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Jukka Peltokoski

ZCommunications | Occupy Homes, One Year On And Growing Daily by Laura Gottesdiener | Z... - 0 views

www.zcommunications.org/ng-daily-by-laura-gottesdiener

asunnottomuus housing occupy Occupy Homes tragedy of the anti-commons

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 23 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • On December 6, the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Homes movement, Meusa and Wheeler were only two among thousands of people who gathered for coordinated direct actions focused on the human right to housing. Building on a year filled with eviction blockades, house takeovers, bank protest and singing auction blockades, the anniversary of Occupy Homes demonstrated that the groups were still committed to risking arrest to keep people sheltered. Yet, even more significantly, the day’s events demonstrated a crystallization of the movement’s central message: that decent and dignified housing should be a human right in the United States.
  • The actions appear to be snowballing. In Atlanta, Occupy our Homes took over a second house on December 8. In Minneapolis, the group opened up another house on December 23 in an action led by Carrie Martinez, who refused to celebrate Christmas with her partner and 12-year-old son in the car where they’d been living since their eviction in October.
  • Like the first Occupy Homes day of action on December 6, 2011, the events demonstrated a high level of coordination and communication among housing groups in various cities — this time drawing on the language and tactics that had been successful throughout the past year.
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  • As the small crowd marched to Meusa and Wheeler’s new home, for instance, people chanted, “Empty houses and houseless people — match them up!” This was a refrain that echoes the rallying cry commonly used by J.R. Fleming, chairman of Chicago’s Anti-Eviction Campaign. (His wording is to match “homeless people with peopleless houses.”)
  • Similarly, in Woodland, activists covered Alma Ponce’s lawn with tents — an allusion to the fall 2011 occupations that has also been used in eviction blockades in Alabama and Georgia over the last year.
  • One important shift evident on the anniversary is that Occupy Homes groups have started rallying more and more behind a rights-based framework to explain why they are pursuing direct action.
  • “Housing is a human right, not for the banks to hold hostage,” Michelene Meusa said a few days after the action, when, at M&T Bank’s request, the Atlanta Police Department arrested her and three others for criminal trespassing. When she refused to leave, she made an explicit comparison between her civil disobedience and the actions of the civil rights movement.
  • The shift towards a human-rights framing of the housing movement and away from following the Occupy movement’s focus on economic unfairness — i.e., “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out” — is significant. The human rights framework is often more powerful in movements led by people of color, drawing strength, as Meusa did, from the civil rights era and cutting through the class divisions that plague housing in a way that movements focused only on mortgage loan modifications cannot.
  • With the continued onslaught of foreclosures across the United States, the question remains: How much will these movements have to scale up to make structural changes, rather than just individual changes?
  • Housing organizing during the Great Depression provides some instructive parallels. The economic devastation since 2008 has been quite similar to what the nation experienced throughout that period. In 1933, for example, banks foreclosed on an average of 1,000 homes every day. In 2010, the rate of displacement was comparable: The average number of foreclosures was more than 2,500 homes a day, and the population has increased two-and-a-half fold.
  • The scale of housing organizing during the early 1930s, however, dwarfs what we have seen so far today. Crowds of hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of people, mobilized to stop evictions in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Gary, Youngstown, Toledo and other urban centers, mostly under the direction of the Communist Party. As in much of current housing organizing, women were often on the front lines. Masses of these women filled the streets as others climbed to the roofs and poured buckets of water on the police below. Women beat back the police officers’ horses by sticking them with long hat pins or pouring marbles into the streets. If the police were successful in moving the family’s furniture out to the curb, the crowd simply broke down the door and moved the family’s belongings back inside after the police had left.
  • Rural communities also formed anti-foreclosure organizations, combining the fight for housing with the fight for fair wages, especially in the sharecropping South. Hundreds of thousands of farmers came together to form anti-eviction and tenants-rights groups
  • This movement achieved substantial legislative gains. Housing policy became a major part of the New Deal, culminating in the National Housing Act of 1934, which established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to provide affordable loans to spur homeownership, and the Housing Act of 1937, which established public housing authorities across the country.
  • the establishment of public housing systemically changed the landscape and ideology around housing in the United States and was “one of the most successful federal programs in the 20th century,” according to Damaris Reyes, the executive director of the public housing advocacy group Good Old Lower East Side.
  • By this measure, the Occupy Homes network and aligned housing movements still have light-years to go — a reality that many organizers acknowledge. Yet the conditions have changed since 1930s, suggesting that what we need are not massive federal construction and lending programs, but rather a shift in the way housing rights are perceived and enacted in the U.S. Rather than coping with the scarcity of the 1930s, the United States now confronts vast, unprecedented wealth and gaping economic inequality — a condition that is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that there are upwards of a dozen empty and unused houses for every homeless person in the nation.
  • With more than enough wealth and roofs to provide safe and dignified homes for the country’s population, the challenge today is to demonstrate that this situation of desperate need coexisting with wasted excess is not one we need to accept.
Jukka Peltokoski

