EconoMan's "Development" is Ecocide

The Amazon rainforest has been called the “lungs” of the world. Its conversion into feedlots for cattle to feed the “first world” for profit isn’t good for any humans, or for all life on earth.

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism just published an important piece by Juan Manuel Crespo, an Ecuadorian sociologist who coins an important new word, and asks an essential question: Who is responsible for the Amazon's ecocide?

Follow the money! We need to look closer at this misnamed thing called "development," which bags money for a few, but destroys whole species and ecosystems we all depend upon. Our present economic system is not really about numbers—it is ideology and lying language. But here’s good advice from Juan’s piece, too, linked above:

If you want to preserve the balance of life, look to indigenous people. Far from being “savages,” indigenous people have knowledge and wisdom to share, the reason even our protected wildlife sanctuaries are poorer in species than the lands where they still live.

 “The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommends revisiting the native peoples for learning how to preserve critical territories. According to a study conducted by the IPCC, the areas managed or co-managed by native peoples have much higher rates of presence of birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles than any other areas (including protected areas), which indicates that this greater biodiversity is being achieved by the practices and land uses of native cultures.

Native peoples may not exceed 5% of the world’s population, but they have preserved up to nearly 80% of the highest biodiversity areas on the planet. Ironically, they are the ones who “slow down development”. It is through the native peoples of the Amazon, and borrowing knowledge from them, that we will find the key to stopping ecocide and development.”

It’s more ideology and misused language again. We have thought ourselves superior, when we were only better armed and more violent. Unless your people came from Mars, it is far past time we “civilized” humans remember how to become indigenous natives of planet Earth. An economy waged as war, and that imagines “winning,” discounts losers, namely all inferiors like bugs, microbes, birds, fungus, diversity—and oh yes, all females, including Gaia.  

Read more about the Amazon’s importance here; and while you are at it, read Riane Eisler and Douglas P. Fry’s new book, Nurturing Our Humanity. You’ll find fascinating information about indigenous people and a wider knowledge of peaceable, life-sustaining ways if only we’d look there, instead of studying war.

Greta Thunberg Doesn't Believe in a Climate Crisis; It's a FACT.

Sixteen-year-old Greta sailed to New York like a true Viking, because aviation is a major polluter, and we humans are just about out of time to save her generation’s future. We’re in the midst of a huge extinction, losing 600 species each day, she explains to Trevor Noah on The Today Show. Where she comes from, climate talk doesn’t focus on belief; .it’s a fact. Polar ice is melting, the ocean grows acidic. Tell your Congress member that our President and a Republican Senate may be a hoax, but the climate crisis is already underway. The future looks like California fires, Houston floods, Puerto Rico and Bermuda. Time to ACT. March with Students because our future is on the line September 20th!

Sister, Can You Spare $400?

t’s time to talk about women’s economics with attitude. It’s time to laugh at what is often absurd and call out what is dangerous. By focusing on voices not typically part of mainstream man-to-man economic discourse, our Ms. Magazine series Women Unscrewing Screwnomics will bring you news of hopeful and practical changes and celebrate an economy waged as life—not as war.

In 2008, we found out just how exciting economics can be. Over 2.5 million U.S. jobs disappeared, and a third of U.S. real estate value flew out the window. It took a decade for the U.S. median household income to pass what it had been in 2008, now just over $60,000—yet, while prices go up and threaten to go higher with Washington’s trade war, 40 percent of Americans still don’t have $400 for emergencies.

Over the past 35 years, so-called “free market” changes in the rules of our money system and tax policies have moved dollars up to those already with a surplus. If you don’t have enough savings to pay for a college degree, a car to get you to your job or a house to live in, you must borrow. Businesses and governments borrow, too—and with interest reliably doubling debt, the upward movement of our system’s pyramid scheme hoists dollars to the un-needy. This is aided by Wall Street bro-bloviation, and sometimes corruption. 

