— Bay Area Community Exchange

Mira Luna, a Timebank board member, wrote this rad article about bike kitchens near and far, including Timebank faves the SF Bike Kitchen and Biketopia, both of which accept Timebank hours

Howdy folks. We’ve been having some tech issues this past week. Things should be resolved now, but we apologize for the inconvenience.  On a related note, if you know a friendly Ruby on Rails developer who wants to get involved with a super cool project (rhymes with “Mimetank”), please drop us a line at timebankinfo@sfbace.org.

The talk consisted mostly of some of the highlights of his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Highly recommended whether or not you’ve read the book.

Video on socialcam

John Robb has written an essay viewing the consolidation of the global economy as an instance of the bow-tie formalism from the theory of control systems. Here’s a diagram of the idea as applied to adversarial situations in human society, usefully melded with concepts from John Boyd’s OODA theory of adversarial interaction:

There are a few very significant implications in viewing the global economy in this way that bear explicit emphasis:

• The center of the bow-tie has an adversarial relationship with the rest of the environment;
• The heirarchies on either side of the bow-tie that place the resources of the environment at the disposal of the center and impose the decisions from the center on the environment serve to buffer or isolate the center from the environment’s complexity by pre-emptively reducing the complexity of the inputs and translating the simple goals of the center into more complex actions on the environment to attempt to enforce them;
• The actions of the center, if its spectrum of purpose is total, will have an inherent tendency to reduce the total complexity of the environment to make it more compatible with the capacities of the center (to narrow the wide ends of the bow-tie down to the width of the center);
• The less complex the environment is, (or the narrower the ends of the bow-tie,) the less complex (narrower) the center may become while preserving the same level of viability with respect to its environment.

Another concept from the theory of control systems, the law of requisite variety, has an important implication: Since the variety of perturbations a system can potentially be confronted with by its environment is unforeseeable and large, (typically due to combinatorial growth of possibilities with system size,) the system should always try to maximize its internal variety (or diversity), so as to maximize its chances of being prepared to benefit from any foreseeable or unforeseeable contigency. (Closely related to Taleb’s antifragility concept.)

Combining this with the previous observations, we can reach much farther. The more the center of the bow-tie with total spectrum of purpose consolidates itself and grows homogeneous, eliminating its internal diversity, the more it must rely on passively buffering itself from its immediate environment by mutilating away its environment’s complexity instead of engaging with it, and the more fragile and less viable it becomes. In turn, the more the center succeeds in mutilating away the environment’s complexity, the more room it has to consolidate itself despite the greater homogeneity consolidation imposes. This dynamic is a positive feedback loop of complexity reduction, the net effect of which is that the broader system in which the control system is embedded loses diversity on the whole, due to the globally homogenizing influence of the center’s attempts to retain control while simultaneously exploiting that control through greater consolidation, and the more fragile and less viable the broader system becomes with respect to external perturbations.

However, when growth of possibilities with system size is uniform and faster than linear, (which is quite true in the case of combinatorial growth,) there is another interesting consequence: the more consolidated the center becomes, the smaller is the size of the environment it can successfully control. So the center is increasingly the center of a narrower and narrower portion of its overall environment, while that portion grows more and more sensitive to perturbations from a growing exterior.

The application of these ideas to the case of the economy is straightforward. Consider Kevin Carson’s recent independent characterization of the historical trajectory of capitalism in this light:

Throughout history, propertied classes have relied primarily on artificial scarcities of material resources to extract a surplus from labor.  With the help of state-enforced artificial property rights, a ruling class can control great concentrations of land and capital. These monopolies prevent competition from driving down the price of capital and land to their natural values. Thus the means of production are artificially scarce and expensive, and labor is forced to pay tribute for access to them.

Today, however, the imploding cost of production means that concentrated ownership of land and capital is becoming less and less effective as a means of rent extraction. The desktop revolution has reduced the cost of setting up a “publishing house” or “music studio” a hundredfold. Micromanufacturing with open source desktop CNC tools will soon do likewise to the cost of a factory. Intensive raised-bed horticulture grows many times more food per acre than mechanized agribusiness. In fact most “farming” is a real estate investment in which the government pays rent for the “farmer” to hold land out of use!

In this age of abundance, when the falling cost of machinery and exploding efficiencies of extracting value from inputs threaten to make control of physical resources worthless as a source of rent, rents accrue mainly to “property rights” like the right to do certain things, or criminalizing competition from more efficient ways of doing things.

Under old-style capitalism, rents were extracted by using artificial property rights to restrict access to physical opportunities for production. Now that the cheapening of physical means of production has made this strategy untenable, the ruling classes must instead charge rents on the right to produce with one’s own physical resources.

Now, what is the way around this self-destructive dynamic? Referring to the bow-tie diagram, we see that a control system with a limited spectrum of purpose and tacit ways of engaging with the environment will be able to deal with inputs in a focused way that doesn’t put stress on its internal capacity for complexity, and will be able to further its purposes through actions that influence the environment by engaging with its complexity rather than violently mutilating the environment and destroying its complexity. Totality of purpose implies an inherently self-destructive dynamic, which casts doubt on the usefulness of such a sweeping ontological category as an economy as a focus for system design, and gives a new perspective on the troubles faced by totalitarian political systems and the tragedies that surround them. Also, smaller control systems interacting with smaller portions of the environment will face less uncertainty in establishing a balance between their internal complexity and their environments’ complexity, due to the rapid growth of complexity with size. The observation that “the most severe fragilities created by bow-tie architectures involve hijacking or manipulating the universally used central protocol and carriers, rather than simple destruction,” made by Marie Csete and John Doyle in their 2004 paper entitled “Bow ties, metabolism, and disease” indicates multiple smaller, simpler systems over fewer, larger, more complex ones to reduce vulnerability to adversarial attacks and worst-case vulnerability to chance failures. And so do the successes of systems designed as collections of individually minimalist, loosely-coupled parts, for example those based on the Unix philosophy, which speak strongly in favor of a society based on principles analogous to Eric Raymond’s design rules for software systems. Let me call your attention to these three:

• Rule of Robustness: Robustness is the child of transparency and simplicity.
• Rule of Diversity: Distrust all claims for “one true way”.
• Rule of Extensibility: Design for the future, because it will be here sooner than you think.

