If you're one of the growing number of people who is beginning to despair of ever stopping the march of Corporatism, here are a couple of suggestions that might re-energize and re-empower you. Try them and you may end up feeling better not only about the future of your community but also about yourself.
- Put you money in a credit union AND become an active credit union member.
- Join a local consumer food coop or form one with your friends and neighbors.
- Learn a craft or skill.
More about each after the break.
Get Control Over Your Money
Is there any area where we feel more powerless than how the financial resources of our communities and our nation are controlled and managed? The Wall Street casino runs our economy, our media and our government, and they run it all for the benefit of a tiny group of Uber-Rich. We've learned the painful lesson over the past four years that a strategy of more and better Democrats holds out little possibility for changing the game.
Don't be fooled into thinking we're powerless, though. According to William Greider, author of The Soul of Capitalism, as of 2003, Americans personally controlled more than $4 trillion (with a "t") in highly liquid assets, mostly bank and savings accounts. The top 5% held more than their share of this money, but the distribution of these funds is far more equal than stocks and bonds.
That means there are trillions of dollars controlled by middle and working class Americans, but much of it is left in the hands of the Super Banks who use it to finance corporations that offshore American jobs, pollute the air and water and buy politicians to make sure they get away with it all.
There is an alternative: credit unions. How is a credit union different from a bank, even a community bank? The owners of a credit union are the depositors, not the stockholders. The credit union is run democratically by its members, and on a day-to-day basis, by a board elected by its members. Each depositor, no matter how small or large, has one vote. Sounds positively Marxist, huh?
If you don't like what Bank of America is doing with your money, what are you going to do about it? Write a letter? Complain to the local branch manager who has as little say as you? Pray that Congress enacts a law requiring better behavior from the banks? If you think your local credit union ought to be loaning your deposits to the local worker cooperative or a new company working in green technology, you can bring it up at the annual meeting. Better yet, you can discuss it face-to-face with some of the board members over a beer or cup of coffee. Best of all, organize some of the members and put one of you on the managing board where you can turn an idea into policy.
Democracy at work. You may not always get your way, but you can always get your say. The end result might be that worthy projects and businesses in your local community get some much-needed investment, AND you might just start to believe again that this world is salvageable, one credit union loan at a time.
How do you move your money to a credit union? I'd suggest you go here and put your zip code in this credit union search tool. Some credit unions will be limited to people who work for certain employers, but many are open to anyone within the geographical area where the credit union is headquartered. You might also want to check to see if the credit union is insured by the National Credit Union Share Insurance Fund, a federal agency that insures credit union deposits the way the FDIC insures deposits in privately owned banks.
If you really want to change the world, you can't just move your money. Go to the annual meeting where the board is elected. Maybe you'll win the door prize. Find out who the current board members are. Meet them. Get to know their vision for the CU, and let them know yours. Remember that this is like the local PTA, except that it controls how a significant amount of money is invested in your community.
Pretty damn cool. Beats writing your umpteenth letter to your Senator about re-regulating the banks only to get a form letter in response and a bird-flip when it comes to a vote in committee.
Get control over your food
Ruthless Corporatism in our financial sector is bad, but profits-above-all applied to the growing and distributing of food is even more frightening. If you're still among those who are unaware of how we and our environment are being poisoned by Corporate Agriculture, you need to begin by viewing Food, Inc.
As someone who grew up on a family farm, I can tell you about how Big Ag has destroyed an important part of our culture. The family farmer was the linchpin of Jefferson's concept of democracy: independent, mindful of the future, committed to a locale. Family farmers are now all but extinct, and many of those who are still in business are nothing more than serfs-by-contract under the thumb of Big Food, raising abusing animals in ways that break any true farmer's heart.
Farming communities have been devastated. In many ways, they are the rural counterparts of our de-industrialized cities like Detroit and Youngstown. Drugs, crime and hopelessness run rampant.
It's easy to admonish people not to shop at Walmart, but where can we get wholesome food? And by wholesome, I don't just mean healthy for the person who eats it. Truly wholesome food is grown in an ecologically responsible way. The people who grow and handle the food are treated with respect and fairness. If animals are involved, they are treated humanely.
There is a solution that promotes social responsibility and democracy.
More and more Americans are getting their food through consumer cooperatives. A consumer food cooperative is a lot like a credit union. A group of people get together and pool their food needs. The cooperative looks for apples and corn by the bushel instead of by the bag. That means that it can buy directly from organic farmers and get wholesome food at affordable (but not Walmart) prices.
Some of these cooperatives are actually large enough to operate storefronts where the members come by and pick up food just as they would in a supermarket. Smaller coops usually have pick-up days when the food is brought to a common location, broken up according to the members' pre-orders and picked up by the members. Some coops even arrange for members to pick their own, a great opportunity for all of us to learn more about what's involved in growing food.
In many parts of the country, it's easy to get involved in the wholesome food movement. Here's one of many websites where you can find out about local food cooperatives in your area.