Interest steadfastly doubles fortunes, too. That’s the reason that we now have a record number of billionaires—2,153 worldwide, controlling piles of money estimated at $8.7 trillion.

Is this growth good news? Not when you remember that the mirror image of this class’s paper capital, the reason for its growth, is the indebtedness of the rest of us.

It’s too bad that Forbes only publishes an annual catalog of the 400 biggest fortunes. A yearly list of the 4000 biggest debtors might enlighten us more. 

Mildly named “growing inequality,” these oversized lumps of billionaire numbers in the macroeconomic world affects Main Street, where most of us women work. The finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector, not real economic production, now accounts for 20 percent of the U.S. GDP, double what it was in 1947. Stock buybacks and mergers that eliminate jobs are today’s most common use of billionaire surplus. 

This ruthless bloating of the biggest is misnamed “economic efficiency”—an apt phrase only if your intentional goal is to melt permafrost and glaciers or develop Vermont’s Green Mountains into beachfront property.

But some capital is in Vermont women’s hands. Their numbers are smaller, but they are venturing into new territory with a wider purpose than fat cat profits. 

Women are new players in the realm of capital and money. Married women couldn’t inherit property, and were property themselves, until 1848, when suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped win necessary legal changes to women’s statuses. Her working-class sisters couldn’t keep her own paycheck until she won that right 158 years ago. If you think sending her money to dad or husband was nuts, until 1974—just 45 years ago—banks could refuse a woman opening a bank account without a male co-signer. Even then, women needed another law to get access to business loans. 

Yet women today make all the difference, says Change the Story—an alliance of the Vermont Women’s Fund, The Vermont Commission on Women, and Vermont Works for Women whose new Champions of Change campaign has already persuaded more than 140 Vermont businesses to sign on to the Vermont Equal Pay Compact pledging to improve women’s paychecks.

They also report that between 2007-2012, women started businesses at twice the rate of men’s startups. Dollar-wise their businesses are small, but even if just one in four of Vermont’s 20,786 women-owned businesses hired one additional worker, they’d create 5200 new jobs, good for the whole state’s economy. So what’s stopping them?

Small business expansion requires financing, made tighter since 2008’s crash; always it has been tightest for people of color and women. But recent studies reveal women-managed businesses make more money, so venture capital is newly seeking women out. On September 25 and 26, for instance, Vermont Innovations Commons (VIC) is hosting the third annual Vermont Investors Summit in Burlington, featuring keynote speaker Deborah Jackson, who, along with her co-founder, Andrea Turner Moffit, used her experience as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and Citibank to create in 2015 what they call an “investors’ ecosystem.”

Their company, Plum Alley, funds women innovators and entrepreneurs “at the margins,” while also enabling women to invest in “forward-looking companies.” So far, they’ve backed startups in biotechnology, cancer immunotherapy, online marketplaces and software. Their host, Vermont Innovation Commons, calls itself a “launching pad for entrepreneurs and innovators, a nurturing partner for startup and growth firms” with a goal to create living-wage jobs and keep Vermont’s young innovators in the state. Bio-friendly terms are found on their website too, referring to Vermont’s “entrepreneurial DNA,” presumably of interest to investor ecosystems. Neither of these exists in biology, but we can hope this isn’t mere greenwashing, but a wiser way of thinking about the eco-logy in eco-nomy.  

“We’re always looking out for our companies’ best interests, aggregating capital…from angel investors and other capital funds,” Samantha Roach-Gerber, innovations director at Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies (VCET), told Ms. VCET seeks to connect Vermont’s entrepreneurs to a network of peers, coaches and capital, namely The Vermont Seed Capital Fund. It, too, uses biologic words—with seed’s living reproduction connecting the green of money to their “evergreen” fund, which means its profits are plowed back into it.

