markets. As economist Paul Davidson has written: “These institutions, when properly designed, protect civic values from the corrosive effects of self-interest. At the same time, institutions make use of productive forms of self-interest, enabling people to enjoy the products of both.”⁵

Increasingly, progressive voices in the media are shining a spotlight on the need for new businesses that serve both entrepreneurs and local communities. Yes! Magazine is a leading chronicler of independence from the global economy, with features such as “31 Ways to Jump Start the Local Economy,” “Wendell Berry’s 17 Rules for a Sustainable Economy,” “A Resilient Community,” “Small Banks, Radical Vision,” and other numerous stories on how consumers and householders can become producers of energy and food. Epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, in his bestseller The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier, offered both a survey of our nation’s growing economic inequalities and an eloquent argument that such inequalities will lead to increased anxiety, fear, isolation, health failures, and chronic insecurity.

One voice that has been fighting for change for seven decades is the great folk singer Pete Seeger, who has brought thousands of people and children together for community songs and good deeds. At the age of ninety-two, he told YES! Magazine that “If there’s a world here in a hundred years, it’s going to be saved by tens of millions of little things. The powers-that-be can break up any big thing they want. They can corrupt it or co-opt it from the inside, or they can attack it from the outside. But what are they going to do about 10 million little things?”⁶ Seeger’s words echo perhaps the most-quoted aphorism of anthropologist Margaret Mead’s: “Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world, indeed it is the only thing that ever has.”

It was the renowned biologist René Dubos who said “think globally, act locally.” This is just what Native American leader Winona LaDuke has been doing in the northern Great Plains, where her tribe, the Chippewa, has embarked on a wind power initiative to bring other tribes to recognize their potential to harness this huge natural resource on their sovereign lands. As LaDuke has pointed out, native peoples all over the world have historically shared an understanding that working with nature, instead of conquering it, provides greater self-sufficiency while preserving the planet’s life-sustaining ecology. Her wind power project marries that timeless wisdom with twenty-first-century technology.

Community economies, by definition, create or strengthen neighborhoods by encouraging neighbors to interact in socially constructive ways. This interaction can foster cultural activities and gift relationships (such as sharing garden produce, exchanging child care services, and tutoring). Edgar Cahn’s Time Dollar movement is one way that community leaders are trying to formalize such relationships. The Time Dollar is just as it sounds: a time-based currency that is bartered through an exchange bank, which can be operated by a community college, church, or local service club. If an elderly couple tutors a teenager for twenty hours, for instance, that teen, or someone else in the exchange, then gives twenty hours to mow the couple’s lawn or shovel their sidewalk. A Time Dollar can be reimbursed in many ways, but the basic idea of equal, reciprocal service underlies the entire project. A lawyer’s time dollar is worth the same as a homeless person’s time dollar. When a community starts to see the value in such equal reciprocity, its residents must soon start to wonder what they’re getting in exchange for giving corporations free rein over the people’s commons—mining resources from public lands, using public airwaves for commercial purposes, giving tax breaks to corporations ostensibly in return for creating jobs. This is the essence of reciprocity in which powerless people find it an awakening principle of moral or ethical equality as well as one of economic value. Such a revelation can have moral, not just economic, weight.

It was just that principle of reciprocity that jolted the late Ray Anderson, who, as CEO of Interface corporation, started transforming his company into a zero pollution, 100 percent recycling enterprise by 2020. As the largest carpet tile manufacturer in the world with factories here and abroad, he launched a plan in 1994 to reduce the company’s output of waste and pollution—a process that also reduced the company’s expenses, increased its sales and profits, and made it a preferred place to work. Anderson said he saw himself as a “recovering plunderer of the planet” who had resolved that Interface should give back no less than what it took from the environment—a standard far beyond any existing government regulations.

And such movements aren’t limited to businesses. Communities of any size, from the local to the national level, can start initiatives that dramatically enhance their own economic well-being. Perhaps the most dramatic example in the past century was the revival of the nations of Western Europe after World War II, taking them from destitution to the highest living standards in the world through the principles of social democracy—combining self-interest with civic values. Working through their trade unions, cooperatives, and multiparty systems, the citizens of Western Europe responded to the rebound of their economies by raising their expectations. During the decade after 1945, these countries embraced their citizens’ demands for universal health care, decent pensions, cheap and accessible public transit, tuition-free university education, at least one month of annual paid vacation, free child care, paid family sick leave and maternity leave—to name only a few of the amenities fostered by this collaboration between local and national.

