45 Years of Building Local Power (Episode 71)

So, I thought that was interesting to hear about as well and just thinking about how much cities have changed over this period and this relationship between engaging and working on policy issues at the local level and then how that influences and the dynamic with state and national politics, as well. So, I hope everyone enjoys this episode. Without any further ado, here’s Hibba and I talking with David Morris.

David, welcome back to Building Local Power.

In 1964, the people in the District of Columbia got the right to vote for president. In ’68, they got the right to vote for the school board, and in ’72, if memory serves me right, they got to vote for the mayor and the city council, so it was a city that was beginning to regain, if you will, its autonomy and its authority, and that was the environment in which the institute was born, and, of course, it was thinking of becoming a city state in the sense that it was a city that was treated like a state from the federal government perspective.

So, that was one very important, if you will, part of the environment into which we were born. A second part was my own experience in Chile when Salvador Allende was elected democratically in 1970. He led a minority government that wouldn’t pass any legislation, but was making a structural revolution for the common good in a profound way, and I grew up in New York City where we had a population of about 8M people, and Chile, at that time, had a population of about 8M people, and it had fewer engineers graduating from its universities than the city colleges of New York, and, of course, had a gross national product that was less than the city budget of New York and was going about determining its own future as much as it could.

And, when I came back from my visit, my stay in Chile, I found that New York City was declaring itself bankrupt and giving up its authority to three bankers, which it did for a number of years, and realized that there was a conceptual problem here, that, essentially, I had lived in this country that had far fewer resources than New York City to hap into, but they felt that they could make, especially in the face of sort of global embargoes led by the United States and the like, a true structural revolution, democratic revolution, and New York City was in despair. So, you know, that sort of combination of political events, if you will, spurred us to stead up the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and to focus on cities.

Can you talk a little bit about how ILSR has evolved, since, going from a neighborhood organization in DC to being a national organization, and then also having to think about the ways that some of the models in DC could work elsewhere, but also different levels of government and how that came into play in terms of the organization’s thinking?

One was the framework itself, and the framework, which I’ll get into in a second, we applied widely, we applied to all sectors of the economy. And then, the institute created initiatives, and the initiatives themselves were, “Drill deeper down into a part of the economy,” like, for example, broadband. Although, we didn’t start broadband until maybe 30 years later but we started solid waste immediately. We started energy immediately in the early 1970s, and so we had those two perspectives, and the framework was essentially a framework that said … cities have an internal market. They often have enough people that they have an expertise. They have an administrative capability, and in many states, they also have significant authority that they can, in fact, develop the rules.

Admittedly, they are constrained by the state governments, but they can develop rules that channel scientific expertise and human genius and investment capital in certain directions, and we posited a kind of framework of this as the ABCs of self-reliance, which is that we promoted an authority, especially at the local level, the authority to in fact make new rules, and the responsibility to make those rules in a way that honored and cared for the weak and the disabled, the elderly and the poor and the next generation, and that they would develop a competency that is a capability, if you will, a capacity internal to the city, not only an intellectual and a skill-based capacity, but actually a capacity to extract wealth from inside the city. And, that’s a framework that we’ve applied throughout our entire history.

The entire … and, it was a small staff of the institute would get together every day and we would bag our sprouts, and then sell them to the local restaurants and to local stores. And, we essentially tried to do that in a way that would allow the institute to, in fact, work in the marketplace, while, at the same time, making us interact with the community at large. But, at the same time that we were doing that. We issued, Bill Batko, our staff person at that time issued a report. I think it probably was the first report on a municipal bank, and it was a nuts and bolts how a municipal bank might be created in the District of Columbia to serve most the low income and moderate income community and workers within the District of Columbia.

And so, those types of things, sort of theory and practice, if you will, policy at the same time as hands-on really has characterized the institute through 45 years. Some of the better examples in the early years were in solid waste. We chose solid waste as one of our initiatives because it’s a sector of the economy over which cities have almost complete authority, and so you didn’t have to convince the city to deal with its garbage. It knew it had to deal with its garbage, and we thought of garbage not as garbage but as materials, and quite valuable materials which could be not only collected and sorted, but also remanufactured for value-added.

