After some more headbanging, here’s where I am.

I keep coming back to 3 sides of a triangle:

• Thinking about Power
• Taking Ownership
• We’re Not As Smart As We Think We Are

I’m pretty clear about why thinking about power in the economy is critical. Some of the core pieces:
-using institutions to build power
- sustaining power
- scale
- checks & balances
- mobilizing vs. demobilizing people

Although it isn’t a strong, I’m also in good enough shape in explaining why it’s critical to confront the limits of our power, a.k.a. We’re Not As Smart As We Think We Are. So core pieces:
- regardless of whether you want “more” or “less” government, have to assume that whatever we do/build may turn on itself
- the best way to deal with it: matter-of-factly embrace the fact that We’re Not As Smart As We Think We Are and create democratic structures & shared power and accountability & a pilot projects/feedback loop/humility/etc. approach.

As is obvious from my semi-cryptic shorthand, both of these could use a lot of fleshing out. But I’ve got a pretty clear idea of what it would take to do that.

Where I’m still really struggling: explaining why taking real ownership is critical to building an economy that works for everybody. In my gut, I know that “More Power to the People, Less Power to the Corporations” isn’t enough. But when I try to explain why, it ends up feeling obvious and unimportant.

So, in the next couple of posts I’ll try to uncover why I think it matters so much.

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to not play it so safe on my blog. If I’m stumbling in my head, stumble on the page. I hate the idea of doing that. I want to wait until I get it right before I write a word in public. But my gut – and my writer friends – say that’s a recipe for constipation, not creativity. So…

I spent last week writing up a bunch of little pieces of paper I’ve stuffed into folders in the last year or so. When I tried to sum them up, I ended up with 4 very rough principles:

• Building democratic power, a.k.a. Everyone Should Have a Real Say
• Top-down/scaling up
• Bottom-up & accountable
• Taking real ownership (Spiderman’s dad)

But when I tried to take the 1-3 pages of notes I’d accumulated on each and use them to flesh out the principles, they weren’t doing anything for me. Why?

Today, I think the problem is that the question I’m trying to answer isn’t sharply defined enough. If I was really struggling with how I would answer it, then each of the 4 principles would be a relief. But the question doesn’t feel urgent. So the answers feel like they’re being phoned in.

And yet I think I’m in the vicinity of the right question. I like focusing on the tension between Everyone Should Have a Real Say in how we shape the economy and the fact that We’re Not As Smart As We Think We Are. Figuring out how we reconcile this tension – between democratic control and chaotic reality – feels like the way to go.

I also think that if I can sharpen the question to the point where it feels urgent again, I’ll find that each of the principles has something to say about both sides of the tension. Take building democratic power. It might seem like it’s mostly about democratic control (no kidding). But I think I can also show that if everyone has a real say, it’ll protect us from some of the major reasons our plans go off the rails.

So, my next step is to ramble till I get to the core of the question, then sharpen it to the point where it demands to be answered.

If you haven’t read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ piece, Fear of a Black President, you should definitely check it out. It’s a very smart, nuanced portrayal of the complicated balancing act that both President Obama and African-Americans who support & criticize him have to struggle with. Normally I would quote my favorite parts, but with an essay this good, you’re better off reading the whole thing.

Coates is a great writer, and I’m thrilled that the folks at the Atlantic seem to be giving him more of a spotlight. He’s definitely someone to put on your RSS reader.

Two weeks ago, DC’s Mayor Gray unveiled a plan called, A Vision for a Sustainable DC. Essentially it’s what you would get if you were to take every smart green initiative that any city has done and then wrapped it up with a bunch of benchmarks. In other words, it’s crazy ambitious:

In just one generation—20 years—the District of Columbia will be the healthiest, greenest, and most livable city in the United States. An international destination for people and investment, the District will be a model of innovative policies and practices that improve quality of life and economic opportunity. We will demonstrate how enhancing our natural and built environments, investing in a diverse clean economy, and reducing disparities among residents can create an educated, equitable and prosperous society.

How much of this will actually happen? Who knows. But the fact that he’s going for something so bold is a breath of fresh air.

How ambitious is it? Here are a few of my faves:

JOBS: Increase by 5 times the number of jobs providing green goods and services

HEALTH: Cut citywide obesity rate by 50%

CLIMATE: Cut citywide greenhouse gas emissions by 50%

ENERGY: Cut citywide energy consumption by 50%; Increase use of renewable energy to 50%

FOOD: Bring locally-grown food within a quarter mile of 75% of the population

NATURE: Cover 40% of the District with a healthy tree canopy: Ensure 100% of residents are within a 10-minute walk of a natural space

TRANSPORTATION: Make 75% of all trips by walking, biking, or transit

WASTE: Achieve zero waste by consuming less and reusing everything else

GREEN ECONOMY: Develop 3 times as many small District-based businesses; Cut city-wide unemployment by 50%

What I particularly like about the plan is that it’s trying to focus on the needs of everybody, not just tree huggers. For example:

Ultimately, sustainability means good things for your health, your community, and your wallet. For example:

• Sustainability means spending less on utility bills because it takes less energy to heat and cool your energy efficient home.

