Joomla! site syndication http://othereconomist.org/1 Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:11:17 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://othereconomist.org/1/images/M_images/joomla_rss.png http://othereconomist.org/1 Joomla! site syndication http://othereconomist.org/1/content/view/15/2/ OK Barack, this is me again.Here is a question I wanted to ask you: When you were a community organizer in Chicago did you ever run across John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann? They are at Northwestern University. (www.sesp.northwestern.edu/abcd/) According to the media you learned some of Saul Alinsky´s organizing methods (as did I, via Cesar Chavez, who was trained by Fred Ross, who was trained by Saul Alinsky) but I wanted to ask whether you ever became familiar with the less confrontational and more communitarian approach of John and Jody.The reason the topic came up is that my last letter sparked interest among readers in Enrique Martinez´s vision of food security, primary health care, and housing assured for every Argentine at the neighborhood level, known as ABC (Abastecimiento Básico Comunitario).People asked me where they could learn more about ABC.Unfortunately very little is written about ABC. There is a chapter on it in a book published in 2007 by the Faculty of Agronomy of the University of Buenos Aires (Hacia un Nuevo Pacto Social en el Agro). There is a note on ABC on the INTI website, where there is also a Spanish translation of my paper “Vision of a World without Poverty or Economic Insecurity,” which was earlier published in English in Acorn, the Journal of the Gandhi-King Society and included as an appendix to my book Undersanding the Global Economy (Peace Education Books 2004) I think my paper expresses INTI´s ideas as well as mine since they took the trouble to translate it and upload it to their site. (www.inti.gov.ar) My reference to Enrique´s idea of assuring in every barrio food, primary health care, and shelter was not based on any text at all, but rather on what he said at a seminar we did on methodology for social change at the home of our friend Hugo Arce who teaches economics at U. of Buenos Aires.John and Jody (and hundreds of collaborators) have invented ABCD. It is similar to ABC and is extensively documented in English. You can buy their book Building Communities from the Inside Out: Finding and Mobilizing a Community´s Assets from ATLA publishers in Chicago. Their book comes with videotapes. You can sign up for trainings led by their collaborator Mike Green. ( www.mike-green.org ) Several Earlham graduates are using ABCD as we speak.ABCD stands for Asset Based Community Development.It was invented in Chicago as a response to globalization. Industry had moved to low wage sites in the third world. Most of Chicago had become what is known in the USA as an “inner city.” As Earlham economics professor Jonathan Diskin once said, an inner city is a place where there is little or no investment. The standard game of civil society has been lost. That is to say, there are no moves left in the standard game of attracting investors to create jobs. The city is checkmated. The residents are left with making a living selling personal services to each other, welfare, retail sales to fewer and fewer customers, government employment, missions and agencies, jail (at least they feed you there), rehab (at least they feed you there), joining the military (ditto), a variety of illegal and semi-legal rackets, and new careers in security and law enforcement spawned by the need to protect everybody from everybody else.In a Chicago devastated by globalization, the members of an inner city church met to deliberate on the questions, Shall we close the church and move to the suburbs? Or shall we stay here and resurrect our neighborhood? They answered the first question NO and the second question YES. ABCD was born.ABCD starts with taking an inventory of (or “mapping”) a community´s assets. In the adaptation of ABCD we used in the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles we called the assets “gifts.” We said, “Building community is connecting gifts.” Everybody has gifts. Busy professionals who have no time usually have money to give. There are gifts of the heart (like enjoying cooking, enjoying weeding and pruning, enjoying caring for the elderly, enjoying working with children...), gifts of the hands (like repairing TV sets, playing the guitar, fixing roofs...) and gifts of the head (languages, accounting, engineering, law...) Institutions have underutilized assets, like a church building that is vacant every day but Sunday, or a vacant lot belonging to a hospital that could be a community garden....Sending the Boy Scouts or the Girl Scouts out to map a community´s assets may not seem like a method for changing the world. However, a little reflection will show that ABCD opens the way to a constructive and open-minded rethinking of the basic rules of the economic game. ABCD is different.ABCD is not what Fernand Braudel called traditional material life. It is not extended peasant families who raise animals and crops and occasionally sell a pig at the fair and immediately use the proceeds to buy goods they do not produce themselves.It is not a money-based exchange society where money is required to obtain the necessities of life, where everybody has to sell goods or services in order to survive. (The type of civil society whose limitations led Hegel to postulate the need for a higher ethic in a public sphere.)ABCD is not what (following Karl Marx) is called an “extended” exchange society in which decisions to initiate production depend on the investors´ confidence that the products can be sold at cost-covering prices plus a profit. Meeting human needs, if it happens at all, is a by-product of turning money into more money. This type of society is today called “the economy.” Governments are