And, Neil Seldman rode the sanitation trucks with the sanitation workers at 5:00 in the morning to get a handle on what that meant and was using the little homemade scale a the landfill in Newark in the middle of the summer to weigh the different components of the garbage to get a handle on how much was paper and the like. This was before the federal government and the state local governments were doing that, but at the same time, he and we were working with activists around the country, and we were saying to them, “You can recycle at high levels and it can be part of your local economy,” and, at the time, because of the energy crisis, the larger environmental community, the organized environmental community and many people in the governments were supporting of burning garbage to generate energy, and waste to energy systems.

And, the problem with the waste to energy system is they’re very large, and if you build one of those, you actually don’t have any capacity any longer to do recycling, so, Neil would go in city after city and say, “Look, this is what we want to do long-term. We want to recycle, we want to create scrap-based manufacturing. We want to create a sort of indigenous manufacturing and collection capacity, but in the meantime, we have to fight these incinerators because if they’re built, we foreclose any other development path, and so for the first 10 to 15 years of institute’s work, we were primarily fighting incinerators, and by the late 1980s … I think 1987 was the time where more incinerators were canceled than were proposed, and by 1987, the institute had also published our reports, our case studies that indicated that you could actually recycle half of your recycling stream, at least at that time, which was revolutionary because most people thought you couldn’t recycle more than 10%. So, we’re not talking about something that’s narrow. We don’t talk about something that’s parochial. We’re not talking about self sufficiency. No nation is self-sufficient. That wouldn’t make sense. We’re talking about an interdependence and a cooperative relationship among cities where they in fact trade, but it’s a different type of trade that we have now in the world.

You were working on trying to persuade and enable these independent business associations to act politically in a way that could challenge the Walmarts and now the Amazons of the world so that they would in fact create a zoning code locally that would prevent a big box retail store from coming in and then, later on, more recently, they would work at the state legislatures to stop Amazon from having a tax exemption for selling the same products as they sell that they are taxed on.

The Broadband Initiative is the same thing where Chris is essentially working with cities, working technical assistance, hands on, working with entrepreneurs, working with technical people and experts, in cities around the country, and more recently with rural cooperatives, to enable their work in setting up their own fiber infrastructure, treating telecommunications networks as part of the essential public infrastructure, and at the same time has created two national organizations.

Their role is to essentially fight state preemption and federal preemption that in fact stop cities from having, or strip cities of the authority to create these publicly owned networks and then as well as creating a daily news service to report on, develops, as well as creating reports, technical reports, that can be used by people around the country when the private sector says, “Cities can’t own their own networks. They’re all going to go broke, and we’re terrific.” You have empirical chapter and verse data to refute that. We work at a number of different levels, but at the same time, I don’t think of it as being chaotic in its work. It’s sort of mutually reinforcing both internal to initiatives, and increasingly within, between initiatives, as well.

That was just an inkling, just a glimmering, if you will, and the other thing about cities in 1974 is that for most environmentalists, cities were a blot, if you will. Cities were something that consumed far more resources than their carrying capacity, than the land they occupied, and many people believed that one needed to go back to the land or needed to go to much smaller cities and villages if we were going to move towards sustainability.

Now, if you move, fast-forward, you move to a time where the federal government is giving less and less money to cities. You’re also talking about a time now where the federal government is hostile to the exercise of authority at just about any level and in fact is now thwarting and trying to overturn any initiatives for the common good so that now, unlike in 1974, most of the innovative, creative, active people in the country are working at the local level or working at the state level, because that’s the place that space is still available, and they’re working in an opposition to the federal government to delay and disable, if you will, those initiative. It’s completely the opposite of what was occurring in 1974, and we’re thankful that we’ve had 45 years of experience, and that can be useful for that.

