A Rebalancing Act: How We Restore Local Power in 2025

Stacy Mitchell (00:00)

Maybe I’m going to be okay with the idea that, you know, a murderous vigilante shoots someone in the streets because I don’t see any other option for, you know, trying to address the problems that I’m facing. you know, I think it’s why to me, like our mission around local self-reliance and building the sense of, of community control and ability to, have agency collectively with your neighbors and shape the future of the place that you live is so crucial. Like it is, it’s the building blocks of a democracy.

Reggie Rucker (00:35)

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of building local power. I am Reggie Rucker filling in for Danny Kane on this special year-end episode. We’re taking a break, just a quick break from our Power Play series to have a conversation with a couple of familiar voices. Our co-executive directors, John Farrell and Stacy Mitchell. Hopefully you are all already subscribed to John’s podcast, local energy rules. So you’ll recognize his voice from the really insightful conversations he has over there about how to free ourselves from the grip that corporate electric utilities have over our energy supply. And Stacy, of course, is somewhat of regular here, though it’s been a while. But what we wanted to do today is just have a conversation about where ILS are, the communities we serve, and the country where we find ourselves at this moment.

By the time this episode airs, we will be nearly two months clear of the election, and as we’ve all had some time to reflect on the results and what happened, and what it means, everyone’s got their hot takes about campaign tactics and strategies, who did what right and wrong, who to blame, et cetera. But for the purpose of this conversation, I want to, as we do on the show, go straight to the people on the ground, voters, communities who were saying something with their vote — or by not voting — what they’re looking for in our elected leadership and what’s missing in our politics, our process of self-governance.

All right, y’all good?

John Farrell (02:05)

Do it.

Reggie Rucker (02:06)

Okay. So John, I want to start with you because you sent me this Nation article that had a lot of great insights, but there was one section that stood out for me that talked about the disconnect between, for example, the unemployment rate that might be historically low, but the lived reality is that too many people feel trapped in jobs. They hate like, what do you make of this disconnect that is evident out there?

John Farrell (02:31)

I mean, so the piece by James Galbraith, the thing I really liked about it is he made this distinction between sort of the macroeconomic indicators and what people’s actual experiences were. So, I mean, to put it very briefly, we had a lot of inflation. The inflation rate came down, but prices stayed up. Some of that was driven by corporate greed in the economy, and we’re learning more and more about that. Some of it was driven by supply chain disruption and whatnot. But the point is, like, when people were coming into 2024 for the election,

They had, you know, their money didn’t go as far as it did four years before. If they were lucky, maybe their income kept up with it. But on the other hand, they had price pressures on food and gas and things that they think about all the time. They had price pressures on rent. And then all of the pandemic relief programs disappeared. The boosted child tax credit, you know, the ban on people getting kicked out of their apartments, you know, other incentive programs, the expansion of Medicaid on an emergency basis. So, there were lots of demonstrable ways in which people were actually like economically less secure, and I think a lot of the candidates in the news media missed what the real issues were for Americans and that real lived experience that they had.

Stacy Mitchell (03:47)

The thing I would add to that is just to underscore what you said, John, about security, I think even if you have a job and you have health insurance, I mean, many Americans feel like, just vulnerable to these corporations that can take stuff away from you. They can deny you a needed medical treatment. You can go to the grocery store and suddenly find that prices are, five, ten percent higher than they were the week before. Things feel very much out of people’s control, both in the economy and of course, in government too, which has not been responding to any of those problems in ways that people have really been able to see and experience. I was just struck looking back and thinking back, I mean, how many change elections have we now had, you know, where voters are coming in and saying, I want change, I don’t like how things are operating. And, you know, one cycle, it’ll be one party in the next cycle, it’ll be the different party. But it’s like every single time since at least Barack Obama and maybe further back, people are saying we want something different.