Sixty-seven years after 1945, however, the United States—the victor in World War II and long touted as the richest nation in the world—offers none of these civilized services for all of its people. Not one. We do not have a multiparty system in which smaller parties with pioneering agendas can be part of governing coalitions. Instead, we have a winner-take-all two-party dictatorship, its voting blocs broken into gerrymandered districts largely dominated by one party or the other. We have the weakest, most obstructionist labor laws among industrialized nations, which have led to the lowest percentage of labor union members in the Western world. A much smaller segment of our economy is devoted to consumer cooperatives. In short, the institutional flaws of our government have allowed powerful corporate interests to drive the American standard of living downward for the past thirty-nine years.

Consider what a century ago was widely seen by reformers as the alternative model to the larger stock-held commercial corporation—namely the producer and the cooperative. Under cooperatively-owned forms of business activity, consumers band together to start their own business that they own and control. Thus combined, consumers cannot only greatly expand their bargaining power vis-à-vis manufacturers and wholesalers, but they can also determine what they want to sell to themselves and under what standards. They can condition the terms of purchase from suppliers, well beyond price, to include quality, safety, nutrition, warranty, durability, and sustainability (as with solar power). They can refuse to stock products like tobacco, pesticides, or drugs and foods with harmful ingredients. They can federate into larger cooperative networks to move into the wholesaling and even the manufacturing sectors. They can use their cash flow to add ancillary services and leverage their membership into their own insurance, media, travel, and adult education enterprises. They can form ad hoc buying groups for specialized goods and services not available in their stores but available locally. When economic and environmental policies are shaped by political decisions, cooperatives can inform and organize their membership to participate in a highly informed and persistent manner.

Two horizons present themselves. One is for the emergence of cooperative subeconomies, providing a network of multiple benefits to the bulk of consumer purchases so that membership increases. Imagine, for example, entire cooperative shopping malls or streets providing food, clothing, banking, insurance, fuel, appliances, reading materials, children’s products, patient health care, adult education, communications, repairs, and other services.

The other is for cooperative institutions to strive toward a steady transformation of the political economy away from waste, inefficiency, environmental damage, price gouging, multinational absentee corporate control, and regulatory obeisance toward an organized, informed, and consumer-driven political economy. It would involve a faster transition from fossil fuels and nuclear to solar energy; from obesity-promoting junk food to nutritious food; from corporatized medicine to cooperative preventative medicine; from massive waste of land, water, and other natural resources that increase global climate change to a conserver economy that safeguards the environment for our descendants; from governments and elections for sale to governments of, by, and for the people.

What America needs is to reengage with the promise of a society controlled by citizens/consumers, not corporations. Today, our universities specialize in teaching seller-side skills (business management, marketing, and so on) to aspiring businesspeople. Tomorrow, our schools—from the elementary and secondary level up—should start teaching buying skills, individual and organized, which include choosing not to buy. When complete amateurs buy stocks, insurance, motor vehicles, homes, and health care—bargaining with expert sellers who are motivated to get the most money for the least return—our nation’s economic welfare suffers as a result.

The fate of community economies in the United States comes down to a basic question: Are consumers willing to step away from the creeping corporatization of their lives and take the time to empower their dollars by joining economic institutions that will endure and outlast their originators? The internet offers infinite new promise for consumer cooperatives, giving consumers much greater power through group purchasing, terms-of-sale negotiation, and complaint handling. Yet it will take more than just technology to interest the American people at large in the potential of community-based cooperatives; it will take a new awakening of interest in our shared standard of living. We will have to raise our expectations.

“We need a ‘new economy’ . . . if critical economic, social and environmental goals are to be met. . . . by activists, economists and socially minded business leaders,” argues Gar Alperovitz, who has written extensively on cooperative experimentation.⁷ He speaks highly of the growing network of Evergreen Cooperative businesses—such as the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry—in the low-income neighborhoods of Cleveland, which are designed to create good jobs and sweat equity by serving the buying needs of “anchor institutions” such as the local universities and hospitals that have made a long-term commitment to the city.