Thanks to Andrew Hasse of East Bay Films, we now have a video of John Robb’s talk from March. We had a lot of interesting discussion during the long question-and-answer period at the end of the talk that you shouldn’t miss.

Work continues on his Open Source Venture project at Miiu.org.

I recently read former BACE speaker John Robb’s thoughts on the emerging bubble in Bitcoins. He wrote the following:

As a store of value or an asset it’s shady.  Here’s why:  since the supply of bitcoin is limited and knowledge/use of it is growing (potentially virally) it’s the perfect breeding ground for a speculative bubble.  In a world awash with scams and financial speculation (a defining characteristic of our time), it was only a matter of time before the pump and dump mobsters moved in.  Spamming message boards everywhere.  Generating buzz.  Taking speculative positions.  The rapid rise in bitcoin’s value relative to the dollar can be seen below (on thin trading) demonstrates that this is already going on:

…As far as I know this could become the first P2P bubble.

I want to share my own thoughts on why there are clear signs of a bubble forming in Bitcoins, and I think it goes far beyond the his view that “the supply of bitcoin is limited and knowledge/use of it is growing (potentially virally).”

The aspect of Bitcoins that is the most concerning to me regarding their tendency to be a vehicle for a bubble is that Bitcoins are backed by nothing; they have no value in themselves and do not represent a promise to deliver, do, or refrain from doing anything. Even gold, whose value many attribute to its relative scarcity and stable supply, has uses in chemical and electronic technology and a prominent place in the marriage traditions of India and in jewelry craft worldwide, all of which underpin its value and mitigate risk in dealing in it. And even national fiat currencies, while some criticize them because they are not redeemable for anything like the gold their predecessors were, have value that is in some sense intrinsic because they must be used to pay taxes and as legal tender they can be used to settle court-adjudicated debts. This is to say nothing of the petrodollar arrangement by which US dollars, commonly held to be a fiat currency, can be seen as being backed in a sense by an extremely important energy commodity.

In the analysis of stock prices and stock market bubbles there is an attempt to distinguish between the fundamental or intrinsic value of a company, which is due to its assets, profitability, and success and prospects in business, and its speculative value, which is due to market perceptions of what the market price of the company’s stock will be in the future. In the sense of this distinction, Bitcoins have only speculative value: the only tie they have to the broader economy is a price determined by their market’s perceptions of what that price will be in the future. They themselves are useful for nothing and are not directly redeemable for anything at all, useful or not.

In models of bubbles such as one in Didier Sornette‘s Why Stock Markets Crash, the intrinsic value of an asset is a baseline around which the speculative price deviates, and a kind of constraint on the speculative price’s deviations, in that some proportion of people in a market can be expected to make investment decisions based on estimates of intrinsic value, while others, with more appetite for risk or gamesmanship, will be willing to make speculative investment decisions, and their interplay determines the final price. My passing familiarity with such models, my familiarity with the history of cases where the tax collection systems, courts, and national reputations that stand behind national fiat currencies’ values have broken down, and my gut feeling on the matter all lead me to believe that an asset whose value is purely speculative, such as the Bitcoin, will have an especially brief and volatile existence before its value crashes. And already 30% to 50% swings in value in a single day have been seen for Bitcoins.

Another troublesome aspect of Bitcoins is that the number in circulation grows, by design, in such a way that the rate of growth slows to a negligible one over a period of two decades or so, with most of the growth occurring, or rather having occurred, in the first few years. (Bitcoins were devised in 2008.) Meanwhile, every other general measure of economic growth in the broader economy is conventionally considered to be exponential in the short term, and long-term data on economic growth of nearly everything resembles a power-law with log-periodic oscillations, and in either case the economy is shown to grow at a rate that either remains constant or increases in time. This assures a growing mismatch between the number of Bitcoins in existence and the general economic value that they would have to reliably measure as a stable currency, and one that will favor early participants in the market more and more in time until the eventual collapse, when those who fail to exit in time, often late entrants waiting for a significant return, are left having paid for a worthless asset (the same pattern of enrichment and impoverishment seen in a pyramid scheme).

This leads me to mention the third troublesome aspect of Bitcoins is that most of the coins created through ‘mining’ of them will be in the hands of early enthusiasts of the system. They thus constitute an insider group with a large incentive to hype the value of Bitcoins to the rest of the world and dump them on whichever greater fools they are able to find or create. We are now witnessing the first broad effort to hype the value of Bitcoins, with the predictable results. Sadly, the final stage of this trajectory is a dramatic collapse, and due to their lack of intrinsic value to stabilize them as an asset I expect the ride to be especially bumpy and brief in the case of Bitcoins.

According to various rubrics, such as Bernard Lietaer‘s here, four key roles that a currency might serve are measure of value, medium of exchange, store of value, and tool for speculative profit, where to be useful as a currency the first two are indispensable, and the last two undermine the second, and speculation undermines both of the first two. Let’s see how Bitcoins look in terms of this rubric:

• Measure of value: Bitcoin prices are set by a purely speculative market where variations in a single day are routinely a significant percentage of Bitcoin total value, making them very poor choices for measuring anything’s value: during the time between you ordering something online and the seller shipping it to you, the price in Bitcoins can easily change by half, to say nothing of doing something like making a contract for long-term business (say over a span of years) in Bitcoins. In keeping with the general behavior of bubbles, this volatility should worsen as time goes on and the bubble nears its collapse. Bitcoins fail as a measure of value.
• Medium of exchange: Bitcoins’ only connection to the rest of the economy is through an extremely volatile speculative market for them. They are not currently broadly accepted as payment despite a certain notorious example, the Silk Road (semi)-anonymous marketplace. They lack any kind of backing, credible or otherwise, in something of broadly accepted value, such as a commodity, by which currencies throughout history typically earn trust as a medium of exchange. Their strong deflationary tendencies will mean that people holding them will much prefer holding them to spending them. Bitcoins fail as a medium of exchange.
• Store of value: Bitcoin prices are extremely volatile and all signs point to their following a severe example of a bubble trajectory ending in a dramatic collapse, with no intrinsic value to put a floor under that collapse. Bitcoins fail as a store of value.
• Tool for speculative profit: I personally think that I could not have engineered a better tool for speculative profit had I been trying for the last ten years. No backing to slow the bubble dynamics down or hinder rapid growth of the system, the pretense of which is behind even the shadiest penny stock pump-and-dump or largest dubious IPO. Enough cryptographic and algorithmic sophistication to the system to give it geek chic and an appearance of integrity and far-sighted design, but not so much that strong anonymity, or anything dispensable to the purpose of running a speculative market, is a feature. A free-money feeling to the activity of mining that has created a group of early adopters who are now carrying everything to its conclusion by acting to get that free money in the form of actual money. And growth is rigged so that those closest to the system at the beginning get the richest. Bingo.

