Me and the Daily Kos (DTR)

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Tuesday September 15, 2009 · 6:01 PM PDT

2009/09/15 · 18:01

Please pardon my recent silence. The past two weeks have been a wild combination of school starting up, taking a little vacation to my previous residence of Olympia, and several days incommunicado while on a road trip to the Western Worker Co-op Conference, hosted at an off-the-grid worker-owned resort called Breitenbush Hot Springs. No phone or email is lovely, until it ends.

I have also been procrastinating, because this is an awkward post to write: A few months ago, I started cross-posting at the Daily Kos, in response to a high concentration of inaccurate statements by bloggers there, on the subject of healthcare co-ops. My Wordpress blog is fine, but doesn't seem to get much traffic, and certainly not any vigorous exchanges of comments.

At first, my Daily Kos posts were pretty focused on the co-op controversy in health care reform, but I gradually started including some of my other posts about my pet topic of how people are collectively improving their situations.

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Best bike fix ever!(!!)

andrewmcleod

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Thursday September 03, 2009 · 9:15 AM PDT

2009/09/03 · 09:15

To begin, a confession: I do not take very good care of my bicycle. I tend to let problems go on way too long, figuring that as long as the thing still rolls, I might as well not get my hands dirty. As a result, my old beater has gotten more and more beaten.

But last weekend, I could not ignore my back tire any longer. The thing was totally bald, and totally coming apart on the sidewalls. There was no doubt that it would soon fail me, and possibly in a very dangerous way. I decided it was finally time to check out the Sacramento Bike Kitchen.

I've known about this volunteer-run bike shop for a while now, and have been waiting for the right moment when I remember to go visit during their somewhat limited hours.

The kitchen's goals " include providing low-cost transportation, self-sufficiency through bicycle maintenance, and safety through education." The kitchen is volunteer run, uses pretty much all used parts cannibalized from donated bikes. These are mosly stored in a huge old library card catalog with drawers labeled "front fork axles" and "bearings" and "rear suspension" and so on. They also have some new items, like patches, lubes, and bearings.

I have to say there was a bit of chaotic magic going on.

andrewmcleod

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Tuesday September 01, 2009 · 1:50 PM PDT

2009/09/01 · 13:50

I need to clarify my previous post, on the cheery subject of banking industry shenanigans.

It seems that I was a little sloppy, apparently not putting enough energy into clearly making and stating my case. In particular, I failed to distinguish my writing from the "economic apocalypse" blog genre, and apparently came across as making a claim that the banking industry is about to collapse and take down the rest of the economy and we're all going to die. And, by extension, that it is all Obama's and/or Bush's fault.

There's a lot of such writing these days, and I wouldn't rule out a pretty grim economic scenario. However, I don't know enough about what tricks the Fed and its international banking conspiracy friends have up their sleeves to make any sort of informed prediction beyond observing that there is a pretty strong precedent set by the eventual collapse of every single empire in history. And we are all indeed going to die...eventually.

So why did I write that little rant? Why not just stick to my usual approach of focusing on the really cool ways that people are organizing cooperatively to lessen the impact of whatever negativity flows out of the banking industry and government?

andrewmcleod

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Saturday August 29, 2009 · 8:05 AM PDT

2009/08/29 · 08:05

This morning I found a cute little article about a very non-cute topic. It turns out the FDIC's bank insurance fund dropped 20% in the 2nd quarter, to a rather alarming balance of $10.4 billion. What the article failed to mention is that since the 2nd quarter ended in June, banks have been dropping like flies - 19 in July and 12 in the first three weeks of August. Sometimes four or five per week.

andrewmcleod

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Tuesday August 25, 2009 · 2:32 PM PDT

2009/08/25 · 14:32

I went downtown for an early dose of Ted this morning, and got an wake-up call about the danger of incentives, those carrots and sticks that supposedly make the world go round but actually are an affront to nature.

I have been aware of this Ted thing for a while; people give "the talk of their lives" on all sorts of topics for 18 minutes or less, but just last week I got hooked in a little. Our first talk was a short bit on the brains and genes of psycho killers – a nice cheery start to my day.

andrewmcleod

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Sunday August 23, 2009 · 4:50 PM PDT

2009/08/23 · 16:50

I never wanted to be stuck in the middle of this argument. When I started blogging about the co-op plan, I thought it would be a flash in the pan and then I would be able to get back to happier topics like rural transit and local food distribution.

My very favorite thing about cooperatives is that they provide a way for people who share a need and vision to work together, rather than wasting their energy trying to convince those who just don't want to be convinced. I believe that this is why the ideal structure for a society's healthcare system would be based on numerous cooperatives, with government playing a minimal oversight role: Rather than constantly fighting in Congress over what services should or shouldn't be included (and to which sort of family members), we could simply organize with those who share our basic values.