The other thing is that the decentralized dynamic of technology, which was just a glimmer in 1974, you had mainframe computers in 1974. You didn’t have laptop, let alone an internet, and now, you’re talking about the internet, of course, being something which has its positives and its negatives, but on the positive side, it can enable a communication, and increasingly, one translated into your own language among peoples in the world and among peoples within a community, and it allows transparency for governance, and it allows people who produce products, especially products that are information products, to sell directly and bypass the middle people in that process, and solar cells are now competitive.

They were competitive with nuclear plants six or seven years ago, but they’re now competitive with coal and natural gas plants, and you now have several million homes which produce enough electricity from their rooftops to provide all of their electricity year-round. Now, they don’t produce it at the specific time that they need to do it, so you’re beginning to talk about storage, and they sell, and they export electricity, they import electricity from the grid system, but nevertheless, you’re now, it’s now mainstream to talk about the possibilities of decentralized technologies like desktop manufacturing tech that weren’t really even thought of in 1974, but it’s the dynamic of the decentralized technology that we promoted and we adopted early on.

There were examples of it, but we thought that technology from the 19th century to the late 20th century was centralizing. When you shifted from wood to steel, when you shifted from wind power to fossil fuels, when you shifted from batch manufacturing to mass manufacturing, inevitably you shifted from small to large, and now the technology is centrifugal. It is now potentially decentralizing. I think that that’s extremely important in terms of the changed context in which we work.

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All right, we’re back. David, before the break, you were talking about how technology in some ways today, with the internet, is enabling decentralization. There are also some, of course, very troubling ways in which we now have a handful of companies that essentially control the internet and have become gatekeepers, Google, Amazon, Facebook, in ways that I think you could say, not dissimilar to some of the technologies you named in the past where you had folks who took hold of the railroads and used them to push a particular agenda that benefited the concentration of wealth, and I think you similarly see that today. I also want to kind of come back to this issue of cities in the context of this question, because on the one hand, there is a lot of authority that cities have, but it’s hard to see how we solve some of the biggest challenges that we face, for example, around the market power of a company like Amazon from a city level. I’m curious how your thinking on kind of levels of government has changed and how you reflect on that and ILSR’s work.

All right, we’re back. David, before the break, you were talking about how technology in some ways today, with the internet, is enabling decentralization. There are also some, of course, very troubling ways in which we now have a handful of companies that essentially control the internet and have become gatekeepers, Google, Amazon, Facebook, in ways that I think you could say, not dissimilar to some of the technologies you named in the past where you had folks who took hold of the railroads and used them to push a particular agenda that benefited the concentration of wealth, and I think you similarly see that today. I also want to kind of come back to this issue of cities in the context of this question, because on the one hand, there is a lot of authority that cities have, but it’s hard to see how we solve some of the biggest challenges that we face, for example, around the market power of a company like Amazon from a city level. I’m curious how your thinking on kind of levels of government has changed and how you reflect on that and ILSR’s work.

States do have antitrust laws, and they can, in fact, make inroads into dealing with these issues, but one thing that you can do at the local level, and I think it’s true about all the issues of the day, is to educate people, is to have a debate with people, is to… The thing about local politics as opposed to national politics is that local politics is retail, and you go door to door. I mean, it doesn’t cost that much money to either run for office or to have a campaign, if you will. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful, but you don’t have to raise $100 million to buy ads on national networks, so it enables things. That doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy at all.

As I said, internet is potentially decentralizing. It was set up to be decentralizing. It was set up to operate after a nuclear war, but at the same time, it is centralizing in its control of information. What we see there is not only the Facebooks and the Amazons, but China, for example, a authoritarian government that’s becoming increasingly a totalitarian government because of the ability of face recognition, because of the ability of tapping into social media, that is collecting information on every individual citizen. Those are the types of things that one has to deal with, and I think that dealing with that is probably going to be the hardest issue that we’ve had to date, but once again, there are things that can be done at the local level to show people the value of privacy and the value of an ecosystem which is an ecosystem which is not a monopolistic system and a monoculture, if you will. That’s where I see the role being for cities.

