Citizen Media - The Stories We Must Tell

We come on the ship they call the Mayflower,

we come on the ship that sailed the moon;

We come in the age's most uncertain hours

and sing an American tune...

– Paul Simon, American Tune

As I have said in previous posts, corporate media is a tool of the present masters (owners of the major pieces) of our economic and political systems, and is used by these masters to enforce the present status quo. This is done by telling the story of the rich as if it was the only legitimate story, by marginalizing the stories of the poor, and by suppressing any dissent to the present system. Thus corporate media is unwilling to accurately depict the failings of and threats to the prevailing system, or to state the need for alternatives that threaten the power of the masters of this system.

So we hear of green shoots instead of plain evidence of continued economic collapse; Peak Oil is never discussed; major newspapers write editorials against genuine health care reform; and the threat of man-made climate change is not publicized. When alternatives to the present system are discussed, their discussion in corporate media is frequently in disparaging tones (as when describing those “frugal doomer/survivalist loonies riding bicycles and raising chickens!!!”). When the rich prosper (as in stock prices rising due to corporations cutting costs and returning dividends), this is held up as a sign that the economy is recovering – even though hundreds of thousands of ordinary people are still being thrown out of work each month.

When left to itself, corporate media ignores the stories of the exploitation of the poor by the rich. When the poor rise up against such exploitation, their action is either not covered at all, or is too frequently called “agitation,” “terrorism,” “militancy,” or some other derogatory term. Corporate media portrays certain segments of humanity unsympathetically in order to legitimize the robbing, exploitation and general mistreatment of these segments by the rich masters of First World society.

Citizen media is a countermeasure to all of this, a weapon by which the poor and powerless can defend themselves. Citizen media is the means by which we can tell our story when no one else will. Here are some stories we should be telling:

• The general stories of our communities and of the people in them. This is especially important for poor people and minority neighborhoods. When mainstream America sees that we are just as human as the subjects favored by the media, they can't easily oppress us in good conscience. They can't so easily write our neighborhoods off as merely another “high-crime” area or “blight district.” Create a biographical sketch of the people of your place, of their hopes and fears and struggles and humanity.

• The things we are doing to make our communities a better place. This includes not just general betterment, but also steps to make our places resilient in the face of economic collapse and resource constraints. Show the world your care for your place by showing the investment of time and effort that you are putting into your community.

• The actions taken by some of our economic and political masters to break our neighborhoods, destroy our resiliency and exploit us. By publicizing these stories, we make it harder for the big people to get away with what they are doing. Talk especially about the things being done by the big guys (both corporate and governmental) to thwart the things ordinary people are doing to make their communities better and more resilient.

These stories must be told in a format that is of high quality, regularly updated and readily accessible. This will mean hard work for would-be citizen journalists if they want to turn out a quality product. (I can testify that trying to write a quality blog is hard work! It takes a serious investment of time.) But those who rise to such a calling will find that it's quite rewarding. A case in point is the example of Ralph Kennedy and those with him who founded the Fullerton Observer, a local independent paper based in Fullerton, California. The Observer is available both in hard copy and on the Web as a free download. I recently asked Ralph's daughter Sharon Kennedy for some background information on the Observer as well as thoughts on running a community newspaper. Here is her response:

“The Observer was started on a shoe-string by a group of friends after the OC Register bought up the local hometown paper (and 31 others) and turned it into an advertising rag. The friends each had their interest in a certain part of the town such as city hall, police relations, homeless issues, affordable housing, transportation and bike trails, education, keeping some open space, etc. or accomplished other tasks such as pasting up (before computers), driving to the printer, picking up the papers and distributing them.

“Each reported on meetings and happenings around town on their issue and each contributed money to the paper for years before it became self-sustainable. Over the years the paper has had an influence on numerous issues and has made the town of Fullerton, one of the better towns in OC. It also created a sense of community by offering citizens a place to sound out and find others with the same concerns. And since it is read by Fullerton officials, these concerns reached city hall in a different way and built support or opposition which improved our town in one way or another. The paper helps keep officials and institutions accountable to the people of the town.

“The paper also served local entertainment by letting people know what was offered right here in town and local businesses by providing inexpensive ad space so they could offer their services and products. It is a very rewarding all-volunteer community written paper which makes it unique. All towns used to have a hometown newspaper. Another effect of the paper has been to make the OC Register have to create a more adequate version of the Fullerton paper they bought. My father, the founding and longtime editor Ralph Kennedy felt independent newspapers are necessary for a healthy democracy.”

