[P2P-F] Mormon social economy and CenterPlace Regional Development Strategy

[Michel Bauwens]

part one will be pubished on August 4, part 2 on August 5,

Michel

On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 9:42 PM, <adavans at aol.com> wrote:

>
> The CenterPlace Regional Development Strategy, Part II
>
> On my last post, I said I would write the bridge piece before I got to the
> CRDS Project Proposal itself.  I'm reworking a lot of that particular piece,
> and so I'll only be throwing about half at you.  Fortunately this half is
> very directly related to the proposal, and makes a fairly good outline of
> it.
>
> To summarize what I've spent so many words telling you so far, the Church
> is (ideally) the emerging Christian social order. One can assume that this
> social order develops according to a different pattern than the fallen
> thrones, principalities and powers.  Salvation, as we learned from Ephesians
> chapter 2 and 3 is a social event and process having to do with being
> reconciled and justified for a right relationship in the context of
> communion with God. The Church confronts the fallen powers with radically
> different patterns.  The fallen powers have designed and maintain fallen
> structures of social and economic development that led to inequities that
> God isn't willing to tolerate forever. By way of anecdote, God once had the
> Northern Kingdom of Israel exiled to Assyria when His Jubilee law was mocked
> once time too many.  Like the Devil, fallen powers presume possession and
> title to the Earth. The Church forecasts that the meek shall inherit the
> Earth.
>
> Signs of the Times
> You are likely aware of a process called 'globalization' and the 'third
> wave.'  The gist of globalization is that the nation-state is becoming less
> important as a player on the world stage, and that the emerging global order
> will be based upon the acts of city regions which are increasingly
> unfettered by national borders.
>
> To explain the forces actually driving city economies is to explain the
> decentralization taking place in North America and Europe.  It is to explain
> the unmistakeable emergence of city regions as the key actors in the
> emerging global order.
>
> Zion had been conceived of in part (through revelation) as an exercise in
> development of a city-region according to zionic patterns of development.
> This is important, because if the RLDS Church intends to  build a Christian
> social order with its own patterns of social and economic development, the
> local communities, the city regions, are the only plausible platforms on
> which to build its operating systems and structures.  It would be strange
> indeed for the Church to start any other way. Seen in this way, basing
> zionic development in part on the development of a city-region according to
> inspired and creative patterns should seem strange to no one.
>
> Not only must the Church consider city-regions and local communities as key
> to its stragegy, it must set a proper framework for three key elements in
> any economy:social structures of accumulation, innovation and land
> stewardship.
>
> To get some idea of what I mean when I refer to these social structures, it
> must be understood that there is a dynamic relationship between these
> structures of accumulation, innovation and land stewardship. For example,
> concentrated land ownership and land speculation may take away from the
> development of an industrial sector.  Land use patterns effect our quality
> of life. Land use patterns also determine wha type of transportation systems
> we must develop and pay for, whether we must commute to work, school and
> shopping centers, and it determines the cost of urban infrastructures in
> general.
>
> Economic organizations at micro and macro levels are manifestations of
> underlying "structures of accumulation" which determine access to capital as
> well as the pattern and mix of development and economic growth.
>
> One model that will be explored in part of this paper is that of the
> Mondragon Cooperatives in northern Spain. Mondragon's 150 plus
> employee-owned businesses ("EOBs") are organized as a federation with a
> contract of association with their bank, the Caja Laboral Popular. The
> relationship these firms and the employee-owners have with the Caja
> (organized under Spanish law as a credit cooperative) suggests how we may
> recast the Storehouse Treasury conceptually.
>
> As outlined by Bishop DeLapp in GCR 977, consecrations to the Storehouse
> Treasury are outright conveyances of ownership to the Church, that is, it's
> a transfer of ownership from the person making the consecration to the
> Storehouse Treasury. I find such an arrangement constraining on both the
> steward and the Storehouse Treasury, given the the Storehouse Treasury
> objectives of funding commercial, agricultural, residential and industrial
> development. To fund the Storehouse's economic development operations wwith
> such a narrow category of funds that outright conveyances are is to take the
> Storehouse Treasury out of the loop that contains pools of capital found in
> banks, insurance and pension reserves, and venture capital, among others.