In brief, Bitcoins are a fascinating economic experiment whose conclusion I look forward to eagerly and with great interest. But as far as I can tell, Bitcoins seem much more like a refinement of some of the most systemically dangerous things in the economic system that led to the collapse and the still-dragging-on depression than something likely to challenge such things or provide a meaningful alternative to them.

I came across the anthology Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics edited by Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu which takes on the question of what kinds of feedback loops, if any, exist between economics and what economics studies, a question of great relevance to our era where economic theory and practice influence one another in deep and complex ways. A sentiment in the introduction struck me: “No language is simply a mirror of what it sets out to articulate, but neither should languages be reduced to the social interests of those deploying them,” and another, “Economic rationality is not like Newton’s laws, which are supposed to be at work everywhere in the universe. It is a fragile property that must be carefully preserved by creating a hospitable environment.” Both do a good job of giving form to the ghosts that haunt me when I think about currencies and how they should be designed and built.

It also happened that the case studied in depth in the second chapter of the book is one of a regional food auction organized in Fontaines-en-Sologne, France in the 1980s which seems relevant to the briskly developing urban and local farming activities in the bay area and is especially interesting to me due to the appeal of the idea of backing a local currency with shares in a local food market. The region was one of the poorest in France and considered little more than a swamp and game preserve but after organizing a regional strawberry auction made a name for itself as a premium producer of branded and quality-assured strawberries, and this provided an economic boost to many types of farmers who weren’t previously doing very well. The construction of the auction was, in the way the auction operated, very strictly in accordance with the economic theory of auctions: a great deal of effort went into grading strawberry quality objectively and structuring the flow of information about quality, bids, supply, demand, and prices in the way auction theory demanded. On the other hand, side information still flowed through external channels beyond the reach of the designer of the auction and politics among strawberry producers and between producers, shippers, and the retail market were a decisive factor in its success and determined the ultimate form it took and how it related with the rest of the economy.

A key passage:

“The construction of the auction market formed groups, crystallized identities. The antagonism of opposing producers and shippers that I described earlier was still alive. But my new observations pointed out the emergence of a more solidarity-oriented attitude. Shippers were recognizing that the Fontaines-en-Sologne’s auction system—combined with the quality labeling of strawberries—allowed producers to exist as such. Producers who engaged in the early crusade for market transparency—that is, for a furthering of competition among shippers—were reluctant to enter into trade directly with mass retailers’ central buying offices. Without a “reference price,” they would find themselves ill-equipped for a defense of their interest in the market. They also though that new market arrangements would be too demanding in terms of logistics for a product with a short growing season. Besides that, a transformation of market practices would challenge the economic disposition that they acquired with the auction market—the stimulation of production through systematic monitoring and comparison of prices.

Market managers were trying to defend shippers, for instance, asking central buying offices not to bypass shippers. When they published advertisements about the market, they added contact details of the shippers who were acknowledged members of the market. When clients got in touch directly with the Fontaines-en-Sologne market, managers redirected them to the members—“we have known our shippers for a long time,” a manager said.

However, solidarity was somewhat less pronounced in the case of younger generations, confronted with other logics of social reproduction. Producers’ new family arrangements could prevent the producer from leaving his or her farm during auction days, because no other family member was available to replace him or her. Shippers who were not dependent on traditional circuits and who were engaged in business with mass retailers were also somewhat disconnected from a defense of the auction system. The identity of the “strawberry from Sologne” started to be questioned, as its quality was based more on a competitive tension than on a standardized assessment. Recently, and as a response to an audit process in 1999, market managers decided to rebrand Sologne strawberries. The fraises du cadran de Sologne have become the new Mian-Mian Sologne strawberries. Besides the fact that this new brand name may not raise much enthusiasm, it is noticeable that the word “cadran,” that is, the auction identity, is no longer part of the identity of Sologne’s strawberries, at least not as they are now marketed.

In short, the Fontaines-en-Sologne’s auction market was threatened less by the shippers’ collusive strategies against the producers’ move of fostering competition than by the transformation of commercial networks, the rise of agrofood mass retail, and their economic justifications. Competition between commercial networks seems to be playing a crucial role in legitimating certain market institutions and delegitimating others. The logic of market relations cannot be grasped only through the logic of market interactions. At the origin of markets there are never rootless and detached individuals. the History embodied in the different actors that intervene in the construction of a market and the history materialized in the preexisting circuits of exchange delineate the space of constraint of any new social construction.”

The English translation is the second chapter of this book and the pdf is available here in Portuguese.

Our congratulations again to Marcin Jakubowski, who spoke for us last year, on his TED fellowship. His TED talk is now available for viewing.

Editor’s note: These currencies must be doing quite well to initiate propaganda against them by the Hungarian Central Bank. I do not know the specifics of these currencies referred to, however, most local currencies have more forge-proofing elements than national money, have more value than the destructive (backed by high interest debt) and inflation-prone national money, and I don’t know how they could be less supportive of the local economy -that just doesn’t make sense. Obviously a very short article that is unable to provide evidence of its claims. Three cheers for autonomous Sopron!

From the Realdeal.hu
April 14, 2011

There are several risks associated with so-called “local” currencies being issued by some municipalities in Hungary, the Hungarian National Bank has warned. Experts from the bank say they are easier to forge, have an uncertain value, and they do not support local economy.

A local currency was introduced in Sopron in 2009, while other regions and towns planning their own local currencies include Rábaköz, Pécs, Veszprém and Debrecen.