One final note is in order. Citizen media now relies heavily on Web-based tools such as blogs. But we must also begin to look beyond the Web to other means of cheaply and easily broadcasting our stories. This is especially true now that the freedom of the Web in America is coming under increased scrutiny from the United States government (as in the proposed Cybersecurity Act of 2009). Of course, the governments of several other nations, including China and Iran, are already trying to restrict the freedom of Internet communication for their citizens. Therefore we must not put all of our citizen media eggs in one Web basket.

Citizen journalists may therefore need to rely more exclusively on “old-fashioned” means of distribution such as hard-copy community newspapers. But there are other means of sharing electronic media beside the Web – especially with the availability of cheap memory sticks, CD burners, and such. We may see the revival of the “sneakernet,” as described in the following link: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/02/sneakernet-beats-internet.html.

Reckoning A Living Wage

The last few posts of this blog have covered the key role of local businesses and local economies in promoting neighborhoods and communities that are resilient in the face of Peak Oil, climate change and economic collapse. Local businesses that have the greatest chance of early success will be those that make or repair necessary or highly beneficial material goods, or that provide essential or highly beneficial services, for market niches that cannot be easily serviced by the global “official” economy due to incompatibilities of scale. By incompatibilities of scale I mean that these market sectors are small enough and/or scattered enough that they can't be served by the mass-produced, mega-chain store approach that is typical of large-scale businesses. Of course, as economic contraction and collapse proceeds, an ever-expanding number of markets and people will be abandoned by the official economy, leaving more room for the rise of local businesses and local economies.

One key question for someone seeking to start his own local business is how much to charge for goods produced or services rendered. A big part of this question is for the prospective small businessman to figure out how much income he needs to live on, and this in turn is influenced by the state of the prospective market – that is, how much the businessman's customers are willing and able to pay for the goods and services rendered. The calculation of the businessman's required income can be stated another way: he must calculate what constitutes a living wage for himself and his dependants and employees.

The calculation of a living wage can be influenced by any number of factors. Many people start with a picture of a desired lifestyle, and by means of simple mental arithmetic they come up with the income required for that desired lifestyle. Our uniquely American problem is that almost everyone who watches TV (and a sizable number of people who don't) has been trained to imagine a very lavish lifestyle, and to want an income to match. Most of the celebrities and influential figures in our country are afflicted with this disease, and they will resort to desperate measures when their income doesn't match their desired lifestyle. Names like Donald Trump, Bernie Madoff, and Kim Basinger come to mind.

This diseased state of mind isn't confined to the rich and famous, as events of the last few years have shown how many Americans lived far beyond their means. And this mindset is a hindrance to the correct process of reckoning a living wage. The correct process begins, not by formulating a picture of a desired lifestyle, but by figuring out how much customers are willing and able to pay for the goods and services offered by a prospective local business. If a woman opens a shoe repair shop in a rural town in Kentucky, and hopes to have ten customers a day and gross $50 for each repair job, she's likely to be disappointed if the town's residents are so poor that they can only afford $5 or $10.

I'd like to suggest that those Americans who want to start local businesses should reckon their figure for a living wage downward, because the ability of most people to pay for goods and services is decreasing. This is due to three factors:

1. First, the global economy (and the large-scale American economy) is now contracting, due to constraints in the availability of natural resources necessary to supply the economy. It is becoming more evident that the world has passed the peak in global oil production, and that oil production is now beginning to fall. We have already seen peaks in other resources including metals and rare-earth elements. Peak coal is not far away. The availability of fresh water is also declining, due to overuse of rivers and drought-induced climate change. Some analysts say that the world experienced Peak Phosphorus (especially inorganic phosphates) in the 1980's. (Source: http://phosphorusfutures.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=16&Itemid=30) Phosphorus is a key ingredient of agricultural fertilizers. Resource constraints and exhaustion mean a shrinking economy, and a shrinking economy means less income for each member of that economy.