>
> The most dynamic feature of Mondragon's bank is that it is a pool of
> finance capital democratically controlled by depositors and employee-owners
> of Mondragon's many enterprises. "Surplus" is accounted for at the level of
> the firm, each firm holding "collective" and "individual" internal capital
> accounts at their bank.  As you may recall, according to the Doctrine and
> Covenants the Storehouse Treasury is a pool of capital controlled by "the
> voice of the order".  If finance capital is held by an intermediary acting
> in a fiduciary capacity and democratically controlled, there is no need to
> deny individual ownership of a capital contribution held as an account.
>
> I recommend then that we conceive of the Storehouse Treasury as a "fund
> manager" managing a number of categories of funds, including a bank. Owing
> to the expense of starting a bank, I suggest that we draw upon the
> experience of community activists in Vermont. In 1989 activists explored
> starting a bank to serve community needs for affordable housing, community
> land trusts, employee-owned businesses, family and organic farms, community
> supported agriculture ("CSAs") and businesses innovative in ecological,
> educational and social spheres. It costs 7 to 10 million dollars to even
> think about making that loan and taking that first deposit.
>
> As an alternative the community activists approached Vermont National Bank
> and suggested that the bankset up a segregated banking operation. They
> called it the "Socially Responsible Banking Fund" ("SRB Fund") and it
> operates according to the criteria, priorities and guidelines set by the
> community group and fund depositors. Vermont National Bank depositors may
> designate their checking, savings and CD accounts as being part of the SRB
> Fund, maintaining FDIC insurance throughout. It's like having a credit union
> at the bank, except the crushing constraints that credit unions operate
> under in USAmerica do not exist.
>
> As mentioned above, there are over 150 Mondragon cooperative enterprises.
> Each employee-owner has one share (membership) and one vote. The federation
> and the enterpises are governed as parliamentary democracies. Checks and
> balances exist with four branches of government. Workers hire and fire their
> managers.
>
> Mongdragon's 30,000 plus employee-owners are considered by the Basque
> Autonomous Regional Goverment to be Basque Country's engine of economic
> growth and development. And it is no wonder that they consider it so.
> Mondragon's EOBs are not the result of acquisitions and buy-outs. They have
> developed over a 45 year period, incubated by its "secondary cooperatives"
> which provide every conceivable service a business, especially a start-up
> venture might need. During Mondragon's history, only 3 businesses were lost
> due to insolvency. Mondragon has thrived and expanded through Spain's deep
> and chronic recessions dating back to the mid-70s. While Spain has
> experienced unemployment as high as 27 percent, Mondragon had a brief
> experience with redundancy of 0.6 percent of its workforce in 1984.
> Mondragon's employee-owners are the best paid in Spain, and their firms are
> the most consistently profitable in Spain.
>
> Mondragon's cooperatives are in fact considered by regional economic
> development experts to be the textbook example of grassroots regional
> economic development. It's origin owes much to Catholic Social Doctrine,
> which has significant parallels to zionic doctrine.
>
> The Spanish dictator Franco terrorized the Basque people during the Spanish
> Civil War and imprisoned thousands of Basques for several years. He got
> around to releasing them well into World War II. One of the prisoners
> released was a young Catholic priest, Don Jose Maria Arrizmendiarietta
> ("Arrizmendi"). Upon his release he was assigned to a parish in the village
> of Mondragon (Assarate). Upon his arrival he was invited to teach
> Catholicism to the apprentices at a metal work firm. He noticed that the
> apprenticeship at that firm was the only educational opportunity in
> Mondragon beyond eighth grade, and that the program was available only to
> the sons of employees and 12 other youths. He attempted to persuade the
> employer to take more students but was declined. Father Arrizmendi then
> organized his parishioners to go bar-hopping throughout the region, drinking
> a little wine, nibbling a little goat cheese, and talking up a storm about
> the technical school they wanted to start with the help of the community. In
> 1943 the technical school opened its doors and taught its first courses in
> electricity and metal work.  The priest, as religion teacher of course,
> emphasized Catholic Social Doctrine to his students and taught them about
> cooperatives, particularly the Rochdale retail cooperatives in Britain. He
> wondered outloud to his class how industrial cooperatives could be operated
> according to the same principles that governed Rochdale retail co-ops.  Six
> students in his first graduating class started a stove manufacturing
> operation (now Spain's largest household appliance manufacturer) in 1956,
> operating according to the Rochdale principles.  Between 1956 and 1959
> several other employee-owned businesses formed and began to collaborate
> together.