• Sustainability means saving up to thousands of dollars a year by walking, biking, and using transit more often, and not needing another car for your family.

And it talks about tackling the terrible job situation for poor folks of color in DC.

Overall, our city has an unemployment rate of just under 10%. However, it ranges from as low as 2% in Ward 3 to as high as 24% in Ward 8. With more than 50,000 unfilled jobs currently available across the city, there is a clear disconnect between the workforce and the skills and training required by these positions.

There is a tremendous opportunity to train and employ workers in the District’s growing green economy. Each component of this vision should help generate and maintain quality jobs for our residents, while simultaneously addressing the training required to succeed in those positions. For each goal or action suggested, there is the opportunity to create new jobs at every rung on the career ladder.

Here and there it’s even got little signs of more radical approaches. For example, as part of its Green Economy strategy, it gives a nod towards the approach that succeeding in Cleveland known as Evergreen Cooperatives:

Universities, hospitality, and healthcare industries will pool their collective purchasing power to buy sustainable goods and services from local, cooperatively-owned businesses.

Is it perfect? Obviously not – not by a long shot. For example, one of the goals is to attract a large number of new residents while retaining existing residence, and it’s not clear if this is a commitment to prevent gentrification from pushing folks out of their neighborhoods or not. And undoubtedly lots of the great intentions will be plowed under or perverted into something other than that what they were intended (welcome to big city politics). But compared to most city plans? It’s pretty amazing.

And with a plan as ambitious as this one, it also creates new opportunities for organizing. That in and of itself can be a pretty big deal.

It’s not often that I get fired up by reading a city plan. I haven’t gotten involved in DC politics, largely because it’s felt like an unending uphill battle where the best you can do is not lose. But a plan like this, even if it turns out to be mostly smoke and mirrors, is enough to make me think maybe it’s worth putting my toes in the water.

On Friday, the Nation magazine got under Doug Henwood’s skin:

The Nation was out with an email blast this morning touting its branded affinity VISA card issued by UMB Bank in Kansas City. The magazine’s associate publisher, Peggy Randall, helpfully identifies UMB as “a small, regional bank recommended by the Move Your Money project, a project we support,” and therefore in accordance with the goals of the Occupy movement.

What’s the problem with moving your money out of Bank of America, Citi, etc. into small local banks?

So who is UMB Bank, really? It’s yet another iteration of the classic Money Mover’s institution: flush with more money than it can invest locally, it loads up on securities. (Parenthetically, why should a magazine based in New York encourage doing business with a bank 1,200 miles away on localist grounds?) According to its latest annual report, 46% of UMB’s money is invested in securities, and another 6% is on deposit with other banks—which comes to over half. They don’t provide details on the securities, but they’re almost certainly a mix of Treasury bonds, mortgage bonds, and corporate bonds—utterly conventional financial market stuff. Just 37% is out in loans—and 0.8% in small-business loans, beloved of the small bank fanclub. They are big regional players in mutual funds, wealth management, and private banking, all moderately to seriously upscale stuff. And, like the big guys, they’re looking to make more money out of fees, rather than traditional deposit-taking and loan-making.

Henwood made a similar argument back in November, when the Move Your Money campaign got a big push through the Huffington Post.

When Huffington unveiled her scheme, I took advantage of the gadget on her website (the Move Your Money Project) that allowed you to enter your zip code and came back with a suggested list of virtuous, meaning small, banks. I thought I’d look into some of the suggestions that emerged when I entered by home zipcode, 11238. One, the black-owned Carver Federal Savings Bank, is a major financer of the gentrification of predominantly black neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. As those neighborhoods get richer, Carver boasts, it’s partnering with Merrill Lynch (a subsidiary of the Bank of America) to offer wealth management services to the flusher new residents. Another suggestion, Apple Savings Bank, has about three-quarters of its assets in securities like U.S. Treasury bonds, not local loans. They don’t come much bigger than the U.S. Treasury. And a third, New York Community Bank, which even features that precious word in its name, financed a private equity group that bought up a lot of apartment buildings in New York in the hope of squeezing out the rent-regulated tenants and replacing them with more lucrative ones paying market rents. With the real estate bust, the PE firm is having trouble servicing its debts, and the residents of its buildings are suffering as services are cut further.