2. Second, the concentrated wealth of the United States, as well as the lavishness of the American lifestyle, have been built on a foundation of military conquests, trade agreements and treaties that facilitated the concentration of the world's wealth in this country, and in the hands of the ruling elites of this country. Thus, for instance, the U.S. has only five percent of the world's population, yet uses over 40 percent of the world's oil. Now those complex arrangements of military might and slanted treaties are starting to unravel. Net oil imports to the U.S. have been declining for the last few years as oil rich nations have become wealthier and have begun to use more of their own oil. Foreign nations are becoming much less willing to buy U.S. debt, and are turning away from the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency, due in part to the huge debts for which the U.S. government is already liable.

3. The collapse of credit worldwide which precipitated our present economic crisis has also resulted in the loss of access to credit for ordinary people, who are now forced to live within their means. The means of ordinary people are shrinking as companies, stung by failing revenues and their own lack of access to credit, lay off ever larger numbers of employees. The increasing layoffs and downward pressure on living standards are the evidence of a shrinking global economy and shrinking American access to the goods and services provided by that global economy.

A word about point #2 above is in order. Some analysts and “collapse thinkers” have voiced the possibility of a sudden, near-term collapse of the arrangements which underlie the American lifestyle – perhaps through a massive sell-off of foreign-held U.S. debt, or a Federal default on U.S. debt, or a sudden crash in oil production or oil exports. If that happens, there will be a swift and sudden decline in the standard of living of most Americans, since we depend on imported goods for so many things. To cite just one example of the scale of this decline, consider what would happen if the American five percent of the world's population that now uses 40 percent of the world's oil woke up one day to find that they now had access to only five percent of the world's oil. On a per capita basis, this would be roughly equivalent to each American finding out that his or her income had suddenly been cut to one-eighth its former value.

Now a per capita estimate of the effects of such a collapse is necessarily flawed, as wealth is not equally distributed in this country. Nor is access to wealth. In the event of such a crisis, it follows that some people would hardly be affected, while a large number of people would be thrown into grinding poverty. Yet it seems quite likely that whether this happens suddenly or gradually, our nation is moving toward a condition in which we have access only to our fair share of the world's resource base – and that the non-renewable part of that base will be continually shrinking. Under these conditions, the sort of small businesses that survive will be those whose proprietors offer necessary goods and services at an affordable price, and who are able to stay in business because they have scaled their own needs back to a level that's sustainable over the long haul.

Here then are some good questions: Could you live on an income that's one-eighth or less of your present income? If not, what steps could you take to simplify your life so that you could live on a drastically reduced income? How much can the citizens of your locality actually afford for the goods and services you propose to sell them? Are these goods and services really so essential or beneficial that people are likely to buy them?

Swinging Your Own Hammer

In my post, Localism And Resilient Neighborhoods, I discussed the importance of building and supporting local economies as a part of building resilient neighborhoods. Of course, building local economies means the revival of a great number and variety of local businesses that were destroyed by the rise of globalism and the concentration of massive amounts of capital in the hands of a small number of national and global elites. The revival of local businesses that actually make or repair the material goods needed for everyday life is a key element of neighborhoods and communities that can survive large-scale economic shocks caused by the failure of the global economy – a failure that is occurring right now due to the collapse of the resource base needed to sustain that global economy.

A key question is whether now is the right time to begin reviving and/or building local economies, and the necessary businesses that make up such economies. That question can be answered on two levels. On one level, the answer is “Of course this is the right time! In fact, we should have started yesterday, given our precarious, crumbling national economy and the coming economic shocks caused by our post-Peak resource base.” But I'm asking a different question, namely, whether people who are trying to rebuild a local economy in their locality can get away with it at this time.

I believe that at present, an increasing number of people are starting to resent the official economy and the conditions under which they are forced to participate in it. I believe that these people would gladly turn to alternatives if these alternatives were readily available. Yet the masters of this official economy and of the big businesses that comprise this economy are actively working to prevent the emergence of alternatives. In this they are willing to use any tools at their disposal, including the lobbying of politicians in order to make it hard for people to pursue alternatives. The sudden emergence of many local economies based primarily on large numbers of small local businesses would constitute a threat to the “official” global economy and its dominant players. Therefore I am not asking whether “we” should formulate some grand policy for reviving local economies, nor am I asking whether we should try to enlist the help of our government at the Federal or State level to promote such a policy. Rather, I'm asking, “If I want to start a local business that both makes and sells useful things, can I get away with it at this time? Or will I be driven out of business?”