>
> In the course of their collaboration they discussed common challenges and
> opportunities.  For example, because they were employee-owned businesses the
> employee-owners were considered by the Spanish government to be
> self-employed, and so excluded from the Spanish social security system.
> Because they were employee-owned businesses and hired and fired management,
> the role of management had to be fit to a new corporate culture.  Because
> their businesses were employee-owned, banks didn't understand their needs.
>
> The period between 1959 and 1967 was spent answering the tough questions
> they asked in 1959.  They organized a credit union in the parish basement
> that year and organized a number of supporting services they called
> "secondary coperatives" among them being an R&D laboratory, R&D
> arrangements, documentation and control sytems, "intervention" procedures,
> their own social security arrangements in the form of insurance and
> pensions, etc. The bank built the capability to guide prospective ventures
> from prefeasibility study to break-even point and beyond.  The technical
> school became a secondary cooperative, where students were acclimatized to
> Mondragon's cooperative and entrepreneural culture, and supplying Mondragon
> with its technical support, engineers and managers.
>
> The CenterPlace Regional Development Strategy is symbolized by a vision:
> the "Village Concept" or "CenterPlace Community Village". The village design
> itself can be thought of loosely as a zoning and land-use concept that
> brings urban life into conformity with the insights of "systems" theory, and
> most particularly "permaculture."  Permaculture is the "...conscious design
> and maintenance of productive ecosystems with the diversity, stability and
> resilience of natural ecosystems." (Bill Mollison). It results in the
> harmonious unity of landscape and people, providing their food, energy,
> shelter and other material and nonmaterial needs in a sustainable way.
> "Permaculture design is a system of assembling conceptual, material and
> strategic components in a pattern which functions to benefit life in all its
> forms"(Bill Mollison).
>
> But most importantly, the CenterPlace Community "Village Concept" is meant
> to build both a "visible" physical environment, delightful to the senses,
> and an "invisible" working environment that serves as the symbolic ground
> for human community.
>
> Permaculturalists feel that 'bio-regions' are the proper subject of their
> design discipline. I feel that a similar systematic approach to economic
> development would be overlaid with templates derived from the ecological
> metaphors of permaculture design because the proper scope and scale of
> economic development is that of city-regions and their localities.  I choose
> to refer to the product of such an ecologically-based overlay as the
> "CenterPlace Regional Development Strategy."
>
> We cannot compartmentalize our social and political economies form the
> ecosystem and expect to rise to whatever challenges both.  The destruction
> of our farms, forrests, and rivers makes manifest the "fallenness" of our
> social order. As long as the social order is ill, destructive and
> unbalanced, the biosphere will continue to be destroyed. Consequently wars
> and poverty will not cease. When designing any system we must take the
> economic development patterns and the biosphere both into account, and as we
> do, we will be better able to develop awareness, patterns of thought and
> learning, as well as applications that will help us to generate innovations
> in our regional social political economy.
>
> Centralized, bureaucratic organizations reliant upon 'econonmies of scale'
> are too rigid a platform upon whch to build social and political economies
> that are engaging, inclusive and broadbased. Corporations and national
> governments have long relied upon the force of resource intensive strategic
> planning ("extensive development"), seeking to control events and
> organizations according to rigid linear and hierarchical patterns, as well
> as through brute force.
>
> Communities seeking to control their own destinies must replace such
> heavy-handed means for an approach that is responsive, collaborative and
> adaptive to change.
>
> Why a Regional Development Strategy?
>
> A region is served by a city. It is the city in which are found leading
> economic systems and structures undergirding a region's economic platform.
> It is the city that generates a region's employment, markets and
> innovations. We have all heard of "globalization" and the "third wave". The
> gist of the process these terms describe is that the centralized
> nation-state is becoming less of a player on the world-stage and
> consequently the emerging global order will be based on the acts of
> city-regions increasingly unfettered by national boundaries and norms.
>
> Nowhere is this more graphically illustrated than in Europe, which has seen
> the revival of several ancient city-regions, often cutting across national
> borders and fast attaining political and economic importance in the European
> Union tha trivals that of most European nation-states.