Co-operative Commonwealth: De-commodifying Land and Money Part 2 | Commons Transition - 0 views

commonstransition.org/odifying-land-and-money-part-2

cooperative commonwealth land osuuskunta maanomistus velka debt osuuskuntakeissi Conaty commonstransition

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 08 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Usury is little discussed today but it is crucial in policy terms.
  • in Germany, Christian Christiansen championed the founding of a number of rural savings and loan co-operatives that went by the acronym JAK, short for Jord Arbete Kapital (“Land Labour Capital”)
  • There were other models that flourished. Dr. Thomas Bowkett introduced a mutual organization in the 1840s to provide housing and smaller loans interest-free.(7) Twenty years later, Richard Starr made some adjustments to the system, and the “Starr-Bowkett” societies spread fast.
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  • in Brazil today. CoopHab is a major housing federation of co-operative savings societies.
  • During the industrial revolution English working people were excluded from bank lending though pawnbroking was rife. Mutual aid savings clubs developed interest-free lending systems for housing. The most successful were the Terminating Building Societies for buying land and building houses.
  • Sweden
  • Operationally, JAK is very similar to a credit union, except that members do not earn any interest on their savings or dividends on their shares.
  • The total cost of a JAK loan covers four things:(12)loan appraisal and set-up cost at a fee that is 2-3% of the approved loan value.an annual administration fee equal to 1% of the loan.an annual fee of approximately $30 to support the JAK educational system and volunteer services.(13)an equity deposit equal to a 6% of loan value to cover risk on any loan in the portfolio.
  • Members are strongly encouraged to pre-save in order to qualify for a loan.(15) Members also contract to continue saving while they are repaying their loans.
  • The Greenbacks would not be backed by gold, but by the farmers’ crops, which would be stored in sub-Treasury warehouses paid for by the government.
  • Swiss WiR
  • President Lincoln
  • free Greenback dollars
  • Lincoln
  • he had led the introduction of a paper money not backed by gold or silver, and had shown that the government could create, issue, and circulate by fiat the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers.
  • the privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government’s greatest creative opportunity.
  • National Farmers Alliance and Co-operative Union, led by Charles Macune, developed the Sub-Treasury Plan.
  • JAK banking, CoopHab and Community Land Trusts work well but are below national policy radar. This is not entirely the case for co-operative commonwealth systems.
  • So this was not simply a co-operative currency. It was a new national currency under a co-operative and state partnership to expunge the debt peonage imposed by merchants and bankers.
  • Infuriated, farmers and workers created their own party in 1891 to carry forwardmonetary reform and a co-operative economy. The new Populist party won some local, state and Congressional elections before falling into decline after 1895.
  • A.C. Townley launched the Non-partisan League (NPL)
  • Bank of North Dakota
  • Henry Ford and Thomas Edison suggested a novel solution.
  • proposed that new money be created by issuing interest-free government bonds
  • Frederick Soddy
  • made the first case for an ecological economics free of debt
  • “100% money.”
  • 100% reserve requirement.
  • Clifford H Douglas
  • He argued that a clear-cut and labour-saving solution would be for Government to create new money, interest-free as “Social Credit.”
  • First all citizens would receive a National Dividend.
  • Second, Douglas proposed that publicly-owned producer banks be set up in each region of the UK to provide finance debt-free to industry and enterprises.
  • From 1929 monetary reform attracted a wide audience In the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Canada with growing grassroots calls ranging from public banking to universal basic income.(34) The New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt took inspiration from John Maynard Keynes.
Jukka Peltokoski

Spain's Crisis is Europe's Opportunity by Yanis Varoufakis - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...ty-by-yanis-varoufakis-2017-10

Katalonia municipalism munisipalismi Espanja jukkap2p Varoufakis talouskriisi eurooppa kaupunki EU kuntapolitiikka