To put the problem another way, the official global economy is like a huge, vicious pit bull that has suddenly shown up in the front yard of a home. Inside is a group of children who are trying to escape from the house, but they are rightly afraid of the pit bull. They have already lost a couple of their comrades who tried to make a break for it and were caught in the jaws of this evil mutt. But a Providential event has befallen them in that the pit bull has just knocked over a trash can and eaten some really gross, poisonous garbage. Now he's looking quite sick, and the children are starting to think he may die – or at least that he might be sick enough that they could outrun him and get away from that house. Yet they're not quite sure – so they converse back and forth along the following lines, “I think maybe he's dead. Wanna check it out?” “No way, man! You go first.” “Chicken!” “You see what that dog did to Jimmy's leg, don't you?” “Maybe if we throw a stick at it, we can see if it's still alive...”

Is the official economy sick? Absolutely. Those who depend on that economy for their livelihoods are being jettisoned from that economy in staggering numbers. The “official” unemployment rate in the United States is now 9.1 percent, although if you check out Shadowstats (http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data), the actual rate is over 20 percent. Is the Government, the enabler of that official economy sick? One way to answer that is to note that the Federal government depends heavily on debt, and foreign nations have grown increasingly reluctant to buy U.S. debt. Many state governments are in much worse shape. (California is the present poster child.) Is modern industrial society feeling well? Consider that there is now abundant evidence that global oil production is past peak and in decline, and that U.S. commercial crude inventories have been falling consistently by 3 to 4 million barrels every week for the past two to three months. Oil – the original topic of this blog, as well as the cause of our present economic collapse – is about to assume a central role in our story once again.

Is there still some “bite” left in the jaws of this pit bull? Unfortunately, yes. Consider government, for instance. There are several “food safety” bills now making their way through the United States Congress, bills that, if signed into law, would drive small farms and food producers out of business by creating such an expensive regulatory burden that only the biggest agribusinesses could survive. It's not surprising that large food corporations like General Mills, Kraft Foods and W.M. Kellogg have endorsed this legislation. There was also the “Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act” passed earlier this year ostensibly to protect children from lead and toxic chemicals. What the law actually accomplished was to saddle small American producers of children's toys with a crushing burden of required tests on products that obviously did not contain lead in the first place. These cases illustrate the strategy of big business, when faced with a crisis caused by a lack of safety in products produced by big business. That strategy is to promote legislation that does not forbid the big business practices that lead to dangerous products, but that rather saddle all businesses with a regulatory burden so heavy that it can only be borne by big businesses. Thus they drive smaller businesses out of business.

The use of governments to promote the policies of big business is but one of the strategies of big business. There are the other strategies – economies of scale, specialization, large-scale automation and the use of cheap labor in a globalized economy. Do you want to make something for a living? How about custom handmade guitars? It is certainly possible to make a decent living as a luthier, as long as you have a good reputation for quality products. Some well-known custom and semi-custom luthiers come to mind, such as Linda Manzer, Kevin Ryan, Grit Laskin and George Lowden, and their instruments can command a price of several thousand dollars each. Yet China has recently emerged as a lutherie powerhouse, and Chinese instruments of high quality can be had very cheaply, due to low labor costs and cheap fossil fuel-based transport. Last year's oil price spike put a temporary crimp in globalism, but that spike has gone away for the present.

Okay, then, how about bicycles? China's prominence is true in spades here. Almost every inexpensive bike sold in the USA is made in China. Yet it is also becoming true that expensive, supposedly “custom” bikes are also made in “low-cost” overseas locations. Consider the offerings of Rivendell Bicycle Works, a seller of “custom” bikes that were at one time all made in the United States. The majority of their most popular models are now made in foreign countries such as Japan (for the Rivendell Atlantis) and Taiwan (for the Sam Hillborne). Now don't get me wrong. I really like Rivendell and respect the company, and I know they aren't exactly rolling in dough. But even they have been somewhat altered by globalism. My point is that making a living in the First World by making things in the First World is still fraught with difficulty, unless you're a really big player.

So what's a person to do if they want to start a local business? What should be the focus of their business? This question is no doubt uppermost in the minds of many people who see that the official globalist system is breaking and who are looking for some sort of escape. Yet such people may feel trapped, people whose education has “...prepared [them] solely for working in a large organization,” and who can't imagine earning a living otherwise, as Matthew B. Crawford says in his book, Shop Class As Soulcraft.