Social entrepreneurs are among the most dynamic engines of the cooperative movement. Where corporate moguls work for personal enrichment, these civic-minded business leaders work for the cooperative equivalent, which is a desire to generate community self-reliance, abolish poverty, and enhance community economic well-being by improving housing, food, transportation, energy, health, finance, and a host of other products and services. Their motivations are not selfishly financial; they are far deeper, rooted in both the human spirit and the pervasive sense of community that human beings have striven to express throughout history.

As the economist Jean Monnet once said, “Without community, there is crisis.”

Any social community owns assets—assets that are controlled by them, not by corporations. These are called the “commons”—property and rights that are everywhere but nowhere—and they should be high on any list of what We the People must work to preserve in a new economy. Children today do not study the commons in school, nor do our politicians debate them in their campaigns, other than to demand that they are privatized or exploited for profiteers without any returns to We the People who own them.

If you were asked to make a list of everything you own, chances are you wouldn’t answer: “Well, I own part of the public airwaves; part of the one-third of America that is public land; part of the national parks and the national forests.” Once you become conscious of your share in these public holdings, however, it’s impossible not to start asking questions that the corporatists and their politician sponsors find very uncomfortable.

For instance: If the people are the landlords of the public airwaves and the television and radio stations are the tenants, why don’t the tenants pay rent? In fact, they pay nothing. Broadcast airwaves are licensed for free on a term of nearly eighty years, allowing the licensees to decide who says what at any time on the part of our spectrum that they exploit for their profit. If those airwaves are our property, you might further ask, why don’t we have access to them for our own television and radio programs? Why can’t we devote an hour or two a day to our own audience network? Why shouldn’t we collect the rent they should be paying us and use it to open studios and hire reporters, editors, programmers, and managers who air the content we want to see—from serious political debate to local culture and humor, very little of which gets on the air now—without corporate manipulation or advertisement?

Our public lands contain a wealth of natural resources—trees, oil, gas, coal, gold, silver, copper, iron, zinc, and many other minerals, onshore and off. We own these lands. Yet under current law the corporations control their extraction and pay very little to Uncle Sam for what revenues and profits they reap. Sometimes, in fact, they pay just about nothing. The 1872 General Mining Act, if you can believe, allows any foreign or domestic company to come onto our land with its geologists; discover hard-rock minerals like gold, silver, and molybdenum; and gain ownership of them to sell, without any royalties back to us, for no more than $5 an acre—a figure presumably based on 1872 land prices! As a result, when the Barrick Gold Corporation, a large Canadian company, discovered $9 billion of gold on federal land in Nevada, it was able to take ownership for less than $30,000—enabling it to sell its freely gotten gold for an immense profit, with no obligation to pay royalties on the profits, as any corporate landowner would charge if the shoe were on the other foot.

There have been some exceptions. When big oil was found on the Alaska North Slope, the state government created a royalty trust fund for the people there. As a result, every woman, man, and child in that state receives an annual royalty check as compensation—checks that can range from $1,000 to $2,000.

One of the largest commons is the trillions of dollars in taxpayer-funded R&D that federal agencies such as the Pentagon, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Department of Agriculture have transferred, virtually free, to private industry. The aerospace, defense, biotechnology, agribusiness, semiconductor, pharmaceutical, and containerization industries—among many other corporate enterprises—all grew out of taxpayer-funded R&D initiatives. In addition, many of these industries receive annual tax credits from the U.S. Treasury to subsidize the kind of research they would certainly be doing anyway. Imagine: every year, your tax dollars go—in the form of large credit checks—to massively profitable companies such as Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, and the drug corporations. These businesses are built on a vast body of discovered knowledge that was originated by your “commons” and was given away, without your consent or even knowledge, for bargain-basement prices. The companies involved then sell you their products—based on the technology you paid to develop—for huge markups. Even such breakthroughs as the medicines Taxol and AZT, discovered and clinically tested by the National Cancer Institute before the giveaway to drug companies, were developed via taxpayer money.

Suppose you and other citizens prevailed upon your senators and representatives to require a better deal in exchange for the use of such common property—the kind of paycheck any private business would demand. Suppose, further, that the money was invested in community jobs through responsibly run local economic institutions. Suppose, that is, you got something for your taxpayer dollars—that they were paid back into the community where you live, work, play and where you raise your family.