You have, in the health sector, which I know Amazon has just gotten into, ACA, the Obamacare program, had a provision in it where, after 10 years, states could ask for innovation waivers. It’s been 10 years, and the idea was that, by many people anyway, was that the innovation waivers would enable a single payer or a public option health system, and that the federal government would allow funds to be used to make that happen.

Well, unfortunately what happened was Donald Trump, and so you now have a federal government that will deny any waiver that enables a public option, that is, enables the public to have control or any more control over the health system, while at the same time, they will approve waivers that require work requirements for Medicaid and the like. There is a neverending dance, or battle if you will, or exchange between higher levels of government and lower levels of government, but I do think that the issue of subsidiarity, which you know, we’ve been promoting, which is you know, allow the local government to do what it does if it’s not hurting anyone, you know broadly, and the federal government and state government can intervene to protect minority rights within those cities, but otherwise should stay out of the way. I think that that educational campaign is extremely important because that’s what will provide fertile ground for the kinds of sort of antitrust, pro privacy legislation that I think you are that you’re working on and I think many people are working on.

You know, things that could actually structurally shift Walmart’s power, and kind of open up the way for a true reinvigoration invigoration of local economies. So I think part of what something that we’ve learned as an organization is what is the dynamic between those two things, in a way working at the national level only, I don’t think achieve something. But I also think working at the local level leaves something behind too.

And once again, in terms of the changed context between 1974 and 2019 is that, you know, when we started the idea, I mean the, the slogan states’ rights was a racial slogan. I mean it was a slogan that said that the, you know, state should have the right to deny people the right to vote and discriminate against people. That’s what state’s rights meant. And I think that now, you know, that slogan is probably still pejorative because of its legacy, but the idea that the state should have more authority to exercise for the common good is one that is I think, increasingly discussed and increasingly put into practice. Whether it’s minimum wage or required parental leave or what have you. So the, if you will, the progressive or the liberal or the community that has previously very much opposed states authority, exercise of authority, because it’s been discriminatory, you know, are now looking to the states to provide the authority that cities don’t have to deal with the larger issues.

In Spain right now there are secessionist movements. Catalonia is one, the Bass province is another and so forth. There are secessionist movements at the regional level, but more recently there are groups that have gained power in cities, larger cities like Barcelona and Madrid. And they are talking about the need to have confederations of cities within Spain, and not to essentially talk about a region uncoupling from a nation state. And that would allow for you know, a more democratic structure and also a more cooperative structure. And one of the good things about modern technologies is that you, you can in fact have discussions, you know, between cities that are stored and you can also have a competition between cities that is not the same as a competition in the private sector.

I think for example you know, the competition of sports teams from city to city is a much more welcome competition than the kinds of things that, in terms of the dog eat dog of the marketplace. So a confederation would be the structure of the future. I would also see that people would be capable of surviving if there were a cutoff of some sort of basic source for at least a certain period of time. There was a biologist whose name I forget, but he was talking about that self reliance is not self sufficiency but it is the potential for self sufficiency, short term self sufficiency in certain situations. And so you know that in terms of resiliency in the face of a hurricane or a tornado or a flood or you know, a larger corporation deciding that they don’t like what you’re doing.

And so you know, that would also be something that would be built into the future. But I don’t envision a future where there’ll be no strife and where everybody will love one another and you know, things will be at peace and the environment will be protected completely. And you know, so I’m not Pollyanna-ish about that. And the institute, you know, works often at the nitty gritty levels, at the day to day levels and when we look out, we often look out to ten years because, you know, for us, if you can achieve something significant, you know, in ten years, the rest in some ways takes care of itself. If you were talking about 50 years, your kids aren’t going to be around or they’ll be so old that they won’t be around to see what happens in 50 years, whether it was a success or a failure.