The fund’s $5.1 million in revolving venture money is relatively “tiny,” yet has funded 24 startups at $25,000-$250,000 and has leveraged more. VCET’s interest is in “high opportunity businesses,” which trend to the technological, but do include women. They also co-host winter events in Burlington called Female Founders that always sell out and spark networking. 

More grounded Vermont investments are in the hands of Janice St. Onge in Montpelier, through the Flexible Capital Fund. A certified Community Development Financial Institution, it provides risk capital for Vermont’s food system, forestry products, and renewable energy companies. So far, they’ve invested $4.4 million in 15 Vermont companies. What makes them different?  St. Onge says she’s proudest of Flex Fund’s “royalty financing,” which is based on a piece of the revenue stream, rather than a share of equity ownership. “We remain flexible with the cash flow needs of a business and… in a way that treats our borrowers as partners.”

Vermonter Janice St. Onge, back far right, is only one of the “financial activists” who met in New York with her cohort in 2019, sponsored by the RSF Integrated Capital Fellowship program, but she and the Flexible Capital Fund are changing investment to include women and our Mother Earth. (Edith Macy)

Seeking “regenerative, not extractive businesses,” the fund values social and environmental responsibility, livable wages, and diversity in ownership, governance, and management. “The fund’s own governance is diverse,” St. Onge adds. “Four of our board of managers and two of our three-member investment committee are women.” They recently added to their portfolio MammaSez, a woman-owned plant-based meal delivery company, investing $150,000.

St. Onge is also part of a new initiative, the Vermont Women’s Investors Network, which aims to close the gender gap in funding for local businesses with positive environmental and social impact. On October 1, in Stowe, Vermont, they and the Northern New England Women’s Investors Network will host Integrated Capital—an event featuring Joel Solomon, author of The Clean Money Revolution, and Deb Nelson of RSF Social Finance, a cohort that dares call themselves “financial activists.” They even speak of poverty, rumored to be of some relevance to women. 

Replacing Privilege with Shared Prosperity

It’s time to talk about women’s economics with attitude. It’s time to laugh at what is often absurd and call out what is dangerous. By focusing on voices not typically part of mainstream man-to-man economic discourse, Women Unscrewing Screwnomics at Ms. Magazine online will bring you news of hopeful and practical changes and celebrate an economy waged as life—not as war.

“I never lacked for anything,” Jamila Medley says of her childhood in Brooklyn in the eighties and nineties, “but it was called ‘the killing fields.’” She’s referring to her deteriorating community at the height of the crack-cocaine epidemic. “Anything structurally and systemically wrong,” she explains, “was sent to East New York.” 

Medley’s grandfather owned a property management company. Her mom was a property manager. When she was old enough, she got to work with both of them in the summers. “That’s when I learned about Section 8 processes and its paperwork,” she remembers. “It showed me grandmothers taking care of two or three grandkids with an annual income of $5000, my first introduction to poverty at that scale.” Her mom didn’t just collect rent or manage repairs: “She was a social worker.” 

Later, as a single mom and college student, Medley encountered the Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) program—President Clinton’s notorious effort at welfare “reform” that added yet another set of punishing government hoops to jump through to receive aid. “My view of poverty expanded,” Medley says simply. She was working with her sociology professor at Connecticut College to research women on welfare and went on to do work for a community foundation.

“There were people with resources,” she learned, “who wanted to help.” This discovery and her own desire to be of service led her to work in the nonprofit world—aiding the homeless, those in recovery or ill from cancer—while earning an MS in Organizational Dynamics at the University of Pennsylvania.

But a later position at Mariposa Food Co-op in West Philadelphia exposed her to a different model. No longer helping people, she’s now empowering them to create a thriving co-operative economy. 

Philadelphia Area Co-operative Alliance (PACA) is building community trust and business savvy.