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 28 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The Catalonia crisis is a strong hint from history that Europe needs to develop a new type of sovereignty, one that strengthens cities and regions, dissolves national particularism, and upholds democratic norms.
  • Spanish state may be just what the doctor ordered. A constitutional crisis in a major European Union member state creates a golden opportunity to reconfigure the democratic governance of regional, national, and European institutions, thereby delivering a defensible, and thus sustainable, EU
  • Barcelona, Catalonia’s exquisite capital, is a rich city running a budget surplus. Yet many of its citizens recently faced eviction by Spanish banks that had been bailed out by their taxes. The result was the formation of a civic movement that in June 2015 succeeded in electing Ada Colau as Barcelona’s mayor.
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  • Among Colau’s commitments to the people of Barcelona was a local tax cut for small businesses and households, assistance to the poor, and the construction of housing for 15,000 refugees
  • All of this could be achieved while keeping the city’s books in the black, simply by reducing the municipal budget surplus.
  • Spain’s central government, citing the state’s obligations to the EU’s austerity directives, had enacted legislation effectively banning any municipality from reducing its surplus.
  • At the same time, the central government barred entry to the 15,000 refugees for whom Colau had built excellent housing facilities.
  • To this day, the budget surplus prevails, the services and local tax cuts promised have not been delivered, and the social housing for refugees remains empty. The path from this sorry state of affairs to the reinvigoration of Catalan separatism could not be clearer.
  • In any systemic crisis, the combination of austerity for the many, socialism for bankers, and strangulation of local democracy creates the hopelessness and discontent that are nationalism’s oxygen
  • Progressive, anti-nationalist Catalans, like Colau, find themselves squeezed from both sides: the state’s authoritarian establishment, which uses the EU’s directives as a cover for its behavior, and a renaissance of radical parochialism, isolationism, and atavistic nativism. Both reflect the failure to fulfill the promise of shared, pan-European prosperity.3
  • The duty of progressive Europeans is to reject both: the deep establishment at the EU level and the competing nationalisms ravaging solidarity and common sense in member states like Spain.
  • The EU treaties could be amended to enshrine the right of regional governments and city councils, like Catalonia’s and Barcelona’s, to fiscal autonomy and even to their own fiscal money
  • They could also be allowed to implement their own policies on refugees and migration.
  • EU could invoke a code of conduct for secession
  • As for the new state, it should be obligated to maintain at least the same level of fiscal transfers as before.
  • the new state should be prohibited from erecting new borders and be compelled to guarantee its residents the right to triple citizenship (new state, old state, and European).
  • Europe needs to develop a new type of sovereignty
Jukka Peltokoski

Our Eyes On the Prize: From a "Worker Co-op Movement" to a Transformative Social Moveme... - 1 views

www.geo.coop/197

osuuskuntakirja osuuskuntakeissi

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 29 Jun 13 - Cached
  • The contemporary U.S. worker cooperative movement is somewhat ambiguous about its relationship to capitalism.
  • While empathizing with those who feel a sense of "inevitability" in the face of today's powerful capitalist economy (and disagreeing with those who see it as generally acceptable), I hold firmly to the perspective that a more just and democratic economy is both necessary and possible.
  • Operating as isolated businesses or even as networks of businesses, worker cooperatives have barely a prayer (contrary to what some cooperative activists suggest) of growing to "eclipse" and replace capitalist enterprise simply through successful growth and competition.
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  • the long term replacement of capitalism--an economy which socializes costs and privatizes benefits--with an economy of democratic cooperation
  • n economy is an ecosystem, a cyclical whole that includes processes of creation (the "original production" of natural resources by geological, biological, and energetic forces), production (human transformation of resources into goods and services), exchange, consumption (perhaps more appropriately called "use"), the processing of waste, and the recycling of surplus (sometimes called "investment").
  • The worker coop movement must work to build broader alliances, holistic economic and social visions, and contribute to the creation of not only more worker coops, but a transformative social movement capable of changing the culture and economy--the "social ecosystem"--in which worker coops struggle to exist.
  • Operating successfully in a capitalist market, worker coops can support movements for social and economic transformation
  • a cooperative solidarity economy
  • Worker cooperatives are a particular--and effective--structure for democratically organizing the production of goods and the provision of services.
  • link these interventions together--at every point of the economic cycle
  • But even a solidarity economy movement cannot succeed without being intimately linked to broader social change work. It is our connections with the work of anti-racism, feminism, queer liberation, environmental justice, ecological sustainablility, immigrant's rights, counter-recruitment and peace advocacy, labor organizing, grassroots community development, and other movements for cultural and insitutional change that will generate the collective power and momentum needed to effect long-term transformation and generate widespread, committed support for worker cooperatives as economic and social-change insitutions.
  • Indeed, to create conditions under which their success is increasingly possible, worker cooperatives must work to generate, sustain and support institutions at all other points of the economic cycle.
  • constructing reliable markets
  • for goods and services produced by worker cooperatives.
  • from a passive place of "entering markets" to an active place of constructing them
  • What does this "movement building" look like?
  • the creation of a shared story and through this, the development of long-term solidarity between worker cooperatives and other groups working for democratic, community-based economies such as local currencies, consumer cooperatives, housing coops and intentional communities, economic justice advocacy groups, neighborhood associations, local food system projects and more
  • solidarity economy
  • Further examples from the solidarity economy movement outside of the U.S. abound. I delve into some of these more deeply in GEO's recent collaborative issue with Dollars and Sense (see Ethan Miller, "Other Economies Are Possible".)
  • We must, instead, work to transform the very terms of the economic game.
  • Green Worker Cooperatives
  • Red Emma's
  • Wooden Shoe Books
  • Electric Embers
  • Riseup
  • Gaiahost Collective
  • Brattleboro Tech Collective
  • pioneers of cross-sector movement-building
  • it is the work that we as cooperators must embrace if we choose to believe that another economy, and another world, is possible
  • Jukka Peltokoski on 29 Jun 13
     