>
> Jane Jacobs, in her acclaimed book "Cities and the Wealth of Nations"
> describes the phenomena that lead to the creation of city-regions, the
> city-regions that are now and always have been, subverted the rigid and
> heavy-handed hegemony of nation-states. Economic development and growth,
> according to Jacobs, are the result of processes taking place in cities.
> Cities can be thought of as the true organisms of economic development and
> growth.  Cities provide a framework and mechanisms for the organization and
> assimilation of capital, labor, R&D, etc. "Economies develop by grace of
> innovation and grow by force of import replacement."
>
> Cities and Market Economies
> Cities innovate when there is a social structure of innovation present that
> can develop new technologies, new processes and new products. Industries
> cluster in cities where universities and firms with large R&D budgets are
> found. At the same time, "cities are where real markets are and where real
> work gets done."
>
> City economies grow when they can assimilate the new developments in
> technology, processes and products that have been developed elsewhere. This
> assimilation takes place whe there is labor/skill competencies enough and
> capital enough to replace a city's imports with its own production.
>
> Cities replace imports they can afford to buy with their own production and
> export that production most feasibly to cities occupying similar places on
> the "ladder of economic development" and become new competitors to cities
> that developed the innovations initially.
>
> Cities are therefore in one of two phases of the development cycle: a
> development/export phase and an import/import replacement phase. Cities in
> different phases of their economic development now exist in the same
> centralized nation-states with the same uniform tax, banking, industrial
> policy and monetary schemes enforced indiscriminantly on all cities within
> the nation-state regardless of what particular phase a city may be in.  This
> "goofy" hegemony exercised by nation-states creates faulty feedback to
> cities because the feedback generated is aggregated and undifferentiated,
> another example of a signal processing disaster.
>
> Currencies are the gatekeepers that regulate an economy's flow of exports
> and imports. Jacobs suggests that since city-regions are where the real and
> meaningful economic processes take place, city-regions ought to have their
> own currencies.
>
> Regional Capital Formation
> Jacob's suggestion that city-regions adopt their own currencies provide
> much of the basis for the CRDS approach to regional capital formation.  When
> contemplating the possbility of a regional currency the immediate question
> comes to mind of hwo to back a new currency. One can back a currency with
> commodities, renewable resources, solar electricity, etc. The possibilities
> are nearly endless.
>
> I believe initial backing of a regional currency with the existing national
> currency offers some opportunities that ought not be passed up. We are in
> USAmerica, so the CenterPlace Region wold initially back its regional
> currency with the US Dollar.  The immediate benefit of such backing is that
> US Dollars are captured in reserve as the regional currency is placed into
> circulation.
>
> In addition, the CRDS calls for the creation of a segregated banking
> operation modeled on that of the Vermont National Bank's Socially
> Responsible Banking Fund. Deposits are lent out by Vermont National Bank
> according to the criteria, priorities and guidelines set by a community
> group in Vermont.
>
> It is within our segregated banking operation, the "Storehouse Banking
> Fund" ("SBF") that we would place the US Dollar reserves, placing into
> circulation the regional currency and insuring that the US Dollar reserve
> backing the regional currency will be deployed according to CRDS criteria,
> priorities and guideline drawn from zionic and permacultural patterns.
>
> Once capital is captured in the form of US Dollar reserve, a boundary is
> placed around the regional market. To some degree then, the regional market
> is also captured, or more accurately, liberated, from the logic of
> unaccountable corporations and centralized bureaucratic government.
>
> Social Structures of Innovation, Accumulation and Land Stewardship
>
> Every social and economic system is characterized by specific social
> structures of innovation, wealth accumulation, and land stewardship.  These
> structures have a dynamic relationship one with the other. For example,
> social structures of accumulation determine who has access to capital,
> control of capital, who benefits from the use of capital and furthermore it
> also determines the structure and organization of enterprise, where the
> norms of a given social structure are enforced and most deeply felt and
> seen.
>
> In turn, a social structure of land stewardship goes right to the ethical
> root of how we see our relationship to this Earth and one to another.
> Because land is a finite resource upon which we make increasing demands, a
> social structure of land stewardship will determine the allocation of wealth
> due to productivity of labor and capital.  For example, when land is traded
> as a marketable commodity like sugar, lumber or pork bellies, speculation
> and concentrated patterns of land ownership will result.  As an economy
> expands and makes further investments in plant, equipment and office space,
> a greater portion of investment is overtaken up in overhead related to the
> expense of land use.....
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