While at Mariposa, Medley served for several years on the board of the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance (PACA), creating educational tools and training, before becoming its Executive Director In 2017. By then, PACA included over 20 local co-ops—including not only the most familiar type, consumer-owned food co-ops, but also a credit union, a childcare co-op, a bookkeeping business, a solar installation business, a media company, a natural cosmetics firm and a group of co-operative urban farms. Soil Generation described themselves as “a project to address displacement politics and the right to grow, thrive, and feed ourselves in Black and Brown communities of Philadelphia.” 

Co-ops are sometimes portrayed in media as idealistic and crunchy-granola-headed. But Jamila and her cohorts had noticed a more painful reality in their area. Philly’s food co-ops were all white-owned and many were too expensive and exclusive for many people to feel welcomed as members. Most often black and brown people were not at the table for important collective decisions. 

“All our co-ops are independent, and all have versions of food justice,” says Medley, “so PACA started our conversation by considering that one in five people in Philly are food insecure. Several of our food co-ops are in gentrifying neighborhoods, displacing black folks or poor whites. All of this is political, but also more nuanced than that,” she says, describing the difficulty of talking about race and class privilege with dynamics particular to different locations. “The important thing is to acknowledge that this displacement and poverty is happening. Let’s not ignore it. We have to interact with it—and to bridge that.”

What exactly is a co-operative? It’s a business with democratic decision-making and equal but united investment. Unlike Costco, real co-ops are owned by their customers and/or their employees, and actively engage with their local community. PACA’s website provides a surprising history of Philadelphia co-op beginnings dating back to Benjamin Franklin; a mutual insurance company started in 1752 still operates. In 1787, The Free African Society was founded in Philly, the second mutual-aid society in the US, and a precursor of formal cooperatives. 

England’s 1844 Rochdale Co-op Grocery typically gets credited as first, but African Americans were ahead of the curve. W.E.B. Dubois wrote in 1900 that free Negroes were so often in “precarious economic condition” they’d created hundreds of mutual-aid societies for all kinds of shared economics.  Learn more in economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s history, Collective Courage. 

Jamila Medley told Ms. that PACA, also aligned with a larger national group, New Economy Coalition, is one of only two or three co-op alliances in the country with paid staff.  Their co-op business developers are creating a promising environment for bridging racial disparities in economic terms. Ideally Philly’s co-op alliance conversations will spark other co-ops. How best to start? 

“It’s important for folks who have race and class privilege to find the people who are already doing the work,” she says. “Then support their leadership. Listen and trust their decisions about who and what to fund.” Stay tuned; Jamila and PACA and a growing population pursue a united prosperity based on co-operative values.

It turns out these are also American values in need of a good dusting off—namely, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, honesty, and social responsibility. E Pluribus, Unum!

Finding My True Wealth

Inside each of us is a story of money. It is about a lot more than numbers—it is about our sense of self-worth, power, influence, and security. I had an idyllic childhood in the forest of Vermont. I was nurtured by gentle and wise parents, and my sister and I would frolic through pastures punctuated by abundant wild strawberries. I was in fourth grade when I first felt poor.

It was picture day at school, exciting for me, dressed up in my fanciest clothes. Something wasn’t right at the breakfast table. My parents were arguing, because there wasn’t enough money in the bank to cover the $24 for the large individual portraits which we purchased each year. Mom wanted to borrow money from her best friend who was wealthy; Pa refused. He was too proud. 

I went to school, my enthusiasm dampened. Our small class of only ten students had our group photo taken, and then everyone but me lined up to have their individual portraits taken. I slunk off to the corner, so embarrassed. I wished I was invisible. I was so ashamed that we couldn’t afford to have this photo taken like everyone else. I felt that pain of “not enough.”

Over the years, that feeling of “not enough” has haunted me. I have seen how money divides people in society, how wealthy people have privilege, and how few people talk about their poverty, as taboo as talking about sex or death. 