From World Public Opinion
April 6, 2011

American public support for the free market economy has dropped sharply in the past year, and is now lower than in China, according to a GlobeScan poll released today.

The findings, drawn from 12,884 interviews across 25 countries, show that there has been a sharp fall in the number of Americans who think that the free market economy is the best economic system for the future.

When GlobeScan began tracking views in 2002, four in five Americans (80%) saw the free market as the best economic system for the future–the highest level of support among tracking countries. Support started to fall away in the following years and recovered slightly after the financial crisis in 2007/8, but has plummeted since 2009, falling 15 points in a year so that fewer than three in five (59%) now see free market capitalism as the best system for the future.

GlobeScan Chairman Doug Miller commented: “America is the last place we would have expected to see such a sharp drop in trust in the free enterprise system. This is not good news for business.”

The results mean that a number of the world’s major emerging economies have now matched or overtaken the USA in their enthusiasm for the free market. The Chinese and Brazilians, 67 percent of whom regard the free market system as the best on offer, are now more positive about capitalism than Americans, while enthusiasm in India now equals that in the USA, with 59 percent rating the free market as the best system for the future.

Among the 20 countries polled in both 2009 and 2010, an average of 54 percent today rate the free market economy as the best economic system, unchanged from 2009.

Americans with incomes below $20,000 were particularly likely to have lost faith in the free market over the past year, with their support dropping from 76 percent to 44 percent between 2009 and 2010. American women have also become much less positive, with 52 percent backing the free market in 2010, down from 73 percent in 2009.

The poll was conducted by telephone in China and the US, and by telephone, in-person, or online in the 23 other countries between June 24 and September 18, 2010 by the international polling firm GlobeScan and its national partners. Before today’s public release, only clients of GlobeScan’s “Radar” reports have had access to these results. National results are considered accurate within +/- 3.0 to +/- 4.9 percent, 19 times out of 20.

GlobeScan Chairman Doug Miller added: “The poll suggest that American business is close to losing its social contract with average American families that has enabled it to prosper in the world. Inspired leadership will be needed to reverse this trend.”

Fieldwork was conducted in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Germany, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the USA. Interviews were conducted via face-to-face, by telephone, or online (Japan only) between June 24 and September 18, 2010. Polling was conducted by GlobeScan and its research partners in each country. Some urban-only surveying was conducted in certain developing countries, following generally accepted research standards in each country. The margin of error per country ranges from +/-3.0 to 4.9 percent, 19 times out of 20.

For more information about GlobeScan see www.GlobeScan.com

I’ve been absorbed in work, writing an article on how to start a worker coop, and fleeing the radiation cloud. Yes, I fled the initial plume of radiation from Japan that hit California on March 18th for a week and a half.

I used to work as a nuclear policy analyst in the Texas legislature, with a nonprofit, and with the US Department of Energy on “safer” nuclear waste storage, then in nuclear news analysis for international energy thinktank.

I can tell you that there is a media blackout of the radiation impact. What little media there is downplays the risk and makes ridiculous comparisons between chest x-rays, flights from SF to NY, and the serious risk we face by inhaling and ingesting radioactive particles that could easily lodge in our tissues and radiate us for the rest of our lives giving us all different kinds of serious cancers (in the case of cesium and other isotopes) and give us thyroid cancer in the case of iodine (particularly in children).

When I worked in this field I was exposed to cover-up after cover-up of the nuclear industry and the government’s own data. The nuclear industry had bought of most the higher level government officials and it owns most of the mainstream media.

That is not to say that I know we are being exposed to significant levels of radiation but it is quite clear that we do not know we are not. Certainly the risk after Chernobyl was drastically downplayed. Only hundreds of people would get cancer according to mainstream sources, now decades later the numbers reach beyond a million extra cancers. The EPA (which is not a beacon for truth telling on issues of environmental health) took down many of its radiation monitors the week the radioactive plume arrived for repair. They are also considering raising the safe levels of radiation standards.

We do know that there is now radioactive iodine and cesium in the rainwater and some kinds of foods and radioactive iodine in the drinking water from UC Berkeley’s Nuclear Engineering Department http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/UCBAirSampling. There was an article about this posted on BBC, which disappeared. It is most certainly censored in the US as it is a prime worry on many people’s minds, yet no news???

It is one thing to not want to be afraid, it is another to be blind to potential danger. At least admitting the potential danger we can take basic precautions.

What does this have to do with economics? EVERYTHING. As I drove through the deserts of Utah, I reevaluated my life. Have I acted with the utmost care and urgency that the care of our Earth and ourselves needs now? NO. I keep participating in the system that feeds nuclear power. I still pay taxes, though not much and only because they take it out of my tiny check each month, which goes towards nuclear power subsidies from the government. I still use power from the grid that is partially derived from nuclear energy. I still feed into an economic system that feeds corporations that consume and pollute our sacred mother Earth. I am urgently trying to create a new economic system that takes energy away from the bad and feeds it into the things that we value and care about.

I saw a movie a couple nights ago called Living Without Money and then gave a talk. The old woman in the film felt such intense urgency about not participating in this destructive system that she has tried to drop out and hasn’t used money for the last 14 years. This reminded me of a meeting of community members in West Texas where a nuclear waste dump was going to be built nearby over the largest aquifer in the country. They said “Let’s never use their energy again, let’s burn our energy bills and build wind power plants.” Today they are making that happen.

When will you feel the urgency to take drastic action? Do your kids have to get cancer? Do all the fish have to be gone first? Derek Jensen advocates blowing up dams and destroying other property that is implicated in irreversible environmental destruction. Maybe this isn’t the best way to deal with things although I appreciate his sense of urgency. Franklin Lopez who screened a film about him said one thing we can do is rebuild our local economy and local government. It’s the only scale where we can have significant impact. And if we withdraw our energy from the corporations and Feds we might just have a chance at winning this battle. But we really need everyone across the US to wake up and get serious about what is really important.

What can you do today? Will you just go back to work tomorrow, come home and watch the news until it depresses you enough to turn it off?