Why do small banks often end up putting their money in US treasuries or unsavory financial schemes? One major reason:

many small banks have more money than they can profitably invest locally. As Barbara Garson showed in her wonderful book, Money Makes the World Go Around, the portion of her book advance she deposited in tiny upstate New York bank was probably lent via the fed funds market to Chase, where it entered the global circuit of capital. This is not at all uncommon. Money is fungible, protean, and highly mobile even when it looks locally rooted.

Ditto for credit unions, another favorite of the Move Your Money crowd.

Many credit unions are fine little enterprises. But they too have the more money than they know what to do with problem. According to the Federal Reserve’s flow of funds accounts, 58% of their assets are in individual loans, mostly for cars and houses. The balance is invested in bank deposits and bonds. The bonds are Treasury and federal agency securities. Again, anything but small and local. And should they get an influx of money, it’s highly likely that most of it will go to these sorts of bonds. In fact, , more than half the growth in credit union assets over the last three years has gone into Treasury and federal agency securities. Less than a quarter went to mortgage loans, and consumer credit (like credit cards and auto loans) have actually declined. There’s no way they could accommodate even a small fraction of our near-$8 trillion in bank deposits without turning to bigtime securities or Merrill Lynch wealth management services.

In the long run, it’s possible that small banks and credit unions could pump more money into the local economy, but it would require fundamentally changing their culture, processes, and technical skills plus building a bunch of supporting institutions that would make putting significantly more money into the local economy a reasonably safe bet.

The other really big problem with small-is-beautiful banking is that small banks are not, to put it mildly, progressive institutions. Your local small bank may support local kids’ baseball teams. But when it comes to struggles for social justice, they’ve often used their power to drop the hammer on our side (e.g., White Citizens Councils). If Move Your Money was encouraging folks to put their money into small local banks and then organize together to make them a more progressive force, that would be a different story. But just moving our money isn’t going to change that balance of power.

Mind you, a Move Your Money strategy might still make sense as a way of giving folks practical experience that they have more power than they realize. I could certainly see it as one small step along the path to helping people discover their power. But in and of itself? I’ll leave the last words to Doug:

Getting banks under control is a matter of politics, not individual portfolio allocation decisions. Sure, you may get friendlier service and lower fees from a credit union—but you’re not really doing anything politically transformative by moving the money.

Can we harness the power of something like Facebook to build better cities? In New Orleans, a project called Neighborland is trying to find out. According to Grist, Neighborland is

a sort of collective online urban planning platform that grew from a project started by artist Candy Chang in 2010. Chang slapped nametag-style stickers reading “I WISH THIS WAS ___” on abandoned buildings around New Orleans. People answered by filling in the blanks with all sorts of things they’d like to see in their neighborhoods: a grocery store, a row of trees, a bakery — to which someone else responded, “If you can get the financing, I will do the baking!”

“People were trying to talk to each other,” says Alan Williams, Neighborland’s director of community, who met with me on a rainy day in New Orleans two weeks ago to show me some of the group’s work. “What if [the conversation] wasn’t lost to time? What if people could share knowledge and expertise?”
Neighborland allows the kind of organic conversations started by the stickers to happen online, where they can build momentum and facilitate connections.

Neighborland’s handbook explains how it works:

1. Take a look around. Sign up to share your insights, support your neighbors’ ideas, and drop some knowledge.

2. Share an idea. The app begins with a simple fill-in-the-blank form: I want ____ in my neighborhood. Fill out the sentence however you like: What would make your block better? What businesses do you think could thrive in your community? What do you have a personal stake in? Choose a location, describe your idea in detail with text, pictures, and video, and share it with your friends.

3. Find support. Share your idea with your friends and family. Everybody that signs up for Neighborland can support your idea. The top ideas for the month are featured on Current. The most popular ideas all time are on Popular.

4. Drop Knowledge. Keep your supporters updated on your progress along the way. Invite your neighbors to help you, ask questions, integrate their feedback, and don’t be afraid to take the conversation offline.

5. Places. See projects that are in development in New Orleans and onWashington Avenue in Houston.

6. Make Things Happen. Actions speak louder than words. See what we’ve accomplished in New Orleans and how we did it here. We will be working in other cities in the U.S. later this year.

Beyond these guidelines, our only rule is “Be nice or leave.” So have fun, make your neighborhood better, and please let us know how we can improve Neighborland by emailing us at hello[at]neighborland.com.