What if there isn't a food coop in your area? You can gather some friends and neighbors and form your own. Cooperatives are governed by your state's law, but nearly every state will allow for such coops and provide some fairly simple way of forming one. If you have a land grant university in your state, it's likely that their extension division will provide information and even assistance for people wanting to form coops. Here's an example of a University of Missouri Extension Service guide to forming consumer coops.
Being involved in a food coop won't only allow your family to eat more healthy food. It will also help keep one or more of the nearly extinct class of family farmers in business, and bring some needed cash into their communities. You'll get to meet and work with some like-minded neighbors, and you and your family may learn a lot about food and how it's produced.
Change your life and change the world, one bushel of green beans at a time.
Take control of your skill-set
By necessity, we have become lifelong learners. Learning new skills has become mandatory if we want to keep our jobs or get a new one in a world where technology is constantly changing.
The problem is that the skills we acquire are almost always dictated by the very Corporate Powers that we oppose in the political arena. Most of these skills are useless outside of some employer's workplace, and they are of little use to us or our neighbors.
Humans have spent thousands of generations acquiring skills that are of practical use to individuals and their neighbors. Gardeners, herdsmen, potters, carpenters, cooks, masons, blacksmiths, the list goes on and on. When the industrial age arrived, there were new skills: mechanics, plumbers, electricians.
I'll admit to a soft-spot for the post-apocalyptic brand of sci-fi. The BBC is currently running the second season of a series of this genre, Survivors, that examines what would happen in the UK in the aftermath of a worldwide virus that kills 99%+ of the human population. In one episode, what is left of the government is compiling a new Doomsday Book. It comes to our group of heroes and asks them what they had done before the Plague, and one of them answers, "Systems Analyst." The census taker could only look at him and laugh.
Many of us live in the midst of a paradox. We may be highly educated and have acquired complex, specialized skills with considerable effort. Yet those skills are of use only to a few employers, and chances are, they will be obsolete before too long. If someone were taking a Doomsday Census and came to us, they would laugh at our skills as well.
At the same time, we have become almost completely incompetent when it comes to doing things for ourselves. What do you think the results would be if we were to take a census of dKos and ask how many knew how to frame a house, replace a fan belt, butcher a steer or tuck-point a chimney?
I grew up on a farm in the 50s and 60s, so things were a bit different for me. My dad insisted I help him change the oil in all the vehicles, and taught me how to cure a ham and clean a fish. My spouse is a farm girl whose mother taught her how to can fruits and vegetables and sew her own clothes.
Fewer and fewer people grow up like that these days, but that doesn't mean people need to remain helpless when it comes to the practical tasks that humans have performed for centuries. If you can learn the ins-and-outs of the newest baffling version of Microsoft Office, you can master one or two crafts or skills that you think you might enjoy. Learn to knit and use your new skill to make gifts for friends and family next holiday season. Maybe you can barter some knit goods to your neighbor in exchange for some help painting your house exterior. Form a knitting club and help others learn while you all enjoy some companionship. That's how human beings have learned and socialized for millenia.
As for a fun place to start thinking about what skill would be fun to acquire, check out an old favorite, Mother Earth News.
Become more self-sufficient at the same time as you make yourself better-equipped to help your neighbors.
Become a real threat to the Corporatocracy
Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil, Lockheed Martin and their lackeys all fervently hope that we only engage them on the political battlefield. With their money, media savvy and ruthlessness, they will win every time.
There are two things that terrify them, though. The first is human ingenuity expressed as self-sufficiency. These corporations have such great power because they have convinced us that they are indispensable. Remember September, 2008 when a few banks were threatened with insolvency? They convinced enough of the nation that we could not survive without them so that our government and its right hand, the Federal Reserve, flooded them with money. They used a moment of their own vulnerability and managed to jujitsu it into an opportunity to enslave us further.
The more self-sufficient we are, the more able we are to tell corporations to fuck themselves when they threaten us. Remember the role that spinning played in Gandhi's battle against the British.
The second thing that terrifies them is face-to-face collaboration and cooperation among middle and working class people. If one person with the right skills can accomplish a lot, several skilled people, working together, can accomplish extraordinary things. And if those people work together in a democratic environment instead of a command-and-control structure, they disprove the Corporatist maxim that human beings must be coerced into servanthood in order for humanity to survive and advance.
It turns out that credit unions, food coops and throwing your own pots are pretty subversive activities.
As he considered how to force Montgomery, Alabama to change its segregated bus system, Martin Luther King, Jr. was troubled by whether a bus boycott would itself be ethical. Then he remembered Henry David Thoreau's statement in Civil Disobedience:
We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system.
The blunt truth is that all of us lend our cooperation on a daily basis to a system so evil that it threatens human existence on this planet. We buy products from that system. We lend it money. We accept its paycheck. At the same time, Corporatism is so omnipresent and so omnipotent that it is impossible for most of us to make a clean break from it and survive.
But there is no excuse to fail to take even small steps toward disentangling ourselves from the Corporate Monster. Credit unions, food coops and new, practical skills are things we can do now to begin a long process.
We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system.