Drop out the dominant economic system as much as possible and tune in to help us build new healthier local economies. Invest locally and directly your time, energy, resources and money into making the transition to a sane economy. An economy that cares for the foundation of our existence- the Earth. One that cares for everyone – we are all interconnected. One where you move towards your true happiness and those around you. Join a transition town group and begin nonrenewable energy descent in your area. Start a timebank or local currency. Grow more food locally. Use human powered energy. Join Slow Money and your local credit union.

Each day of your life you make a choice to go along and watch the disasters unfold on the news or to stop now, stand up, and build the world we all wish we lived in.

By Cat Johnson
From Shareable.net
03.09.11

There’s something very cool happening in the workplace — people are re-claiming their lives. They’re creating a more humane work/life balance, they’re spending less time in the office, and, yet, their careers are thriving. How can this be? Two words: job sharing.

To best explain what job sharing is, let’s start with what it is not. It is not two people working part-time jobs in parallel. That’s just part-time work. Job sharing is two people, through shared responsibilities, identity, and accountability, occupying one position. They are a single unit, a team.

Laurie Cremona Wagner and Elaine Miller have been job-sharing, career partners for years. Throughout their career they have held several high-impact corporate positions and are currently Director of Marketing and Strategic Initiatives at EMC. The two women, both of whom have children, have been able to not only maintain, but further their careers while also having quality time to spend with their families. They have had such success with job sharing that, in 2008, they founded a Bay Area non-profit, Mission Job Share, to spread awareness and job-sharing resources.

“There’s no way that we would ever have had the kind of jobs we’ve had, that are really demanding, more than full-time positions, without job sharing,” says Cremona Wagner. “We’re not job sharing because we want to plateau our careers; we’re doing this because we want to accelerate and grow our careers.”

When thoughtfully executed, job sharing is a win for everyone involved — employees have the personal time that they need while maintaining their position in the company, and employers are able to retain high-performing individuals and glean the value of having two valuable (and not over-worked) people on their team.

And job sharing is not limited to the corporate world. Michelle Spahn, who currently shares a teaching position in Santa Cruz, Calif. emphasizes that job sharing benefits her not only on a personal level — the artist and web designer has plenty of time to spend on her creative pursuits — but on a professional level, as well. “When I started job sharing, my teaching got better,” she says. “When you work in isolation you don’t have anyone to bounce things off of. But with job sharing, our skills compliment and inspire each other.”

Cremona Wagner and Miller, through their work with Mission Job Share, have found that, with a little creative thinking, job sharing can be adapted to any work environment. “We could not find an area that a job share wouldn’t work,” Cremona Wagner says, listing doctors, nurses, and lawyers among some of the professions that have had successful job shares. “We just found that it doesn’t work for all people.”

A successful job-sharing situation requires organization, commitment, unselfishness, and seamless communication. Both Cremona Wagner and Spahn stress the need for both partners to be clear, open, and honest in communicating everything from workday details down to personal problems and frustrations when they arise. Both partners need to know exactly what’s going on; and employers need to know that the communication is being handled by the team, that they don’t have to say everything twice. “The more organized you are,” says Spahn, “the better the job share is going to work.”

It is also imperative that the team is seen as a single entity by co-workers, employers, and the partners themselves. “You have to be interested in how the team looks,” says Cremona Wagner. “If, for one second, you’re interested more in how you look than how the team looks, then there’s just disaster waiting to happen.”

Cremona Wagner and Miller have a joint e-mail, voice mail, calendar, and IM. They communicate several times throughout the week to keep each other up-to-speed on what’s happening. “If you have a conversation with one of us, you can pick up where you left off with the other,” says Cremona Wagner. They also take great measures to insure the well-being of their partnership and they stress the importance of being treated exactly equal. From salaries and bonuses to benefits and reviews, they are 100% a team. “It’s very much like choosing a life partner,” says CremonaWagner. “That’s how important they are.”

While some employers already have job-sharing options in place, others are unfamiliar with the idea and may need to be enlightened as to how the arrangement can benefit everyone.

Here are a few tips on pitching a job share to an employer:

Familiarity: When possible, choose a partner that you’ve already worked with and know that you are compatible with. It can work out to be randomly placed with someone, but the odds are much better if you and your partner choose each other. Hiring someone as a consultant is a good way to find out how you work together.

Do the Legwork: Before you pitch the job share, have the details worked out. What’s the breakdown of days going to be? Detail how everything, from early morning meetings to weekend e-mails, will be covered; stress the commitment the team has to making it a win situation for everyone; and breakdown how benefits could be divided (some companies will give 100% benefits to both partners). Like the job share itself, preparation and clear, detailed communication is the key to a successful pitch.

Toot Your Horn: Detail the successes you’ve had in working together. Highlight that, although you’re two different people, you have common values and a commitment to the organization, your career, and job sharing. As Spahn says, “If you can make it work, you can pave the road for other people.”

As people look to mix a little more living into their lives, and employers realized that 60-hour work weeks are just not productive, the job-share model makes a lot of sense. “It’s an amazingly valuable situation for the company and employee,” says Cremona Wagner. “I couldn’t recommend job sharing more highly.” She then adds, “And you can consider that you had this conversation with both of us.”

Resources:
See the original article for lots of good resources on this topic

Editor’s note: Global Exchange of San Francisco is initiating a similar campaign across the US called “Community Rights” to protect themselves from higher levels of government and corporations that use the government against environmental and human health harm.
And Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County, CA is asserting their community rights over local elections and local business.

http://blog.tenthamendmentcenter.com/2011/03/maine-town-declares-food-sovereignty-nullifies-conflicting-laws/

Written by: Chris Dixon

The Maine town of Sedgwick took an interesting step that brings a new dynamic to the movement to maintain sovereignty: Town-level nullification. Last Friday, the town passed a proposed ordinance that would empower the local level to grow and sell food amongst themselves without interference from unconstitutional State or Federal regulations. Beyond that, the passed ordinance would make it unlawful for agents of either the State or Federal government to execute laws that interfere with the ordinance.

Under the new ordinance, producers and processors are protected from licensure or inspection in sales that are sold for home consumption between them and a patron, at farmer’s market, or at a roadside stand. The ordinance specifically notes the right of the people to food freedom, as well as citing the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Maine Constitution in defending the rights of the people.