When I was 22, I lived in Guatemala and shopped at beautiful markets from women wearing self-woven clothing, selling their handiwork and fresh produce. There wasn’t a price tag on anything! That made me very uncomfortable. They expected me to have a conversation about what the value was. For them, the relationship determined the value. The conversation was what gave meaning, it was back and forth. It was in the dynamic give-and-take that we settled on the price and made the exchange. I grew to love this way of being more intimate with people.

I returned from Central America and rented an apartment in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, statistically one of the very richest counties in the United States. Women in fur coats and diamonds came to apply for loans at the Bank of Jackson Hole, where I was executive assistant to the vice president. One month into the job, a stack of loan documents appeared on my desk. Suzy, the receptionist, told me that the previous CEO had just been accused of embezzling $1.5 million over the last decade. It was my job to copy the evidence against him. Looking through these forged documents, I imagined him on the final day of the annual federal audit of the bank when the lies were discovered. That night he tried to commit suicide. The anxiety and shame he must have felt! The fear of being discovered! What motivates someone to do this? Hunger for more. When is enough, enough? Greed compels us to seek more and more.

I returned to college to study money and graduated with my degree in international economics from Southern Oregon University. When my $30,000 in student loans came due six months later, I was shocked. While studying economics, I had neglected my own personal finance and money management. I took a course to learn these skills, and I began teaching workshops about creating a healthier relationship with money. Almost everyone I’ve taught is suffering in some way because of money, and there is extraordinary relief when we share our intimate stories and financial struggles.

In 2010, I said yes to the hardest job I’ve ever had. It’s physically and emotionally demanding, I’m on call around the clock, and there’s very little appreciation. I became a new mother. Motherhood is one of the least appreciated jobs, truly a labor of love. I’m supported by a loving husband and have healthy children and a helpful community. The first years of my two children were the hardest five years of my life. Much of the time I felt worthless. I was doing such valuable work, but I was receiving no money and very little acknowledgment from the outside world.

I remember nursing my infant in the wee hours of the morning. I heard a rumble in her diaper, and felt a familiar wetness on my hand. I took her to the changing table, and gently wiped that mustard colored poop from her back. There was no overtime pay for this work. It’s priceless. I’m grateful for the caretakers; the men and women who care for children and elderly parents are valuable beyond measure.

My children today are eight and five, and we cooperate to care for our land and each other. In my family we fluidly balance the offers and needs of everyone as we prioritize our resource use. This flow of sacred reciprocity is at the heart of family.

I now serve as the education director of the Post Growth Institute. We bring people together to barter, buy, and otherwise share and exchange their goods, knowledge, services, and skills. I am truly wealthy, as is my family, as is my community. Nature is generous, and so are my children. So are my neighbors. Each spring I transplant into my soil perennial flowers gleaned from the land of my neighbors. I will enjoy their beauty for years to come. As these flowers burst into bloom, they are valuable beyond measure because they were gifts.

The purple irises from Rachel’s garden, the dainty columbine from Deborah, the strawberries from Amy, raspberries and sunflowers from Carrie, the parsnips from Gideon, the echinacea from Ann; they are all stretching toward the light. The beauty of these plants unfurls in the warmth of the sun and our loving care. Much like our children. We moved onto our land nearly three years ago, and each spring is like welcoming familiar friends again as the plants emerge from their slumber.

Humans are made to tend to our gardens together. Each Sunday we have some neighbors over to work in the soil and feast together. We are so nourished by this time, brought back to the roots of belonging. We belong to this land, and she provides for us. The plants living on our acre by the creek swell and decay with the changing seasons.

There is something special about being in relationship that can’t be measured in money. This is what makes life worth living. Last Thanksgiving we hosted over 30 people, some family but mostly neighbors. I looked around at the people who had brought carefully prepared dishes with such love and generosity, at the kids running and laughing and playing games, at the people playing music and having intimate conversations. I smiled as I witnessed our spirit of generosity and love, and this to me is true wealth. Honestly, we are all wealthy beyond measure.