I'll admit to some bias toward cooperatives, but a key part of my work as a co-op development advisor is to know when a co-op isn't likely to work. And the more I look at the healthcare reform mess, the more discouraged I become. This discouragement is not from any shortcoming of the co-op model - indeed, I keep finding evidence that co-ops are more likely to succeed than the public plan - but because the overall quality of the debate has bogged down in orthodoxy and bias.

andrewmcleod

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Thursday August 20, 2009 · 3:08 PM PDT

2009/08/20 · 15:08

Gas is creeping back up above $3.00/gallon, and this is bad news for everyone. But nobody feels the pain as much as people living in lightly-populated rural areas. When businesses shut down, it means that people must drive for dozens of miles to find basic goods like groceries, or even to work at minimum-wage jobs. Cuts in urban bus routes make it difficult to get around the city, but cuts in rural transit can make reliable movement impossible.

Gas prices are not as bad as they were last year, so this is no longer in the news. But the overall level of economic trouble makes the rural transportation crisis more dire. We are not far from seeing full-blown collapse of rural economies, which has already begun in some areas. City folks may be tempted to write this off as a consequence of country folks' decision to live in the middle of nowhere, but this issue will affect us all. Even setting aside our reliance on the agricultural and resource-based economies, rural collapse will drive people into already-struggling cities.

andrewmcleod

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Wednesday August 19, 2009 · 11:11 AM PDT

2009/08/19 · 11:11

There are two debates on healthcare reform: The first debate is on the merits of various proposals, and how they will impact people outside of the notorious Beltway. The second debate is about motivations of the individuals and organizations pushing for those various proposals, often spiked with questionable polling data. This is primarily a political battle generating more heat than light.

The first debate is confusing enough, with the House and Senate having cooked up three conflicting proposals before leaving town for a summer break of often hostile meetings with constituents. It is quite impossible to tell where they now stand on many of the issues, although many have made absolute statements for or against the public plan. Some have also drawn lines in the sand regarding cooperatives, even though very little is known about what the Senate Finance Committee has in mind, and some congressional leaders have displayed little knowledge of the concept.

andrewmcleod

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Monday August 17, 2009 · 4:10 PM PDT

2009/08/17 · 16:10

BenGoshi points out a very interesting web site assembled to help members of electric co-ops network around their respective legal struggles with their cooperatives.

This raises a point that has often been deployed to argue against cooperative-based health care reform: Co-ops are not perfect. They sometimes become big and unresponsive, especially after the founding generation passes on. That is exactly what happened with electric cooperatives, which were mostly organized during the first half of the 20th century.

The thing to remember is that there is no perfect system. Anything we do is going to get messed up, and what we need is a system of accountability through which people can organize to draw the system back toward its ideals.

andrewmcleod

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Thursday August 13, 2009 · 2:35 PM PDT

2009/08/13 · 14:35

Humboldt Creamery, an 80 year-old organic milk producers cooperative, has been bought in a bankruptcy auction, and will now be folded into a major California milk producer. It is the end of an era.

This story first developed last spring, when the co-op's CEO left town with the books in severe disarray and the business bankrupt. They put up a good fight in trying to keep cooperative ownership, but ultimately ran out of options; a community as small and remote as Ferndale (pop. 1382 in 2000, 260 miles north of San Francisco) just didn't have sufficient equity to preserve local ownership, especially after a previous drive to increase community investment ended badly (an FBI investigation continues and legal objections have been raised).

andrewmcleod

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Tuesday August 11, 2009 · 8:26 PM PDT

2009/08/11 · 20:26

The past week saw an increasingly disturbing trend of disruptions at events related to healthcare reform. It got to the point that today's news included a mention that President Obama's town hall meeting was NOT disrupted (it went on to note that Sen Arlen Specter was booed and then caught up in a shouting match at his own meeting). Egad.

The focus of these conflicts seems to be around what the government is and isn't going to do, and it seems to be due to misinformation about "death panels" and people being forced to quit their insurance and take a policy from the government. Misinformation is bad, and when it is used to manipulate people into disrupting civil discourse, it is really bad. Of course, it is also really good copy, so the media has been all over it.

andrewmcleod

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Thursday August 06, 2009 · 5:25 PM PDT

2009/08/06 · 17:25

I just returned from the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy, a gathering of about 150 brave souls doing good work. I'm very inspired, although somewhat scatterbrained from all the new leads and ideas.

Without getting into much detail, I had an excellent time in Pittsburgh. It is a beautiful (although gritty) city, with an amazing history, amazing geography, and amazing architecture. It had a rough couple of decades, but seems to be bouncing back quite nicely. One of the more intriguing developments is a local trend of repurposing big old buildings, such as the Mattress Factory art gallery and the Church Brewpub. They also have crazy sandwiches. I could go on and on, but I would rather zoom out a bit and discuss some of the cooperative projects that I learned about during my time among people who are creating a democratic economy out of the ruins of industrial capitalism.

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Me and the Daily Kos (DTR)

Best bike fix ever!(!!)

The sky is not (yet) falling

Here comes the next bank bailout

No more giant carrots!

Healthcare debate feels pointless

Sustainable rural transit

Escape from the Beltway

Corruption is everywhere

Death of a cooperative

Meanwhile, outside the healthcare bigtop...

The Rust Belt shines