Local farmer and member of the National Family Farm Coalition Bob St. Peter noted “Rural working people have always had to do a little of this and a little of that to make ends meet. But up until the last couple generations, we didn’t need a special license or new facility each time we wanted to sell something to our neighbors. Small farmers and producers have been getting squeezed out in the name of food safety, yet it’s the industrial food that is causing food borne illness, not us.”

Also, ordinances similar to this one will be going before a vote in three other Maine towns: Penobscott, Brooksville, and Blue Hill.

The text of the “Local Food And Community Self-Governance Ordinance of 2011″, which was passed unanimously, can be found here.

The Food Sovereignty movement has been growing, as it gained a boost with the U.S. Senate bill S. 510: “The Food Safety Modernization Act.” Georgia, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Wyoming have introduced legislation that, if passed, would nullify Federal laws that unconstitutionally affect food that does not cross state lines. Maine Representative Walter Kumiega (D-Deer Isle) has also taken the lead in the Legislature for food freedom with L.D. 263, which would exempt people from licensing requirements when engaging in sales that are local, such as at farmer’s markets.

Chris is the state chapter coordinator for the Maine Tenth Amendment Center. He is also a writer for Maine Web News.

–
Christopher Waters | Entrepreneur · Organizer · Consultant | Gypsy Spirit Mission Inc.

by Georgia Kelly
from the Huffington Post
November 15, 2010

A few years ago, when former CA state legislator Tom Hayden suggested that Northern California should apply for observer status with the European Union, it was understood that our region had more in common with Europe than much of the rest of America. Widely recognized for its progressive politics, the Bay Area is also home to the largest number of worker-owned businesses in the country.

Though they receive little to no press, these models for 21st century business are still below the radar. Perhaps they are not dramatic enough (they are successful) or corrupt enough (no one is suing anyone), or exploitative enough (all worker-owners earn a living wage).

Inspired by the Mondragón Cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain, many of these local businesses have flourished for years and have developed a template that works in the US.

One of the better-known examples is the Alvarado St. Bakery, featured in Michael Moore’s film Capitalism: A Love Story, and located in Sonoma County. Alvarado St. was established 1981 by five people with roots in the 1970′s “Food for People, not for Profit” movement in San Francisco. Today, they employ more than 100 worker-owners in what has become a national business.

Alvarado Street uses whole grain and organic ingredients whenever possible and sells to natural food stores as well as large supermarkets that package Alvarado St. bread under their own labels.

Joseph Tuck, the CEO of Alvarado Street said that worker-owners’ salaries range between $57,000 and $63,000 a year. Clearly, the democratic model of worker ownership honors a substantial living wage. The highest salary approved in their system could reach 3 times the lowest salary, but no one is currently receiving that high a wage. With revenues of $24.6 million in 2009, Alvarado St. has proven that worker ownership thrives, even in an economic downturn.

Alvarado St. offers a robust medical plan that includes dental and vision. Workers pay $30 per month for a family plan and $10 per month for a single. Fourteen percent of Alvarado St. profits go into 401k plans for workers. They do not have to match the contributions.

San Francisco’s Rainbow Grocery, the largest worker-owned supermarket in California, won SF’s Bay Guardian 2010 award for best Bay Area grocery store. What began as a small collective in 1975 today employs 239 worker-owners. Kasper Koczab, who was Steering Committee Secretary at Rainbow and is now working for the Network of Bay Area Worker Coops, said that Rainbow was strictly worker-owned and not a consumer coop. One worker-owner equals one share and one vote. Rainbow Grocery has outgrown its premises three times and has had to move to larger quarters or add nearby space. Rainbow also offers an excellent healthcare plan that includes preventative care, fitness and even massage.

Representatives of the worker-owned businesses noted how difficult it is to get loans for these types of enterprises. When there is no designated owner, banks are reluctant to lend money. Consequently, Rainbow Grocery has paid cash for all of its expansions.

Worker-owned businesses even have a support group in the Bay Area, the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. Their stated purpose is to support the growth and development of worker-owned cooperatives. They sponsor workshops, conferences, resources and networking opportunities for new and established cooperatives. Melissa Hoover, the executive director of the federation, is also on the board of the Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives.

The five Arizmendi Bakeries, including the Cheeseboard in Berkeley, are famous for their pizzas, pastries and breads. Labeled “socialist scones” in a Salon.com article, the Arizmendi bakeries emerged from a study group that was learning about the Mondragón Cooperatives in Spain. Father Don Jose Maria Arizmendi, the founder of the Mondragón Cooperatives, inspired the name.

Hoover said that the mission of the Arizmendi coops “is to create as many living wage jobs as possible and to offer significant opportunities for personal and professional development.” With more than 100 worker-owners, the Arizmendi Association is planning to expand their businesses beyond bakeries, maybe even branching out into finance.

While the Bay Area may have much in common with Europe, we have also been raised with the same competitive values as other Americans. We value innovation and creativity and these qualities are needed in both private businesses and cooperatives. Clearly, worker-owned businesses in the Bay Area are competitive with private businesses and are highly creative and innovative. What sets cooperatives apart is their focus on sharing the wealth, supporting each other, and responsibly living within limits on a planet with limits.

For those who claim worker-ownership can only develop in countries sympathetic to socialist ideas or cultures where cooperation is highly valued, the success of worker-owned businesses in the Bay Area and in many other parts of the US demonstrate that people who are motivated by sharing the wealth and creating jobs can create coops anywhere. The resources listed below can help those interested in learning more about worker-owned businesses:

www.usworker.coop
www.arizmenibakery.org
www.alvaradostreetbakery.com
www.rainbowgrocery.org
Video presentations of the people cited in this article
An entry on the Mondragón Cooperatives

The Bay Area Community Exchange presents John Robb, author of Brave New War and originator of the concept of “open source warfare” which predicted many of the patterns of conflict observed in the recent revolutions sweeping North Africa and the Middle East. Now he turns his attention from the future of war to the future of peace and presents the “open source venture” and his related startup, PictureThis, done in collaboration with bettermeans of Oakland.

Read his blog at globalguerrillas.typepad.com and his coverage of the ongoing revolutions at twitter.com/johnrobb.

Seats are limited; please reserve one at johnrobbatsfbace.eventbrite.com (even if you wish to make no donation, so that we can still assure you a place).