Reggie Rucker (04:59)

So it’s interesting, Stacy, that you bring up the change elections going back to Obama and this perpetual state of dissatisfaction. I’ve heard some conversations about the role social media plays in this, particularly for young people. And it brings me to conversations about the number of young people who voted for Trump. Or even I just saw a poll recently that voters 18 to 29 — I think it was — Like an equal number of young voters saw the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO as acceptable, as they did unacceptable. It was like 40 percent apiece. There’s a deep dissatisfaction that people are clearly expressing here. And again, especially for young people who can’t afford college, but are told college is the only way to afford life, the American dream is growing further and further out of reach.

John Farrell (05:50)

I do think that the reaction to the murder of that healthcare executive is indicative of this idea of people feeling like they don’t have control over their lives, right? Normally we don’t celebrate murder, but there were so many people who were like, I have had such a terrible experience with the healthcare system that I don’t feel sad that an executive who might have denied me a needed treatment for cancer or who denied treatment for my loved one, experienced something horrible. That’s essentially what they were saying. And it didn’t justify the actions of that individual that people were like, you know, not terribly sad, but I think it was like, there’s this undercurrent, and I think the healthcare system, in particular, is such an important piece of this of people feel unstable, insecure, frightened about what can happen to them, feel like they don’t have control over it.

And then they see this one act of vigilantism and feel like, my God, I wish I felt like I had control over things. I don’t want to go shoot somebody, but I wish I had something I could do. And I think to get to Stacy’s point there, like that’s why change keeps being on the ballot in a way. And yet people aren’t getting what they need from it because the candidates then when we elect them, aren’t actually addressing those fundamental problems.

Stacy Mitchell (07:02)

Yeah, that’s right. I think there’s a widespread sense of powerlessness across the country. And, you know, when people feel like the, you know, the most important things in their lives, and their communities are really subject to forces that are beyond their control, you know, they effectively feel like democracy doesn’t function. And so, you know, why, why have any faith in it? Why have faith in these institutions if they if it feels like, well, these things are not my neighbors, and I can’t come together collectively and affect any of these things. We’re just, you know, bobbing in this ocean of powerful forces that can overrun us. You know, in that kind of state, you look out there and think, well, maybe I’d like a strong man, you know, maybe I’d like a strong man who’s going to come tumble down these institutions and kind of wield power on my behalf.

Or maybe I’m going to be okay with the idea that, you know, a murderous vigilante shoots someone in the streets because I don’t see any other option for, you know, trying to address the problems that I’m facing. you know, I think it’s why to me, like our mission around local self-reliance and building the sense of, of community control and ability to, have agency collectively with your neighbors and shape the future of the place that you live is so crucial. Like it is, it is, it’s the building blocks of a democracy.

Reggie Rucker (08:27)

I want to pick up on this thread of you talking about the building blocks of our democracy. And you gave a speech earlier this year at the Bioneers Conference. We’ll put a link in the show notes. But you do a great job of explaining how antitrust policy, an area of policy work, ILSR is deeply invested in is one of these building blocks. It would be great if you could give our audience the teaser version and folks can check out the rest online.

Stacy Mitchell (08:53)

The purpose of antitrust policy is it works like a check and balance, you know, in the same way that we it’s like a fundamental part of how you how you structure a society if you want to be a democracy, like you have to have antimonopoly laws, you know, in the same way that we have checks and balances in our political system so that you know, one branch of government doesn’t run away with too much power and take away our liberty. We also need checks and balances over the private sphere so that you don’t have these concentrations of private economic power that function in the same way in terms of taking away our liberty, governing our lives, you making decisions outside our control. And so, you can’t, you can’t have a democracy unless you have anti-monopoly law. And the fact that our antitrust laws have been mostly dormant for the last 40 years explains a lot about how we’ve gotten to the place that we, that we are. And, you know, the consequences at this point, you know, are not only being experienced by, workers who are seeing their wages squeezed by big companies, you know, communities, entrepreneurs, small businesses losing their livelihoods, communities being left behind in various ways, this overrunning of our government. But of course, consumers are now also paying higher prices, like across the board for groceries, for airlines, for rents, you know, because of consolidation among landlords. I am running a few minutes late; my previous meeting is running over.