Two former postgraduate associates of mine, David Bollier and Jonathan Rowe, have become eloquent scholars and champions of “reclaiming the commons.” In an address called “The Marginalization of the Commons and What to Do About It,” Bollier had this to say:

Paradoxically, the commons does all sorts of work that markets depend upon—but this work usually goes unacknowledged. The “caring economy” and other so-called “women’s work” is part of the vast, off-the-books shadow economy that invisibly props up the formal market economy. Nature is also part of this shadow economy. So is the public domain of information and culture. It tells you something about the vaunted “productivity” of the formal economy that quietly relies upon so many invisible commons-based subsidies!⁸

As Bollier has noted, the commons are what we share and pass on to future generations: the rivers, lakes, earth’s atmosphere, wildlife; our genetic heritage; and much more. Without legal protection and enforcement, however, the commons can all too easily become a “free” dumping ground for corporate and governmental contamination. Cannibalizing the commons is big business and getting bigger. Corporations now hold monopoly patents on one-fifth of the human genome—our genetic inheritance—and more such patents on flora seeds and fauna. This may be the ultimate instance of nature’s commons being co-opted for private profit. Way out of public sight, nanotechnology companies and synthetic biology firms are moving to patent synthetic versions of the basic elements of nature. The results are potentially catastrophic—from loss of biodiversity and the exhaustion of ocean fisheries, to groundwater depletion, species extinctions, permanent genetic damage, and downward-spiraling ecosystems. But these costs appear nowhere on any corporate ledger. Nor are they subtracted from the absurdly one-sided GDP, a figure long determined and defined by corporate interests.

The phrase “public commons” once referred to a literal place: a public gathering space, such as the area that emerged in Boston when Peter Faneuil built Faneuil Hall in 1742, giving rise to some of the most momentous gatherings in American history. From Samuel Adams and his allies stirring the spirit of liberty before 1776, to the great orations of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Lucy Stone against the evils of slavery, that public space was a breeding ground for community. Next door, a sprawling open market sold food and goods of all kinds while people interacted socially and sometimes civically as part of daily life. Even while I was attending Harvard Law School, I saw this kind of community spirit in action.

Now, though, these open-air markets are gone from most of our communities. Today’s giant malls are privately owned spaces, controlled by owners who refuse even to allow people to gather petitions there. No forms of civic engagement need apply.

Yet the hunger for such social experiences remains, and it is feeding the expansion of more than four thousand farmers’ markets across the country. In Washington, D.C., one such market sprawls over the parking lot of a major bank—which donates the lot for the public relations reward. The same desire for social interaction is built into the expansion of the urban community garden movement, of which there is about seven hundred in New York City.

The corporate world will never voluntarily value civic engagement. On the contrary, companies like Walmart, as Jonathan Rowe notes, “have sucked commerce out of traditional market settings, [and] they also have cannibalized the attendant social and civic functions—the commons productivity—that were a part of the purpose of markets in the first place.”⁹ This sucking process is hollowing out our post offices—one of our original commons—around the country. By order of the U.S. Postal Service—governed by a board of directors dominated for years by corporate executives and corporatist dogma—small post offices are being replaced across the country by kiosks in Walmarts, Kmarts, and large shopping malls. Other branches are seeing their revenue so depleted as to set them up for closing. There are now more kiosks than the thirty-two thousand post offices in the land.

The history of McDonald’s offers an example of how corporate mandates can reduce the role of an ostensibly public experience like eating out to the lowest common denominator. Founder Ray Kroc imposed an iron-willed dictum on his franchisees—including instructions not to trust “people who are nonconformists, you cannot give them an inch. . . . The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.”¹⁰ Kroc demanded that portion and content control must be exact whether in Pasadena or Peoria, Augusta or Albuquerque, so that a hamburger in one locale would be an advertisement for one in another locale. While this approach made billions of dollars for Kroc and his family, it also ushered in a permanent low-wage subeconomy—and a high-fat diet that contributed overwhelmingly to today’s obesity epidemic.