Donations will be accepted to cover event expenses and to fund BACE operations.

By Mira Luna
From Shareable.net
2/27/11

If you think you’re covered by health insurance, think again. According to a 2007 study in the American Journal of Medicine, illness and medical bills caused 62% of all bankruptcies and most of those people were insured and middle class. Meanwhile, “the five largest health-insurance companies racked up combined profits of $12.2 billion, up 56 percent over 2008”, according to a report by Health Care for American Now based on SEC filings.

In CNN’s analysis of the Fortune 500, “The star of 2009 is undoubtedly health care. The sector’s earnings jumped to an all-time high of $92 billion. Health-care earnings rose by $23 billion, or 33%…from two groups, one surprising — medical insurers — and the other more predictable, pharmaceuticals. For the drug industry, it’s as if the recession never happened. The sector’s earnings surged by one-third to $64 billion.”

Three years ago I learned this the hard way. I contracted Lyme disease and coinfections at the peak of my health, right after my employer had closed down, leaving me without health insurance. At the last minute, I was able to get expensive guaranteed health insurance that would cover my new preexisting condition…or so I thought. I fought repeatedly with my insurance company for coverage of my life-saving medicines. They refused to pay for any expensive treatment by denying that it was medically necessary – I could probably survive without it. My health never really improved on the cheaper, less effective drugs they sometimes covered. I was in and out of the hospital, hit with huge co-pays and unable to work due to my disability for years, leading me to declare Chapter 7 medical bankruptcy.

“We waste one-third of every health care dollar on insurance bureaucracy and profits while two million people go bankrupt annually and we leave 45 million uninsured,” says Dr. Quentin Young, national coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program. Even government programs to help the uninsured often leave people stranded, especially the middle class. When I asked Healthy San Francisco, a municipal health plan for the poor about my condition, they said, “We don’t cover chronic Lyme disease.”

In addition, none of the alternative healthcare treatments that helped my body’s own healing process and significantly eased my symptoms were covered by my insurance. Alternative healthcare is often less expensive than conventional medicine and is much better for preventing illness. With its proven treatment value and the comparative rising cost of conventional medicine, one third of all Americans now use alternative medicines and tend to visit alternative healthcare practitioners more often than conventional doctors. Alternative healthcare has been at least half of the recipe to my recovery.

While the government fumbles over legislation to provide this basic safety net that most developed countries guarantee all their citizens, innovative grassroots projects have jumped in to fill the gap. One such project in San Francisco, Adaptogen, that I have volunteered at is a monthly community alternative healthcare clinic providing unlimited visits to professional healers like naturopaths, herbalists, and bodyworkers for a sliding scale admission fee. The event offers tea service, healthy meals, and a talk on alternative healthcare.

Charlotte Maxwell Clinic, where I volunteered for a year, offers free complementary care to low income women with cancer, such as bodywork, acupuncture, herbs and supplements. Many women I massaged there tried to give me tips of money and food in exchange, despite being poor- some were so poor that they were homeless or living out of their cars while receiving chemo and radiation therapies. One terminally ill nun I massaged was so grateful for pain relief, she said she’d put in a good word for me. As a patient, I frequent Circle Community Acupuncture in San Francisco, which provides low cost acupuncture in a communal setting with a social justice mission, linked to similar clinics of the same model across the country.

The Karma Clinic (Oakland, CA), The Gifting Tree (Ashland, OR) and Volunteers for Health Care Today (Mount Shasta, CA) all offer health services through a network of local volunteer providers with the expectation that their communities will support them with gifts to continue providing service and their nonpaying clients will “pay it forward” by volunteering for their community when they are well. The Volunteers for Health Care website explains “we appeal to patients receiving free care to volunteer their skills, knowledge, and energy in your community – to “Pay It Forward”to others in need rather than paying it “back,” in “cash” to those not as needy. My own Lyme specialist doctor continued to see me on the pay it forward model after I ran out of money so I could continue my treatment and keep doing my activist work, as did several bodyworkers and a naturopathic doctor.

Taking the “pay it forward” model to another level, some low income clinics have integrated with local Timebanks to provide more access. Four low income health centers in St. Louis (Grace Hill Neighborhood Centers) use their local Timebank (MORE) and two health clinics in Portland, Maine (Turn the Tide Health Collaborative and True North Clinic) use Hour Exchange Portland to allow lower income clients to earn service credits called time dollars by volunteering to help community members and nonprofits. Healthcare is the most used service on Hour Exchange Portland and offers 30 different kinds of health services. One hour of childcare or community gardening can be exchanged on the Timebank for one hour of healthcare consultation. However, clients don’t have to earn first to spend, allowing them to join when they are sick and give back when they are well again.

South Korea has a similar indirect reciprocity system that provides conventional healthcare to thousands of low income patients through Hanabat LETS (Local Employment Trading System). One Hanabat LETS organizer noted that they have no trouble with “freeloading”. In fact, in most of these systems, including the one I coordinate, called Bay Area Community Exchange, people have more trouble receiving gifts than giving. Orion River Exchange in Vermont recently got a three year, one million dollar grant from the federal government to facilitate mutual aid care for the sick and disabled elderly. In Japan, the Fureaui Kippu time exchange is part of the national social security system, where able-bodied people provide care to the sick and elderly in exchange for care for their parents or themselves.

Many of the models mentioned above provide a wide array of outpatient alternative and conventional care, though not usually hospital or emergency care. Ithaca Health Alliance is working to change that through a nonprofit community fund available for minor emergencies, as well as a low cost community provider network. Their health fund was challenged under for profit insurance laws, but maintains they are a nonprofit mutual aid organization. The roots of this program, according to its staff, are in the Amish tradition of community members pitching in for each other’s healthcare costs when in need.The Old Order Amish do not typically carry private commercial health insurance, and about two-thirds of the Amish in Lancaster County participate in Church Aid, an informal self-insurance plan. The Amish have asserted and been approved by the government to opt out of national healthcare.

I wouldn’t have survived without the help of my community and alternative medicine. We need more locally based, community-driven medicine with design, feedback and participation from doctors and patients, not corporate executives that see life value in terms of short-term, quarterly profits. As the national government flounders, communities should pick up the reins, cut out the middlemen, and start implementing these simple and low cost local solutions.