Crawford's book is a deliciously subversive critique of modern globalism, and of white-collar culture and all its support institutions, including schools that teach useless factoids while destroying common sense. To those looking for a localist escape from the breaking globalist system, Crawford suggests finding work that essentially requires human craft of the kind that can only be gained through experience, and that can only be handed down through apprenticeship. This sort of work can't be globalized, outsourced, automated or exploited over an Internet connection. He suggests “finding work in the cracks,” work that is not being done by the official global economy because its scale or scope does not fit the large scale suited to the organs of the global economy.

Figuring out where the “cracks” are and what sort of work can be done in the cracks is a challenge I leave to you, the reader. (It's certainly a challenge I myself am facing.) But I leave you with some suggested avenues of exploration for finding such work. These were written by Ahavah Gayle, author of the blog Shalom Bayit, and are found in a series on that blog titled, “The Collision With The Reality Train – What Can We Do?” The relevant post is here: Repost: Third and Final part. Enjoy!

(P.S. I once got to see a Rivendell Atlantis as I was coming home from work and waiting at a MAX platform. It belonged to a middle-aged lady who was also a bike commuter. I came up to her and said, “Is that a Rivendell Atlantis? Can I drool over it?!” She said, “Sure! Do you need a bib?” Those bikes are cool.)

Sources:

• “Are Foreign Investors Losing Interest In US Treasury Bonds?”, Christian Science Monitor, 15 June 2009, (http://features.csmonitor.com/economyrebuild/2009/06/15/are-foreign-investors-losing-interest-in-us-treasury-bonds/)

• “General Mills, Kraft Seek Safety Rules In 'Philosophical Shift'”, Bloomberg, 4 March 2009 (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?sid=aRnLL61d9xmc&pid=20601087)

• “Made In China,” Strings Magazine, October 2003 (http://www.stringsmagazine.com/issues/strings113/china.html)

• Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into The Value Of Work, Matthew B. Crawford, The Penguin Press, 2009

Localism And Resilient Neighborhoods

This week, I'd like to resume discussion of building resilient neighborhoods as preparation for Peak Oil, climate change and economic collapse. In this post, I will emphasize the importance of supporting local economies as a part of the building process. In an earlier post, Our Least Resilient Neighborhoods, I said the following: “Building resilient neighborhoods therefore consists of devising effective defenses against breakage [of neighborhoods], repairing the culture of the neighborhoods and fostering neighborhood self-sufficiency.” One key element of neighborhood self-sufficiency is financial self-sufficiency – that is, being as free as possible from the claims of the official money economy. This means either not having huge financial obligations, or having locally-owned, locally-controlled means of meeting the obligations one has, or both.

As a practical example, consider a homeowner who wants to become more self-reliant and less susceptible to economic collapse. Let's assume that his house is on a fairly decent lot (around 6000 to 7000 square feet), and that he has started “farming” his front and back yards in order to provide some of his own food. Let's also give this man a clothesline and some chickens in his backyard and assume that he has saved up a bit of money to pay for super-insulating his house and installing a simple rainwater catchment system under his roof gutters.

This is all well and good. The man is pursuing financial self-sufficiency by providing for his needs in a way that reduces his need to spend money over the long run. But let's assume that he “owns” his home only in the sense that he is paying a mortgage. If we give this guy a two bed, one bath house and assume that he bought it in Southern California between 2000 and 2007, he probably has a sizable mortgage payment (say, around $1800 a month if he bought it before prices really took off). That's a significant financial burden, a significant obligation to the official money economy. Even if we assumed that the homeowner in question owned his home outright, he would still have to pay property taxes as part of the cost of living in a city. Yearly taxes for this man's house would probably run between $2500 and $3000. That money would have to come from somewhere. If he didn't pay it, the County would foreclose on his house and he would be homeless.

So how does this guy get the money? Until recently, the answer to this was, “By participating in the official economy.” In the overwhelming majority of cases, that meant getting a job from an employer. Now, this employer demands a certain amount of work, as well as a certain level of personal preparation, skill and competence. The employee must spend some of himself in his labors and in his preparation to perform his labors competently (i.e., in schooling and self-study). The employee's labors generate wealth for the employer, who returns some of that wealth to the employee as compensation for his labors.

