posted 7 June 2008 by Paula | link to this
tags: capital, corporations, profits, wealth
Ran Prieur has an encouraging entry at his blog this week. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Ran’s blog, he both lives and writes outside the “consensus trance” and his blog is something of a hub for innovative social thinkers. So I was especially encouraged to see him rethinking the dogma that corporations and profits are automatically evil:
But I have been thinking about corporate evil, mostly because of these two articles: A freelance lifestyle in a corporate workplace is about a radical new workplace environment where workers can do whatever they want as long as they get the job done, and of course they get the job done better than in the old model where they’re degraded and micromanaged. And Comcast Tests a New Bandwidth Black List is about the new trend of punishing people who get too much use out of the internet, even though they don’t seem to be harming people who use it less, or preventing internet providers from profiting. Comcast is only pissing off the geeks here, which is bad business.
Both of these articles refute the idea that corporations = profit = evil. Both Comcast’s decision, and the normal hellish workplace environment, are examples of evil interfering with profit. So if corporations are simply profit machines, where does the evil come from? It comes from humans! Humans who have been abused and controlled themselves can’t stand to see other humans be happy and free, so they perpetuate the crushing workplace environment. And humans whose job is just to make their company profitable become demonically possessed by the spirit of profit, and it’s no longer enough for the company to make a profit overall — it has to make a profit from every individual customer. You see the same thing when credit card companies charge an extra fee to customers who pay off their balance every month. This is not corporate nature — this is human nature using corporate nature as an excuse. And remember that it was humans who designed corporations in the first place to take more than they give with perfect indifference to external costs.
I think capitalism, in its most fundamental sense, is simply just the flow of “capital” through a given system, and “capital” is pretty much anything at all that flows through a system: energy “capital,” information “capital,” social “capital,” human “capital.” The freer the flow, the more the system benefits, and can count this benefit as “wealth” and an increasingly free flow as “wealth creation.” Restricting the flow chokes off wealth creation and impoverishes the system.
Corporations, and the global monetary system, are both systems designed to choke off flow. These are akin to pinching closed a garden hose until a bubble forms and eventually bursts. The person pinching it closed thinks he/she is amassing wealth for him or herself in the form of the bubble, but in fact all the interrelated systems are impoverished by this act. All the elements in the system, including the pinching person, would be much wealthier if the flow were not restricted. This is why open-source projects and companies with politically free cororate cultures are so much more productive, innovative, and (dare I say it?) profitable than traditional corporations.
The whole problem boils down to a matter of tunnel-vision: the person pinching the garden hose can’t see that he or she is part of, and supported by, the wider network of systems impoverished by the lack of water flowing through the garden hose. No one is separate from the natural systems of Earth and the social systems of our species.
I don’t include natural resources among those things that can flow through human economic systems, because ecosystems already exist in the highest state of wealth any system can achieve: everything flows, and nothing is wasted; choke points become the basis for new capital flows. They are our model for wealth creation. For example, a field that has been tilled to extinction can be brought back with a modest investment of compost capital, nutrient-fixing seeds capital, and time; in the same way, an impoverished neighborhood can also be made wealtheir with a modest investment of information capital, wealth-fixing capital (perhaps a community currency), and time. The problem in both instances is that too many people think restricting flows within these systems is what creates wealth, so neither ever has the chance to achieve free capital flows.
And I think the political left is complicit with the political right to make this happen, because while the right obviously wants to harvest everything it can from everywehre and keep the profits to itself, thereby restricting flow, the left shuns capital and capitalism in all its forms and discourages even learning about it, thereby restricting flow. Neither political view can see past the garden hose, or understands that the systems are all interconnected. 
posted 4 June 2008 by Paula | link to this
tags: blog carnival, carnival of the localists
The next Carnival of the Localists edition will publish on June 16. Submissions deadline is June 13 at 5:00 p.m. Eastern time. If you’d like to submit an entry, head over to Blog Carnival and fill in the little form. To find out more about this blog carnival, check out the Carnival of the Localists home page.
posted 1 June 2008 by Paula | link to this
tags: blog carnival, carnival of the localists, local food, localvore, locavore
Greetings everyone! My apologies for neglecting to announce this edition of the Carnival. What can I say, been very busy of late. But in any event, without further ado, welcome to the June 2, 2008 edition of Carnival of the Localists!