From ξFin

With the EFF’s announcement that they would being accepting BitCoin donations, the alternative money community began to take a larger interest. I certainly did, and found that there are good and bad things about this form of money. In the end, BitCoins create a perverse incentive to consume energy to “create money.” Here is why.

What is a bitcoin and how do you create one? — A BitCoin is created whenever a user’s computer churns though a SHA-256 hash repeatedly from a hash until it results in a number less than a given number. Statistically, hash functions are supposed to have very unpredictable content–that is what makes them secure. Whenever a BitCoin client churns through a hash starting from a given number issued to the network, it burns CPU time (and thus energy). The probability of getting a hash to be “less than” a given 256-bit number is quite low. Successfully determining how many SHA-256 rounds it takes for a particular nonce to hash to a number lower than some value is called the “proof of work.” If while your computer receives a new “block” from the network (meaning another computer successfully won some BitCoins), your computer must start over with a new nonce.

How much energy does it require to mine the average BitCoin? — With my “older computer,” the hash rate averages around 2000 khps on a microprocessor going full-bore consuming about 65W. The current difficulty shows that a new BitCoin can be mined by a computer at this speed on average every 113 days. So, 113 days × 24 hours = 2712 hours. 2712 hours × 65W = 176280 Wh or 176.28 KWh. The average cost of a KWh in the United States is 10.45 cents. So we’re looking at spending $18.42 to create 50 BTC (at the moment). So the electrical cost is about $0.36/BTC. BitCoins are trading now already at values below this, so I can only assume that they’re being sold at a loss or others may be externalizing the costs of electricity and not taking this into account. If you were to pay your electric bill in BTC, you would have a positive feedback loop (always a bad thing) that consumes more energy to earn money to pay back the power company. It doesn’t matter how efficient your processors are—you’re spending more money to make money.

Now I understand the motive to why BitCoin is like this: it is to prevent run-away inflation– the number of BitCoins that will ever be available to the world is limited to X million. If BitCoins are lost due to corruption or data loss, they can never be recovered. (Clue in the Greifer who writes a trojan horse that seeks out to destroy unprotected wallet.dat files!) While the BitCoin FAQ claims that it is a misconception to say that BitCoins gain their value via the electricity used to generate them, as there is no other way to feasibly generate a BitCoin other than the mass consumption of electricity, I don’t agree with this assertion. Once a BitCoin is generated, you still have the problem of a market that still must determine their “value”–does it cost you 25 BTC for a sandwich or 2.5 BTC for a sandwich? With an absolute fixed quantity of BTC to be created (until about the year 2140) and a specification that says that BTC can be subdivided down to the 0.00000001ths (not that any client supports this at this time, most mandate the limit of hundreths of a BTC are the smallest subdivisions) we have a currency that will devalue itself almost as easily as the Zimbabwean dollar, except by using progressively smaller and smaller subdivisions of a BTC. Should we be using BitCoin 10-decades from now, we’ll still reminisce how it used to be that 10 BTC would have bought you a nice meal, and so on.

So what use is BitCoin? — BitCoin is driving a lot of people to think about the problems of creating transactions that cannot be interfered with by third parties, without fees, etc. The “Timestamp Server” concept and distribution of publicly “spent” transactions (to prevent double-spending) is still a valid concept. Anonymity in transactions is still something desirable, but I don’t believe that you can achieve it via near-anonymous digital signatures online.

In the end, the artificial creation of the limited number of possible BitCoins via this “proof of work” (doing millions of SHA-256 hashes over and over) is madness. All you really need is to have “proof of limitation” without the politics—was the market restrained from creating too much money too fast? BitCoin’s use of a procedural solution is the wrong track when all you need do is define a constraint via a formula and apply it as needed over time, instead of everyone continuously spinning a hash function and wasting electricity. Keep the transactions public, cryptographically sign them, and audit them with a money model and you’ll be able to keep much of what is good about BitCoin. And of course, use a “commodity” the people can intuitively understand, something like… time.

for more info about Bitcoin

Press release from the USFWC Board stating our solidarity with the movement in Wisconsin
USFWC contact: Melissa Hoover, (415) 309-5983, melissa@usworker.coop

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

US Federation of Worker Cooperatives Supports Public Sector Workers’ Right to Collective Bargaining

The United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC) stands in solidarity with public workers protesting the State of Wisconsin’s Budget Repair Bill to protect their right to collective bargaining. The USFWC is a national grassroots membership organization of and for worker cooperatives, other democratic workplaces, and the organizations that support the growth and continued development of worker cooperatives.

John McNamara, president of the USFWC Board and worker-owner at Union Cab Cooperative of Madison said, “We are at Ground Zero of the labor movement right now. The battle over public sector unions and their right to collectively bargain is our struggle. What happens in Wisconsin will help change the course of debate in this country that will prevent the Shock Capitalism advocates from operating.”

US Federation Executive Director Melissa Hoover states: “Worker cooperatives are historically and currently part of the labor movement. We promote the idea of democracy–not just in the workplace, but in the labor union structure and in our civic life. We support the workers of Wisconsin and internationally. Corporate handouts by governments cannot be paid for by working people.”

Two of the most basic principles followed by worker cooperatives worldwide are ‘democratic member control’ and ‘member economic participation.’ As institutions of economic democracy, worker cooperatives support political democracy and the rights of all workers to engage in the political process. The USFWC stands against this “smoke screen” to attack workers, sell off state assets, and destroy the ability of workers to engage in the political process, and encourages its members and allies to contact their legislators to oppose the “repair” bill.

For more on the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives: www.usworker.coop. For more on worker cooperatives and their guiding principles: http://www.ica.coop/coop/principles.html

Incumbent Joe Moore was re-elected Tuesday by his constituents in the 49th ward, edging out challenger Brian White. As of 10:37 p.m. with all results in, Moore won with 73 percent of the vote.The 49th ward, which has roughly the same boundaries as the Rogers Park neighborhood, saw slightly over 43 percent turnout in Tuesday’s municipal election. Moore was first elected as alderman in 1991.

See:http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/chicagos-1.3-million-experiment-in-democracy