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Small-Mart: The New Revolution for the LOCAL |
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By Eric Rumble
This is a fine piece I discovered on the web as well as in Adbusters. He draws a bridge between what is wrong with globalization and with the solutions. His research takes him to Michelle Long, Michael Shuman, David Korten, Sustainable Solutions and BALLE.
It’s no secret to most of us that the corporate flagpoles encroaching our streetscapes and city outskirts represent conquest, not community. But at first, the sprawling, single-file wave of neon logos and beaming signs trumpeting fast food, discount stores, super-centers, and drive-thru convenience seemed part of an inescapable gentrification – evidence of an elaborate, thriving local economy. Over time though, it’s become clear that all of the ensuing bells and whistles have been drowning out a profound lie that these ubiquitous retail outposts are the mark of prosperity.
The stark reality of corporate expansion and consolidation is more and more familiar: once-bustling downtowns rendered derelict; once-busy commercial warehouses abandoned; once-plentiful resources pillaged; once-promised jobs gradually axed. Perhaps more fatefully, something as socially innate as shopping for food staples has been remade as a pre-rehearsed chore, part of an anemic cycle rather than a nourishing, age-old ritual.
But consumers are starting to take back their territory and traditions. To quote activist and author Michael Shuman’s The Small-Mart Revolution – a veritable blueprint for returning the power of the free market to the masses, published last year: “We are now witnessing an epochal struggle between two dramatically different visions of capitalism, the outcome of which will define many interesting and important years of history to come.” Shuman describes the incumbent vision as one propelled by the “there is no alternative” logic of modern economic developers, the callous creators of a status quo that pours a good portion of most local communities’ wealth into the coffers of absentee owners and shareholders. Left short-changed and disengaged in an age when sustainability issues are rushing to the fore, many progressive communities are building an alternative economic template on the basic premise of “local ownership and import substitution.”
In the US, this new vision of capitalism – essentially, choosing Mom & Pop over the Big Box – is rapidly taking shape through the collective efforts of an organization that Shuman helped co-found in 2001, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, or BALLE (livingeconomies.org). Hatched by overlapping members of other community activism groups, BALLE aims to mobilize and engage small-business owners and civic leaders to create a more humane and sustainable local economy by sharing resources, communication tools and strategies. BALLE organizes itself in individual towns, cities and communities by aligning retailers and services of all shapes and sizes – provided they’re autonomously run by locals in a given area – to ensure and guide one another’s insulated success and sustainable development.
As Shuman points out when interviewed, much of the national group’s progress has come through concentrating on being “advocates for local business and local economies, and not wast[ing] our time attacking global business.” In five years, more than 40 independent organizations from 18 states and two Canadian provinces have joined BALLE and begun crafting – in many cases, fortifying – a local living economy. Concurrently, research from a handful of US cities has shown that locally-owned and operated businesses are consistently better at re-circulating money into the local economy than chain stores. (The famous Andersonville Study found that local businesses in a Chicago neighborhood made 70 percent more local economic impact per square foot than chains.)
“Historically, at least in the US, small businesses have been very conservative,” Shuman explains. “They are the mainstay of the Republican Party….And they have been represented in the political sphere by a bunch of organizations that, at the end of the day, did not do a very good job of segregating their interests from those of larger global corporations.”
“The deep issue is democracy,” explains David Korten, author of The Great Turning and When Corporations Rule the World, who also serves with Shuman on BALLE’s board. “Do we really believe that power should be rooted in people and community – decentralized – or should it be centralized either in government or in large corporations? This is where I have a lot of problems with certain lines of libertarians that think any power in government is bad, but no concentration of power in any corporation is too much.”
This sanctioned power imbalance could create huge obstacles and potential disasters. The spike in food contamination and bacterial outbreaks in 2006 is particularly ominous given the massive mechanization and centralization of the American food system since the ’60s – leaving a country of 300 million’s beef supply, for example, mostly processed by a meager 13 slaughterhouses. Communities suffering the unprecedented effects of climate change have little control over the major industrial sectors (fossil fuel extraction, electricity, mass manufacturing, etc.) that desperately need to be overhauled in the wake of a global ecological crisis.
“The thing that’s really going to drive this process over the long-term,” says Korten of the movement towards local living economies, “is a growing awareness of the consequences of a combination of peak oil, global climate change and a collapsing US dollar resulting from our unsustainable trade deficit. Each one of these individually will force a reordering of the economic incentives away from global supply chains to local supply chains, and particularly in areas of food and energy.” Shuman expands on this sentiment in The Small Mart Revolution, arguing that the inefficiencies in global production and distribution, the rising cost of energy, the looming decline of the US dollar, the larger trend towards delivery of services instead of goods, and a general shift in business ethics are all developments that favor local economies. And on the ground in some BALLE chapters, the momentum they’re describing is already taking hold.
Backed by the Santa Fe Alliance in New Mexico, a loyalty and debit card program (locals-care.com) was launched last fall, wherein cardholders get points for keeping money in the local economy (redeemable later at the same businesses where they’re earned), and a percentage of all spending is donated to the non-profit organization of the shopper’s choice. Within its first three months, almost 100 businesses had enlisted, and $15,000 had been raised by over 400 shoppers seizing on the concept. In Bellingham, Washington, the city utility companies had tried for five years to convince businesses and households to switch to sun, wind and converted methane power. Within two months of Sustainable Connections’ (the local BALLE group) joining the effort in September, business participation in the program tripled – and their goal is now to become the nation’s number-one community for green power usage.
“We didn’t invent organic farming, or green building, or any of these things,” says Michelle Long, executive director of Sustainable Connections. “We have members who have been doing these things for decades behind the scenes, because they thought it was the right thing to do. But now there does seem to be this kind of tipping point, this mainstream awareness that’s increasing … there seems to be growing consensus, and recognition of the urgency, and real places for entrepreneurs to step in and attempt to solve problems, because we need to reexamine how we consume energy and build homes and shop and grow our food.”
Reprinted from Adbusters
(www.adbusters.org )
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