This arrangement works tolerably as long as the employer returns a fair share of the wealth generated by the employee's labors, and as long as the cost of goods and services required by the employee do not exceed his compensation from his employer. But whereas that may have been true of American employers and employees before 1980, it is certainly not true now. The trends of deregulation and globalism, pushed by corporations and corporatist politicians from 1980 onward, have produced a world in which an ever-larger share of the fruits of the labors of workers are skimmed off and sent to a small “club” of ever-richer ruling economic elites, while an ever-smaller portion of the wealth generated by those labors is returned to the laborers. Thus, for instance, there is an expanding class of recent college graduates who can't get work paying more than $10 or $15 an hour. (See http://legacy.decaturdaily.com/decaturdaily/livingtoday/050516/degree.shtml, http://www.impactlab.com/2007/04/30/study-growing-number-of-college-graduates-classified-as-poor/, and http://www.newser.com/story/58492/college-grads-face-years-of-lower-wages.html. Or if you're in college now, maybe you should skip reading these. I don't want to depress you.)

Meanwhile, the cost of necessities such as housing and health care skyrocketed during the period between 1980 and the last two years. In fact, the cost of health care is still climbing. And the rise in the cost of an education has outpaced the nominal national inflation rate. These rising costs have led to massive indebtedness, which does not make for a very resilient or self-reliant situation for most people. Organic farmers know that soils can become exhausted when they are over-farmed without returning returning adequate amounts of dead plant and animal matter back to the soil. In the same way, most American workers are becoming depleted and exhausted as the majority of the wealth generated by their labors is taken away from them by greedy faraway corporate masters who do not give back enough to maintain the workers on whom they depend. All these things mean that it has gotten much harder for people to meet their financial obligations to the official economy by working in that economy.

This is why localism has become such an attractive concept recently. The premise of localism is the local control and ownership of means of generating wealth, where profits generated by local businesses stay in the community in which these businesses reside. Thus the fruits of the labors of local workers remain in the communities of these local workers, providing them with the nourishment they need in order to continue their labors. If, for instance, a person worked for a fairly-run local business and her labor generated $50,000 a year in wealth for the business, it is far more likely that she'd be compensated with a fair share of that $50,000 than it would be if she worked for some multinational, publicly traded corporation. Thus it is far more likely that she'd be able to pay her bills – including her housing bill, whether that meant rent, a mortgage, or property tax, and that she could do this without having to work like a dog.

One other important aspect of the “official” economy is that it requires continual growth to function properly, and that it is now breaking because it can no longer grow. The masters of this economy – the majority shareholders, CEO's, corporate presidents and so forth – still expect and demand ever-increasing profits. Therefore, they have not only been cutting laborers from their workforce wherever they can, but they have been driving the remaining laborers ever harder. Those who are still bound to the global economy are therefore increasingly losing control over their lives and their time. (An example: “WANTED: Certified QXZ Engineer for ABC process control. Must be goal-oriented, self-starter, highly motivated to bring the client the best possible value for the lowest price. Must be willing to travel at least 20 percent of the time. ABC is a fast-paced, dynamic place for hungry, rising stars willing to grab all they can.” Translation: “You will live in a hotel at least one week per month and work like a dog at least 60 hours a week. You will also be on call evenings and weekends.”) Proper participation in a properly organized local economy allows people to regain some control over their lives while meeting their needs.

So what are some desirable characteristics of a locally-owned business? First, it must truly be 100 percent locally owned – not a mere franchise of some national or global business. McDonald's, New Seasons Market and Whole Foods Market don't count. Neither does Valero Petroleum, NBC or Clear Channel. Second, it must be entirely locally controlled. This follows from the first condition, since those who own a business get to run the business. A business run by faraway masters is not local. Of the various local business models, a cooperative model is one of the most attractive. Examples of cooperatives in Portland include Citybikes Workers Co-op and People's Food Co-op. Third, it must return a fair share of its profits back to its employees. At the very least, it must be able to pay a “living wage.” Lastly, its profits must be spent predominantly within the community in which it resides. A business which sends the majority of its profits out of the community is a drain on the community, and is not truly local. This also means that local businesses need a supplier base that is also predominantly local in order to keep profits within the local community as much as possible.

In light of these characteristics, what can be said about some of the recent advertising by large corporations who want to portray themselves as “local”? In my post, "Localism" And Truthfulness, I described a few corporations whose advertising I had recently heard or seen. Feel free to check out that post and answer for yourself whether these businesses are truly “locally owned.” But I want to ask another question, namely, how “local” does a business have to be in order to be truly “local”?