now throwing huge sums of money at “the economy” desperately attempting to restore confidence. (The “confidence” analysis is a twist due to Keynes, not Marx.)The philosophy of ABCD is not that of a typical welfare state in which there is a needs assessment (showing a need for clean and adequate water, for low cost housing, for safe streets ...) followed by public policies, plans, programs, projects, and missions designed to meet the needs of the target population.It is not a centrally planned command economy.ABCD represents a higher form of pragmatism. It is persons-in-community mobilizing resources to meet needs, employing elements of 1 to 5 above, and also elements of 6 to .... n not shown, employing what works, discarding what does not work. As John and Jody say, institutions should be employed to serve communities. Could all of this have started in Chicago, in the same Chicago where Milton Friedman was teaching his theories of free market utopia at another university a few miles to the south of Northwestern, while a young community organizer, a worshiper in a socially conscious congregation, a law professor, a state representative, and a Senator from the State of Illinois knew nothing about it ? It did not seem likely to me. That was why I wanted to ask you whether you had ever run across John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann. But notice that I put my question in the past tense. I now no longer need to ask the question because I have learned from a little sleuthing on the Internet that you did know John and Jody, John McKnight wrote a letter of recommendation for you when you applied for admission to Harvard Law School. Small world.Howard R.November 10, 2008 News - Letters to Barack Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:41:02 +0100 http://othereconomist.org/1/content/view/13/2/ A Letter to Barack from the SouthOK Barack, I sent out a thousand copies of my first letter to you. Several friends responded by correcting my number: You got nearly 65 million votes, not 52 million. Nobody questioned my concept.The concept is that together we are going to transform civil society.In the campaign your opponent sang the rancid old Republican theme song: Get the government off our backs. He repeated the perennial liberal utopian ideology: He assumed there is nothing wrong with civil society. He said too much government is the problem, less government is the solution.You put together phrases from Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, …stirring old roots with Spring rain. You emphasized some relatively new dimensions: bottom up, service, transform, higher purpose, save the world.Some people say you won our votes by appealing to our emotions, and then less than 24 hours after the polls closed confirmed that although your words expressed crowd-pleasing sentiments they referred to nothing concrete when you by appointed a no-nonsense conservative Democrat as your chief of staff. I say behind the emotion there is a concept: transform civil society. People are as delirious about your victory in Asia and Africa as they are in Chicago and Los Angeles because you touched their hearts with a dream of CHANGE. Although you are legally the President-elect of the USA , and only in some people´s imagination the President-elect of the world, you are for billions the incarnation of HOPE. The world´s billions may harbour enthuasism without clarity, but what they feel in their hearts can be clarified. It can be put into practice.There was a promise in your campaign that John McCain did not understand. You are not the tax and spend Democrat he was attacking. Amitai Etzioni is right to call you a communitarian. blog.amitaietzioni.org/2008/01/a-communitarian.htmlCHANGE and HOPE have an operational meaning above and beyond Rooseveltian social democracy: above and beyond stronger government; above and beyond defending the economic interests of the middle and working classes; above and beyond reversing the dismantling of the welfare state. They mean a groundswell of social responsibility in the private sector; they mean a culture shift. Without the second the first is not feasible. Without the transformation of civil society CHANGE and HOPE will deflate to gasless plastic balloons.I appreciate the difficulty of keeping track of your 64 million electors and your 3 million contributors, even though you have promised to listen carefully to what we have to say. I imagine myself as number 32,641,211 among the electors and number 1,025,986 among the contributors. If you look up number 1,025,986 on your database you will find a California address, but actually I am an expat. I live on the Continent of Hope ( South America ), and vote by absentee ballot. I do not usually vote for Democrats. I made an exception in your case because I thought that because of your background as a community organizer you would know in practical terms what it would take to give concrete meaning to your words. I thought that someone who had imbibed anthropology with his mother´s milk, and who had lived as a child in Indonesia , would be capable of rising above the ethnocentrism of his father´s profession. I thought that you could facilitate turning the culture shift the masses vaguely dream and desire into an operational reality. I thought the other world that is happening at thousands of sites around the planet would find in Barack Obama a leader who symbolized it and understood it because of his personal history.Today I went to a meeting. You know about meetings. “Participation” sounds good but meetings are .. well ... er … ah…indispensable. If you cannot endure the boredom and/or petty quarrels that typify the average meeting you cannot change the world. You are like a soldier who flunked boot camp, yes?Today´s meeting was better than average. It was at the office of our communal union of neighbourhood councils. Our little town of 40,000 people is divided