And so, you know, just this idea that has predicated the last 40 years of like, let’s take away, let’s reduce antitrust and we’ll get, these big efficient companies and that’ll be really good for consumers. mean, even that, you know, it has been shown to be completely false. The thing about antitrust, we have seen an extraordinary revival of antitrust laws over the last four years. And there’s has begun to be some recognition of that among the populace, among the public, but you know, only barely. And of course it takes only to a certain extent and it takes a long time to turn things around with antitrust. I mean, not a super long time, but you have to file cases and you have to make open up markets and then wait for new competitors and new businesses to come in and fill those spaces. It’s not something you can just flip a switch and do overnight. And so, you know, I think one of the, the trickiness, you know, one of the failures of the Biden administration was having made these big changes on antitrust, which are already and are going to be yielding real dividends, but really not having the ability or the capacity to communicate effectively what those things were, especially in the context of people really trying to just deal with what’s right in front of them.

John Farrell (11:35)

I just, want to say too, I think one of the really important concepts behind antitrust is not just its ability to protect us and protect our democracy by creating checks and balances in the economic sphere, but also its explanatory power of what’s gone wrong in our economy. When I think about, I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, you know, my grandma and grandfather lived in Danville, Illinois. It’s a small town on the Illinois, Indiana border about in central Illinois. You know, he was like an IRS agent. She was a teacher. They had a nice house and five kids. I looked up a few years ago, that house to see how much it sold for just out of sort of random curiosity. And it was worth $30,000. It’s a nice two story house that had enough bedrooms that they had raised five kids in that house. And as I was looking for it, I also came across an article that listed Danville, Illinois as one of the 10 worst places to live in the country. Probably a place that had been hollowed out like so many rural communities by the opioid crisis by disinvestment as corporate concentration led businesses to focus more on large cities rather than investments in small towns.

And I just think when I think about like railroad concentration before antitrust stepped in meant that a lot of cities couldn’t get service from rail companies. A lot of farmers couldn’t get service to get their crops to market. Airline deregulation led to concentration in the airline industry and basically small towns stopped getting air service. And all the small airports that used to serve places, it’s like now you get to drive two or three hours to a big city to get on an airplane to go somewhere. You know, the illusion of choice that you have in the supermarket, either between different chains that are actually all owned by the same company, or even when you go there on the shelf and it’s like there’s 17 different brands, but it’s actually two different companies. And they basically collude on the prices that you pay.

So what I found really helpful for me as someone who just wants to understand how the economy is working and understand why we’re where we’re at, antitrust and the failure to enforce it and the concentration of companies giving you that illusion of choice. Like it not only explains why life is hard for people demonstrably, but also how frustrated you are when you think you have choices and then you find out you don’t. That I really don’t have a way to affect, you know, how much I have to pay for healthcare or whether I’ll even get coverage for it or whether I can get a job because there’s been a non-compete clause in my fast food, you know, employment contract that wouldn’t have let me go work at another fast food restaurant even if I could get a higher wage. I mean, all those kinds of things I think are the, you know, they are the harvest of the neoliberal economic thinking, which is we will give people this illusion that there’s choice in the economy even as we allow large corporations and wealthy individuals to rack up huge economic rewards from trapping us in situations where we don’t have lot of choices.

Stacy Mitchell (14:37)

And just to tie that back, think the point you make about the marginalization of certain communities by the corporations that run this economic system, it has created this geography that I think really connects to the thing we started talking about at the very beginning, which is why is it that the news media and many politicians and folks in DC don’t seem to there’s this like disconnect, they seem confused about the challenges people are facing. It’s because, you know, for the most part, those are folks who live in fairly prosperous major cities on the coast, and, you know, are not, you know, are not living in a place where the only option to buy groceries is Dollar General, for example, you know, where, you know, they’re not in a field where they’re facing a non-compete. They’re not in a place where you can’t get airline service for a decent price or at all. You know, I mean, they’re just not experiencing those things on a day-to-day basis. And that’s what’s, I think, led to a lot of this disconnect and inability to, like, reflect to people what they’re experiencing and the stories that you’re telling as a politician or in the media.

Reggie Rucker (15:43)

So I think it’s important to bring up here. I mean, we’re talking about elected officials, people voted on by the public to represent us. We’re talking about these people being disconnected from the lives of everyday citizens. You know who’s going to be more disconnected from these people? Billionaires, right? And we’ve got someone like Elon Musk, who has for all intents and purposes bought his way into a governing role in our politics.