Projects have ranged from working together to create a night market on a vacant stretch of St. Claude Avenue to helping to mobilize to extend a streetcar line. And some of these projects combine creating alternative spaces with mobilizing to change laws.

After acquiring some lots adjacent to their offices in the freshly-renovated Franz Building, Good Work Network partnered with students from MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning to develop a plan for the property. Their proposal: a food truck lot. But not just any food truck lot–one that will serve as an incubator for aspiring culinary entrepreneurs. Good Work Network will make the investments in landscaping and in trucks and carts for the entrepreneurs to lease, serving as a stepping stone for those that don’t have access to sufficient start-up capital…

Now, Neighborland and the New Orleans Food Truck Coalition will hold a Food Truck Festival not just to build support for our cause, but also to help Barrie and the Good Work Network get some real-life market research. With more data in hand, we hope to make the food truck incubator that much easier to get off the ground. In the meantime, we hope to show everybody in Central City what a food truck lot next to the Franz Building would add to the neighborhood.

In the coming week, we’ll get in touch with neighborhood groups like Oretha Castle Haley Main Street and the Central City Renaissance Alliance and many others to see how our event can best serve nearby residents, businesses and institutions.

And at the same time they are working together to change the rules that restrict food trucks:

As a low-barrier business, food trucks are an important source of economic opportunity in our community. In cities around the country, they’ve also shown the ability to help revitalize and enliven streets. However, with today’s out-dated laws, food trucks in New Orleans remain relatively rare.

Those are just a few of the reasons Neighborland is pleased to introduce The New Orleans Food Truck Coalition, our city’s freshly-minted food truck and mobile vending advocate. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve helped this diverse and open group of mobile vendors, customers, and community members organize themselves.

Neighborland was the brainchild of folks at the Civic Center, the same kind of mix of artists and city planners who elsewhere created the idea of parklets. There’s an awful lot of creative stuff going on in this niche of the economy, and between it and participatory budgeting, I think we’ve got some really interesting space opening up for thinking about what it means for ordinary folks to have a real say in the economy.

Need a break from one of the best reality TV show ever, the Republican Presidential Primary? Marxist Prof Erik Olin Wright is now president of the American Sociology Association, and he has a treat for you.

This year, the ASA is going to devote part of their annual conference to a discussion of “Real Utopias: emancipatory projects, institutional designs, possible futures.”

Many people are drawn to sociology because of moral concerns about harmful social conditions and injustices. Those concerns are reflected in much sociological research, but usually this takes the form of the diagnosis and critique of existing institutions rather than the exploration of alternatives. A great deal of scholarship focuses on explaining the sources of social injustice and the causes and consequences of undesirable social conditions; much less explores the design of alternatives to existing institutions that would help realize moral ideals of justice and human flourishing. The idea of “real utopias” is meant to point sociology in this direction.

As part of that conversation, Wright has pulled together a bunch of interesting professors to give a brief talk on their pet ideas. And to make sure the conversation is as interesting as possible, he’s asked them to submit a paper in advance – and as they turn them in he’s put them online. A few examples:

• Janet Gornick (CUNY Graduate Center), ” <a href="http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/ASA/Gornick%20Real%20Utopia%20Proposal%20–%20Family%20Division%20of%20Labor.pdfWork-Family Reconciliation Policies and Gender Equality“
• Philippe Van Parijs & Yannick Vanderborght (University of Louvain) “ Basic Income in a Globalized Economy”
• Fred Block (UC Davis), ” Democratizing Finance“
• John Gastil and Robert Richards (Penn State), ” Making Direct Democracy Deliberative through Random Assemblies“

So if you’re in the mood to dream – and can handle plowing through professorspeak – head on over to Uncle Wright’s Leftie Intellectual Candy Shop.

I keep circling back to a lot of the same pieces. Individually they feel right. But when I pull them together, they don’t. So, in the next few weeks I’m going to try shuffling reshuffling the pieces and see if I start to get a feel for what’s working vs. what’s not and why.

A) The economy isn’t working for most of us – and the middle class is falling apart.
It isn’t inevitable, and it isn’t natural.
It’s because the rich and powerful are calling all the shots in how we shape the economy.

B) To build a more just economy and to save the middle class, we need to embrace 2 truths:
– We Have More Power Than We Think We Have:
We have a lot more power to shape the economy than we admit
– We’re Not As Smart As We Think We Are:
But we don’t know what’s really possible in the economy, and it’s easy to screw it up

C) There are 3 principles we can use to find a balance between these truths that will help us build a just economy for all:
1) Everyone Should Have a Real Say
2) Stack the Odds in Favor of the Good Guys
3) With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility (Spiderman’s Dad)