Paula presents Infrastructure Issues in Vermont posted at Local Preference, saying, "...infrastructure problems are IMO one of the primary reasons the local foods movement remains niche. But these problems also offer great opportunities for anyone looking to drop out of the rat race and earn a living doing something positive."
Hannah presents The Purloined Letter: Eating Local posted at The Purloined Letter, saying, "Inspired by the bounty of shining produce at the farmer's market, we had our first strictly-all-local meal of the season..."
valereee presents Linwood Sausage Company posted at Cincinnati Locavore, saying, "Handmade artisanal sausage in Cincinnati OH."
That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of
carnival of the localists
using our
carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our
blog carnival index page.
posted 27 May 2008 by Paula | link to this
tags: business, buy local, entrepreneurs, localvore, locavore
Here’s an absolutely fantastic idea out of Dartmouth, England (shown on the map): a full line of local products carried through a convenience store.
The line of products is called Love the Flavour. Food and Drink Devon, a local food association out of the county of Devon, England, where Dartmouth is located, uses “Love the Flavour” as its brand name to market local producers’ goods. The line will be offered at a Spar shop — evidently like a vastly upscale version of the US’s ubiquitous 7-11, complete with the gas pumps outside and 24/7 hours but which also offers things like (gasp!) fresh produce, meats, and wines.
This is something I have wondered about often. Whenever I need to go to a convenience store, I always hit Lykens Market in Bellefonte (PA), which is like an extended convenience store in that it, too, has a selection of cold cuts, produce, and other things at very reasonable prices, though I doubt if any of it is produced locally (however, the milk is from Schneider’s, which is still in PA). Every time I go there I think about how perfect the place would be for distributing local goods, and that doing so could potentially give it a sales boost since it is competing with a Weis Market just up the road.
What I hadn’t thought of is the possibility of branding the local goods and setting up a franchise specifically targeting convenience stores. This is a stroke of genius on the part of Food and Drink Devon — a branded franchise would consolidate local goods and make them easier to identify, distributing through convenience stores would create a year-round market for producers, and solving the logistics issues would create a local-foods infrastructure resilient enough to compete against big-box grocery stores — especially since the cost of long-distance shipping is already driving some shoppers to seek out local goods that have lower shipping costs. And if distribution occurred through a regional convenience store chain, so much the better for the local economy.
For the full story, see Time to Make a Convenience of Local Produce at redorbit.com.
posted 24 May 2008 by Paula | link to this
tags: contango, markets, peak oil
It seems odd to me that in the past several years I’ve been studying sustainability and economics that I’ve never come across the words “contango” and “backwardation.” These words entered the public lexicon this week when crude entered the state of contango, meaning that the price of futures contracts are higher than the price of right-now contracts. Usually, when futures prices are higher, there is some date beyond which prices come down again. What’s remarkable about crude’s move into contango this week is that, currently, there is no future date beyond which prices come down again: the markets are expecting oil to become more and more expensive, into the foreseeable future. And the only reason markets would expect this is if they expect oil to become more and more scarce into the foreseeable future — in other words, they’ve suddenly realized there’s a finite amount of the stuff to go around.
If contango is the state markets achieve upon realizing that oil is finite, then it stands to reason that other commodities markets will also reach a state of contango as traders realize other things are finite, too: peak water, peak food, peak gold, peak copper — peak everything.
It seems that contango is, and should always have been, the normal state of markets on a finite planet. It is the realization that infinite economic growth simply cannot occur on an orb that has a measurable circumference (24,901.55 miles, in case you’re wondering); that there comes a point when economic activity reaches the limit of that circumference, and that there simply is no more of a given commodity. A great many of us have known all along that the time discount on value is a hallucination that could only occur among people utterly divorced from reality. It’s like watching someone come off drugs to see the markets waking up from the fog to realize, “holy shit, we’ve run out of planet!”