Even with the example of Jeff Bezos with his ownership of the Washington Post and squashing the Harris endorsement for his own gain. I these billionaires having this type of influence in our politics is precisely the disconnect that the general public is feeling, right?

Stacy Mitchell (16:30)

I mean…Musk has spent a lot of time railing against unelected bureaucrats. which is exactly what he is. He does not have an official role in the Trump administration and yet seems to wield an extraordinary amount of power. And for anyone who uses Twitter, it was pretty obvious that he spent the months leading up to the election feeding pro-Trump propaganda into a social media platform and using an incredible amount of wealth and position to do that. I think, you know, this is extraordinarily alarming, you know, and you added that the example of Jeff Bezos, you know, pulling the Washington Post’s endorsement of Harris, you’ve got these billionaires, you know, who are directly trying, you know, to intervene in government and to just sort of go around wielding power. That’s not in any official capacity, meaning there’s no you know mechanism of accountability at all in those roles. I have to say that the that the global and historical experience of this is Is pretty terrifying.

John Farrell (17:39)

I think it’s actually really helpful to look specifically at this analysis of the relationships and power dynamics. You know, I just saw an article the other day that like his administration is like the largest collection of billionaires ever put together into a presidential administration. Like it’s very explicitly about concentrated economic power in leadership, in the administration. So, I’m really glad that you flagged that.

I also just want to touch on one other thing I think that matters a lot here is, you know, that the only private industry that has protections in the Constitution is the press. And we are in this time of like fundamental realignment about where people get their information. So, like, yeah, Bezos quashed this endorsement for Harris, which I think is a troubling indication of the power of particular billionaires. But we’ve also over the past 10 to 15 to 20 years, seen a hollowing out of our media institutions, again, because of corporate concentration. Companies like Google that have dominated the ad space and destroyed the advertising revenue that supported an independent media and especially in independent media at a small scale that could actually serve communities. I think about how many communities now don’t have a reporter covering City Hall and the dangers that that leads to in terms of our trust and faith in democracy and decisions being made well. So I guess I just want to emphasize, I think that the concentration is an issue right at the top in terms of how the government is run, but it also is fundamentally damaging the other like important organs of democracy, which is our ability to get shared fact-based information.

Stacy Mitchell (19:12)

I’m so glad you brought up the local news thing because it’s so true. We have lost incredible numbers of local news outlets and it is really hurting democracy. You know, it’s striking to think about that in the context of what we’ve seen just recently in terms of like, I think it was ABC News, you know, they were sued by Trump for defamation and they decided to settle it, and pay his inauguration millions of dollars and say some other things. And you know, of course, ABC News is owned by a conglomerate, it’s run by stockholder interests who, you know, don’t want to take any risks. And you know, a local newspaper that’s, you know, just sort of a family-owned business in a community. They don’t really have, I mean, obviously they could be harassed, but they don’t have the same kind of stakes. And it seems to me that having a lot of local news outlets who are free to actually report and do things would be a much safer situation than a handful of conglomerates who are much more vulnerable to wanting to protect their bottom line, you know, and do someone’s bidding when they shouldn’t.

Reggie Rucker (20:20)

It strikes me that there’s this thread of accountability coming through this conversation as I continue to study the way our media landscape changes over time. I’ve heard some argue that your local newspaper was effectively a monopoly, right? It was going to be really hard to get your message out to the local public if you didn’t do it through your local newspaper. And I can speak to that from my early career running a digital marketing agency.

You know, so many of my clients were happy to finally have a choice outside of the Modesto Bee and could use Facebook advertising to reach local customers, right? But for me, these conversations are helpful in illuminating, even if you accept the argument of the local newspaper being somewhere further along the monopoly spectrum, there’s a level of accountability there that doesn’t exist with the Facebooks and the Googles of the world.