into 52 neighborhoods, each with its council. On the pretext of preparing for the impact of the world financial crisis, and taking advantage of the opportunities created by our recent success in electing a new mayor with new ideas (who happens to be a gay man who won handily in spite of homophobic propaganda against him) we are doing what we should be doing even without the crisis and even without the new mayor. Every neighbourhood will have a community food pantry run by volunteers, through which anybody who is unemployed can earn food by community service. We are not giving anything away. Those who do not succeed in selling their labor in the labor market work for the local community and the local community pools resources to make sure they get by. We have already organized food security in one neighbourhood, and now we are extending the practice to other neighbourhoods.Next time you are in Argentina you might consider visiting Cordoba or any of several other cities to see ABC (Abastecimiento Basico Comunitario). It is a project of the National Institute of Industrial Technology headed by my friend Enrique Martinez. Enrique´s proposal is that every Argentine have assured at the neighbourhood level adequate nutrition, primary health care (at the neighbourhood clinic), and housing. Then let the storms brew as they may at the level of the national economy and the global economy. (See www.inti.gov.ar) More later. I aim to contribute to the transformation of civil society in the North by making better known some of the seeds of transformation that are already germinating in the South.Howard R. 8 November 2008p.s. Scholars will notice that my use of the term “civil society” blends its classic sense (that of Hegel´s bürgerliche Gesellschaft ) with its more recent senses popularized by the World Bank and others. News - Letters to Barack Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:21:13 +0100 http://othereconomist.org/1/content/view/1/2/ Here, Howard Richards, Professor of Global Studies, JD Stanford, and friends, will present current economic thinking with an aim to ameliorating the suffering that will attend this global economic crisis. News - Latest Sat, 12 Jun 2004 11:54:06 +0100 http://othereconomist.org/1/content/view/14/2/ Written by Howard Richards Thursday, 12 June 2003The Other Economist is not any of the 999,999 economists who are other than any given economist, assuming for the sake of the argument that there are in total 1,000,000 economists in the world. The Economist to which the phrase Other Economist refers is a specific magazine of that name published weekly in London. Surely you have seen it. Maybe you read it. We would like to refute it.We would like to destabilize the constellation of power/knowledge that it represents.Maybe some day The Economist, or someone on its staff, will notice us, and do us the favor of answering our critiques. We can dream.The Other Economist is this we, this critic, this dreamer. It is we who have undertaken this project. We will try to post a comment on at least one article from each issue of The Economist. We want to do a running critique by tracking each issue of the magazine with at least one comment from a critical realist point of view. We also provide a glossary of economic terms sometimes used in that magazine, for the benefit of people who might find more courage to challenge its hegemonic discourse if they were not intimidated by unfamiliar words.(We are sprinkling some familiar hip words like discourse in this welcome note in order to show the dropper-in that this will be an in site to visit.)We may also write, or copy, timely critiques of official pronouncements on economic topics, such as those of the G8, which dress power in the garb of knowledge.There are only four of us now, but hopefully more will post contributions to this site as we get underway. We will identify ourselves by individually signing each comment that one of us writes. Questions? webweaver at othereconomist.orgLast Updated ( Monday, 18 October 2004 ) News - Latest Sun, 09 Nov 2008 01:33:21 +0100 http://othereconomist.org/1/content/view/6/2/ OK Barack, this is me speaking.I am one of the 52 million people who voted for you, one of the 3 million in your database who contributed small amounts of money to your campaign.Remember me?I am writing to make sure I understand our deal. I watched your acceptance speech at Grant Park in Chicago. I watched many of your speeches.You said together we are going to transform America and the world. Right? We are going to transform not from the top down but from the bottom up. Did I get that right? It is not you who are going to transform America but we. Is that the deal? You are calling for a spirit of service and sacrifice. That’s what I heard.In a speech to financiers on Wall Street you said the economy has a higher purpose. The higher purpose is that we are all in this together. From time to time we change the rules of the economic game to make the economic machine serve its purpose better. (I read the speech on your website www.barackobama.com (http://www.barackobama.com/).) Your Wall Street friends voted for you even though you told them you would raise their taxes. That sent a message.So – here is my conclusion, my message: I am not supposed to be just watching TV waiting to see whom you will name to cabinet posts. I am supposed to be out on the street transforming my town and neighborhood. Right?This afternoon I will donate twelve bottles of cooking oil to our neighborhood food pantry. I will talk up cooperation. I will also work on changing our irrigation system from spray to drip (drip benefits the environment by producing more food with less water.)I am copying this to lists of transformers. If I am missing something, or if I have misunderstood something, hopefully somebody will set me straight.Howard R.Nov. 6, 2008 News - Letters to Barack Tue, 11 Nov 2008 02:00:00 +0100