I ask this question because of a billboard I saw last week as I was on the way home from work. It was an advertisement for Darigold Farms, and it showed a burly guy with a mustache standing in a field of some kind of grain, with the caption, “Your Local Farmer” underneath. Now, there are some good things to be said for Darigold. First, it is a farmer-run cooperative that offers hormone-free milk among its product lines, and second, it does have a number of operations that are “local” to the Pacific Northwest. But is it truly “local” on smaller scales, such as the individual cities in which its operations are based? How much local control is exercised in each place where such companies have their operations? How much local say is there over how locally-generated profits are used? These are questions that successful cooperatives will have to answer for themselves, as some of them grow beyond the boundaries of the communities in which they first started.

"Localism" And Truthfulness

I'm in Southern California this week for a job assignment. I drove down on Sunday. Yes, that's right – I drove instead of flying. Having witnessed the death of several airlines during the last oil price super-spike, I figured that the surviving airlines may be going beyond such well-known cost-cutting measures as charging extra for all luggage and cutting back on in-flight snacks. They may also be cutting back on maintenance and mechanics' salaries. Accuse me of being overly suspicious if you like. I don't want to find out the hard way that my suspicions are right.

Anyway, I was driving through some town – I don't remember if it was Grant's Pass or Ashland – when I saw a very curious sight. It was a billboard advertising a TV station, a local NBC affiliate. Among other things, the billboard proudly portrayed this station as “locally-owned,” with a strong “community connection.” I thought it strange that the “locally-owned” label was being applied to a TV station that's part of a national media corporation's broadcasting network.

But that wasn't all. A bit farther on, in Redding or thereabouts, I was listening to a classic rock station as its DJ was giving the station identification announcement, which enthusiastically stated that this station was “locally programmed.” Again, I was struck by the oddness of this announcement, especially since this station sounded very much like other oldies stations I've heard on trips between Portland and So. Cal., and it was playing the very same “oldies greatest hits countdown” I had heard on another oldies station a minute or two beforehand. This was followed a while later by a commercial for a Chevy dealership which boasted that it was “locally owned and family operated.”

These instances show how deeply and swiftly the “localism” meme is penetrating the American consciousness. Many ideas that would have been considered unacceptably countercultural even a few years ago are now going mainstream, as more and more Americans are looking for alternatives to our breaking “official” systems. Unfortunately, the masters of those existing official systems often try to co-opt the alternatives. Frequently, this co-opting takes the form of re-branding and re-packaging the official systems to make them look like the alternative.

This, of course, is known in plain English as lying. I think I heard and saw a few lies on Sunday. It is now well known that building and supporting local economies is one of the keys to building resilient communities that are able to survive the exigencies of Peak Oil, climate change and economic collapse. One key to supporting local economies is for local residents to buy from local businesses. But I always thought a “local business” was defined thus:

• 100 percent local ownership (no “owners” or “part-owners” who are far away)

• 100 percent local control (as in management and oversight)

• Characterized by a revenue stream which flows from local residents to the local business and back again, with the vast majority of that revenue stream staying in the local community.

Based on this definition, I don't see how the businesses whose ads I saw and heard could try to sell themselves as “locally owned.” Maybe the phrase “locally owned” is now under attack, just as big agribusiness is trying to hijack the term “locally grown” (see http://earthfirst.com/is-food-still-%E2%80%98local%E2%80%99-if-it%E2%80%99s-grown-by-a-nationwide-brand/, for instance), and as big agribusiness destroyed the term “organic” (with Federal government help) in its bid to eliminate an alternative that threatened the factory farm.

But I'm open to correction – I freely admit that I may be wrong in my assessment. Would someone therefore please tell me how a TV station affiliated with a national media company can be “locally owned?” Does the revenue generated by such a station stay entirely within the community in which the station is located? How is a radio station owned by some giant network like Clear Channel “locally programmed,” especially when you can hear its very same playlist replicated on other stations owned by the same network? Does “local programming” mean the times once or twice an hour when the DJ asks people to phone in their song requests and someone calls saying “Yo, dude, could you play some Billy Joel?” Is a dealer of autos made by one of the Big Three automakers (not so big now) really “locally owned” in the fullest sense of the word?

* * *

I'm planning to go out to lunch with some co-workers tomorrow. It will be a good opportunity to catch up on personal news. But I will also ask about the culture of So. Cal., and will try to see if there have been any healthy changes. I may write about my findings in another blog post.