Every major religion in the world has warned its adherents not to give too much power to the merchant class—for example, the moneylenders. This common tendency did not arise from divine revelation; rather, it came from the community’s daily experience. Leaders observed how the single-minded monetized mentality could run roughshod over civic and spiritual values. Community economies—by their nature decentralized, intimate with people, and locally rooted—are simply in a better position than corporations to mix the mundane with the humane, the formal with the informal, the prudential with the discretionary features that bring people together in their proximate reality where they live, rather than leave them immersed in a lonely crowd watching TV or other screens in virtual reality. A skeptic once said, “but people like humor and entertainment,” not knowing that he had unintentionally made my point. I replied: “Tell me, when have you laughed the most, from deep inside you? Watching a sitcom on TV or from funny interactions with your friends and relatives?” There’s no comparison. Also, do you think children would rather watch a play on TV if they had the chance to perform in a play at school or in the neighborhood? The answer for most kids, except perhaps the shy ones, would be participating in the play.

From the conventional economy there are assets and collaborations to be pursued. When the Pentagon goes big-time into installing or purchasing various kinds of solar energy, the result is a larger market for such technologies and probably a reduction in per-unit cost from mass production. Originally suggested to the Pentagon by Professor Barry Commoner more than thirty years ago, this energy shift can only redound to the benefit of self-sufficient community energy production in this “new economy.” Community health clinics many years ago benefited when the U.S. Army decided to buy generic drugs for large cost savings and thereby rebutted Big Pharma’s specious claim that generics were not safe.

But there are good stories too. Many communities are still served by sole-proprietorship businesses—restaurants and bookstores come to mind—that were created to mix profit and community values. One outstanding example is the restaurant enterprise of Andy Shallal, who immigrated to the United States from Iraq as a youngster. His small chain of Washington, D.C., restaurants, known as Busboys and Poets (for the poet Langston Hughes, who was also a busboy at what is now the Wardman Park Hotel), offers an ethnically diverse clientele an elegant restaurant, bookstore, and community event space where authors, advocates, artists, and politicians come together. Shallal attributes his restaurants’ popularity not just to their good, reasonably priced food and unique decor, but to his customers’ hunger for community. The city’s many fancy expense-account restaurants don’t fill that need. At Busboys and Poets, no topic is too controversial, no presenter is taboo, and no debates are avoided. I call Andy Shallal “Democracy’s Restaurateur.”

And yet Shallal has only a handful of restaurants, while McDonald’s has tens of thousands around the world. How can community-minded enterprises overcome our deeply ingrained dependence on corporate services? As Harvard lecturer Lisbeth B. Schorr notes in her book Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America:

All over this country, right now, some program or some institution is succeeding in combating such serious problems as high rates of single parenthood, child abuse, youth violence, school failure, and intergenerational poverty. Yes, successful programs exist, but they have, in the main, been small and scarce. Why? . . .

What makes the difference in whether your wonderful demonstration can thrive outside the hothouse? Is it money? Is it one leader’s charisma? Is it luck?¹¹

What matters most, Schorr argues, is being able to beat or manipulate “the system.” “The problems,” she continues, “arise when the successful pilot program is to expand and thereby threatens the basic political and bureaucratic arrangements that have held sway over the decades. . . . When effective programs aiming to reach large numbers encounter the pressures exercised by prevailing attitudes and systems, the resulting collision is almost always lethal to the effective programs. Their demise can be prevented only by changing systems and public perceptions to make them more hospitable to effective efforts to change lives and communities.”

There is an important lesson here: Taking such initiatives to a wider audience does require a concerted effort to educate the people on the benefits of local economic self-reliance—to show how much more secure, enjoyable, safe, and happy their lives can be when they participate in and reap the benefits of decisions about their own communities—decisions that are now being made thousands of miles away by a few powerbrokers who view them as mere subentries on an income statement.

Teaching people about this new economy (with old roots) and conveying what it takes to get such programs under way in their own communities is a lot of work—though the internet and other modern communications technologies can speed the plow. The goal of such a campaign should be to give people appropriate yardsticks—what David Korten, a prominent critic of globalization, calls “life indicators”—to use in measuring their community’s economic progress. It should demonstrate to them that a shift in power from the few to the many will lead to increased fairness, justice, and economic stability. When this message finally takes hold—especially among average Americans, who are inflicted daily by small and large injustices—the result should be a new American way of life, one that will ensure our economic future while remaining consonant with age-old rhythms of local culture.