Stacy Mitchell (21:17)

You’re business or a newspaper and the owner is local, the ownership is local, there’s a higher risk if you do things that are contrary to the community’s interests. In part because you’re going to sometimes feel the blowback of that. if you’re a local business, are you going to campaign to like, you know, slash the taxes that your business pays when your kid is part of, you know, goes to the school system that’s going to be hurt by that. So, there’s a kind of connected way in which being part of the community makes you subject to the negative impacts of decisions that you might make and maybe makes you rethink those decisions. And there are reputational risks in the sense that, you know, if you’re a restaurant and you treat people that work for you really badly, especially in a smaller community, that has visibility and you know, people are, you know, potentially going to stop coming there. If you do that, that’s not, you know, I’m not saying that we don’t need laws and regulations and, and, and the like to prevent, bad behavior by businesses of all size sizes. But the fundamental way that businesses make decisions is different if it’s, if it’s locally held, because there’s an orientation to the community and you know, you’re, if you think about a corporation, you work at Amazon, like your status and sense of yourself comes from helping Amazon become bigger and more powerful. If you work at a community bank or a local newspaper or a small coffee shop, a lot of your sense of like, are you doing well in the world is, is whether or not your community is responding to that. And you know, that’s sort of your source of positive feedback and status and so on. And so, it sets up a healthier relationship. It’s not a fail safe for everything, but it’s a better orientation, I think, to having people make the right kinds of decisions that serve the common good.

John Farrell (23:19)

And I think it feeds right into the idea too about how big are those institutions, right? The problem, most of the political and corruption and like loss of faith problems that people have with the economy is when a company gets so large as to not feel accountable anymore. I’m reminded of a couple of examples. One is I was talking with the director of the electric utility, the municipally owned electric utility in Burlington, Vermont. And he talks about how like, I will see my customers in the grocery store, I know that I have to be accountable to them. Like if I want to raise rates on customers, I’m going to hear about it. And I’m not just going to hear about it when I’m at work. I’m going to hear about it all the time. Cause I live here. Like I’m, I’m not separate from the people who I’m serving.

Or I think about in Lafayette, Louisiana, which was building its own municipal broadband network. And the mayor there talked about the strangle effect that the advantage of a locally owned business or a locally run entity was that there was someone to reach out and strangle when you were frustrated by it. That, I, I just think that’s such a, an apt way it, you know, it plays into like the local news we talked about about the, that health, that healthcare CEO, right? Like somebody wanted a chance to like, have their issue dealt with and they couldn’t get it through the normal way that that system operated because that CEO is so insulated from the decisions that he makes for that company by so many layers of bureaucracy and the size of that company over so many states. So I think there is really like, it comes full circle. There’s this idea of accountability because of scale and also because of location and ownership. And so, I don’t worry as much about the Modesto Bee having a monopoly. I mean, and I don’t really think that it does effectively either because you have other media that people have access to, even if you don’t count social media and the internet, you know, like you said, there’s radio, might be magazines, et cetera. As long as it’s at a scale that people can compete with it and hold it accountable, I don’t think that’s a concern. And so I think the bigger problem we have right now is the vacuum. It’s the lack of any service that so many communities have, whether it’s a grocery store or a pharmacy or a newspaper, they have nobody that’s local to them.

Maybe they don’t have the service at all, or maybe the only access they have to the service is through some multinational corporation that doesn’t really care about the community and won’t be accountable.

Reggie Rucker (25:38)

So I want to start winding up this conversation and we’ve talked about the uncertainty and instability people are feeling, the fear, the chaos that surrounds our politics, the to buy influence. Where do we go from here?

John Farrell (26:00)

I mean, I’ll just say the thing that gives me hope is that so much of the control over how our economy works is not at the federal level. There are, of course, very important levers that are pulled at the federal level, whether that’s on antitrust or tax and credits and tax incentives for things and tax policy. But there’s also so much that’s done at the state and local level. know, who hauls the garbage away or decides whether we’re going to compost or is something that we get to decide at a municipal level, how we regulate our utility corporations and decide how much we have to pay for energy is at the state level in most places. So there’s, I do feel really optimistic that we still have lots of opportunities in the next four years to focus on those levels of government. And yeah, we’re probably going to get dragged into some federal things that might be unpleasant. Maybe there’ll be some promising federal things, you know, as Stacy has talked about, I think this interest in antitrust is beyond one particular political party at this point, because people are realizing it can explain why we have problems and that how it can address issues in our communities. So I don’t know, I do remain optimistic going into this, even as I remain concerned

Stacy Mitchell (27:10)

I think about 75 percent of ILSR’s work is state and local. And so that continues. There’s, you know, there’s enormous, as John said, there’s enormous authority that cities and states have, some of which is really untapped. And part of what we do is to work alongside communities to look at, well, here are the policy levers you have, here are the creative things that you could do. And then to spread those models across the country by sharing them with other communities who then, you know, develop them even further and their ideas spread and so on. And, we’re seeing that across all of the different areas of our work. You know, I’ve been asked a lot, since the election about what’s going to happen with antitrust. And, know, it’s really worth noting that, historically, states have been major leaders on antitrust. Our first antitrust laws were at the state level. They were the ones that inspired the federal government to pass the first antitrust laws at the national level. And when we look at, for example, the recent defeat of the Kroger Albertson’s merger, this is a huge mega merger in the grocery sector. The government, either state or federal, hasn’t even tried to stop a grocery merger in like decades. And in this case, we not only had a federal case to block this merger, we had two separate state cases to block this merger. And so and you know, we had decisions just recently, both in the federal case, the court came down and said, Yeah, this is a bad deal came down on the side of the government and in the Washington State case. And so we would have blocked that merger, you know, sort of regardless of what the federal government did. And we’re seeing a lot of activity right now, both on the part of state AGs, and also on the part of state lawmakers who are going, know, this corporate power thing is something that we’re experiencing directly from our, you know, hearing from our constituents. And we have a lot of ways in which we can address that both through state antitrust and through other kinds of measures that target particular industries and particular issues.

Reggie Rucker (29:14)

Stacy, you bring up the Kroger-Albersons merger that was blocked, and I want to pivot to a piece you wrote recently for the Atlantic describing how what we think of as food deserts didn’t really exist until the 1980s. And this was not coincidentally after we stopped enforcing a particular antitrust law. We’ll put a link to this article in our show notes as well. But in the nearly three years that I’ve been here, we’ve put out a lot of great analysis, but this one has gotten a reaction like nothing I’ve seen before from all corners of the country and all over the political spectrum. What do you think explains that?

Stacy Mitchell (29:55)

It’s interesting. Food deserts are a thing that have been around for a while now. the common explanation among both scholars and policymakers and, you know, the general consensus in the public is that communities that don’t have grocery stores are deficient in some way that there’s that they they don’t have the you know, they’re either too rural or too poor to support a grocery store, or they can’t overcome sort of a corporate pattern of, you know, racist redlining.

And going back and looking at the history and realizing that food deserts didn’t always exist, you know, poverty and ruralness have been with us for a long time, but food deserts only arrived in the late 1980s and in fact are the result of a very specific policy decision that was made in the 1980s that made it impossible for independent grocery stores to compete and then had this cascade of effects such that we have a large and growing number of Americans who live in places where there’s no grocery store.

The response to the piece has been just extraordinary. think, you know, there are a lot of folks who, you know, maybe work in food systems kinds of issues. So they’re trying to address the problem of food deserts or food access or food security, or there are people who experience that in their daily lives. You know, there are nearly 40 million Americans who live in food deserts. And so this just struck a nerve, you know, in part because it, you know, it explained something that has afflicted a lot of communities where we’ve mostly just blamed the communities, there’s something wrong with you, that supermarkets don’t want to be there. And, in fact, no, this is a policy decision. What is I think great about that reframing is it gives us an answer, and it does so in a way that’s empowering. It’s like, well, we can use government. Like government made a set of choices. Well, what if we used government to make a different set of choices?

It’s not just, you know, I chose to focus on grocery stores, but this also affects pharmacies and bookstores and all kinds of, you know, craft brewers, all kinds of local businesses. And so if we got this policy right, we really have the potential to see just like flourishing of new businesses and entrepreneurs and commercial activity in all kinds of communities right now that are really suffering without that. And in the process, kind of, you know, revitalization of community self-determination, which would help both our politics and our economy in really important ways. And so, you I’ve been really excited to see the response. And we’ve gotten tons of email coming into ILSR for people who want to work with us who are newly jazzed about antitrust and are like, Hey, how do we fix this?

We’ve got state lawmakers who are like, do we have a Robinson Patman Act, which is the primary law that’s at play here? Do we have a sort of mini version of that in our, in our state or how do we get that kind of price discrimination law into our state law? And so there’s suddenly a lot of activity on this issue and I’m, I’m, really excited to see it.

Reggie Rucker (33:14)

On that note, I have one last question before I let you all go. I spent a lot of time working on our 50th-anniversary content this year. And there’s a moment that’s been ringing in my mind from the short documentary we made covering our 50 years of building local power and fighting corporate control. And Stacy, there’s a moment when you’re reflecting on our role post financial crisis in 2008. And you talked about the world looking around, trying to explain what was happening, and ILSR having a set of answers. This also feels true of the turbulent period in the early 70s that we were born out of. Can you talk about how these sort of echoes from our work over time, how you think it informs our role moving forward today?

Stacy Mitchell (34:06)

I think you’re right about the echoes of this moment that we’re in with the past. It’s not exactly the same. It’s different in certain ways. But there is this sense of like, we need to come at our politics and our society in a different kind of way than we have been. And I think ILSR has a lot of solutions to that, and that there are communities that we’re working with across the country that are carrying those things out and pursuing those things. When we work with a community around building a community composting system, when we work on community solar or local business or community owned broadband, all of these things are like ins and of themselves, right? Like, building a publicly owned, municipally owned broadband network is great in and of itself, but also the process of doing it, of people coming together looking at a problem and working collectively at the local level, often in face-to-face real relationships, is a way of building a sense of collective agency and possibility. And it’s not surprising that we see communities that take on one of these kinds of projects, then go on to take on other kinds of projects and to solve things.

And so part of our theory of change is that by doing these kind of practical things together at the local level, people build a sense of the possibility and build a sense of their own power, especially their power when they work alongside their neighbors. And I think what’s exciting about where ILSR is right now is our ability to both do that at the local level and then also engage those same allies in trying to move state policy and in some cases, federal policy to shift the bigger structural dynamics that are, that can really open up more space to do even more of this kind of local self-reliance work.

Reggie Rucker (35:59)

I mean, Stacy, that theory of change tracks precisely with my own journey to ILSR. I I started as a small business, working with other small businesses in Modesto’s downtown and started seeing how local policy was really essential to our ability to do the things we wanted to do to build a healthy, vibrant, thriving community.

And as I found myself getting more involved in sort of the local policy side of things, working on like real infrastructure and social infrastructure, I started bumping up against sort of the state policies that were instrumental our success. So you’re right about this, just doing of the work that connects you to community, and also connects you to the practice of self-governance beyond just the voting every two or four years. Like that’s, spot on, spot on.

John and Stacy, I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much and I’ll see you on the other side of the new year.

John Farrell (36:59)

Thank you, Reggie.

Stacy Mitchell (37:00)

bye.

Reggie Rucker (37:01)

And thank you, our listeners for joining us on this final episode of building local power and 2024. We’ll be back again in two weeks where Danny Kane will continue our power play series, exploring how monopolies exploit structural racism to build their control over markets and eliminate choice in our lives. But in the meantime, you can always check out the show notes from this episode to get more insights on the topics we discussed today.

And, if this is a time of year where you are thinking about what to do with some of that extra holiday money, or simply want to donate to work that is focused every day on restoring a sense of ownership over our lives and communities, we hope you’ll consider us. You can give any amount at ILSR.org backslash donate. Any amount is truly, truly appreciated. This episode was produced by me, Reggie Rucker, and the show was edited by me alongside Téa Noelle.

The show’s music was also provided by Téa Noelle. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power.

• James Galbraith’s article in The Nation: Why Bidenomics Was Such a Bust
• Emerson College poll on reaction to UnitedHealthcare CEO killing
• Donate to ILSR