    Ethan Miller ehdottaa työosuuskuntaliikkeen viemistä uudelle tasolle. Mukana kiinnostavia esimerkkejä.
Jukka Peltokoski

The Blockchain: A Promising New Infrastructure for Online Commons | David Bollier - 0 views

bollier.org/...-infrastructure-online-commons

ethereum blockchain commons bollier smart contract verkosto

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 11 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Move beyond the superficial public discussions about Bitcoin, and you’ll discover a software breakthrough that could be of enormous importance to the future of commoning on open network platforms.
  • Blockchain technology
  • can validate the authenticity of an individual bitcoin without the need for a third-party guarantor such as a bank or government body
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  • collective-action problem in an open network context
  • How do you know that a given document, certificate or dataset -- or a vote or "digital identity" asserted by an individual -- is the “real thing” and not a forgery? 
  • online “ledger” that keeps track of all transactions of all bitcoins
  • set of transactions known as the “block”
  • a kind of permanent record maintained by a vast distributed peer network
  • blockchain technology could provide a critical infrastructure for building what are called “distributed collaborative organizations.”
  • to give its members specified rights within the organization, which are managed and guaranteed by the blockchain
  • blockchain technology is not confined to digital currency
  • Transactions would be near-instantaneous, and transaction costs would be minimal.
  • Bitcoin 2.0 projects
  • a way to create distributed networks of solar power on residential houses
  • reliable systems to manage their inter-relationships on network platforms.
  • traditional issues related to shared common-pool resources—such as the free rider problem or the tragedy of the commons—could be addressed with the implementation of blockchain-based governance, through the adoption of transparent decision-making procedures and the introduction decentralized incentives systems for collaboration and cooperation.
  • to reach consensus and implement innovative forms of self-governance. The possibility to record every interaction on a incorruptible public ledger and the ability to encode a particular set rules linking these interactions to a specific transactions (e.g., the assignment of cryptographic tokens) makes it possible to design new sophisticated incentive systems
  • Decentralized blockchain technologies bring trust and coordination to shared resource pools, enabling new models of non-hierarchical governance, where intelligence is spread on the edges of the network instead of being concentrated at the center
  • commons-based peer-production communities
  • have had a hard scaling up, without turning into more bureaucratic and centralized institutions
  • could overcome many collective-action challenges that cannot be easily solved by conventional institutions today
  • Who guards the guards? 
  • blockchain technology does offer more formidable tools for better protecting the perimeter of the commons and for empowering commoners to decide their own fate
Jukka Peltokoski

Fearless Cities: the new urban movements | Red Pepper - 0 views

www.redpepper.org.uk/cities-the-new-urban-movements

city kaupunki kapinakaupunki Fearless Cities jukkap2p vasemmisto kunta kuntapolitiikka yhteisötalous commons

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 25 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • ‘Fearless Cities’, a gathering of over 700 people, representing dozens of experiments in taking power at city level, to empower citizens’ movements worldwide. More than a coming together of a series of local experiments, it marked the ‘coming out’ party for a new global social movement.
  • A wave of new municipalist movements has been experimenting with how to take – and transform – power in cities large and small.
  • it became necessary to change who the movement made demands of.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • the housing rights activist and feminist Ada Colau – took control of the Catalan capital
  • citizens started to wonder what would happen if the movement tried to occupy the institutions too
  • From the beginning, this was not a simple return to electoral politics but an experiment in transforming local institutions. It was to use municipal institutions not instead of movement organising but to support, expand and generalise the movement.
  • it’s about the blossoming of examples around the world where citizens are successfully winning their cities.
  • internationalist
  • the list of radical civic platforms standing up to entrenched political interests continues to grow.
  • there are a number of principles and practices that the new municipalist movements share
  • The political theorist Margaret Kohn once defined municipalism as ‘a politics of everyday life concerned with the issues that immediately affect citizens, including education, policing, jobs, culture and services. Municipalism is a political approach to community.’
  • The role of the municipality was to foster associations that challenge concentrations of power in the hands of a small elite. Capturing the city hall was never an end in itself but rather one method in expanding the scope of experiments in popular participation.
  • the continued erosion of basic living standards and increasing inequality driven by the myth that there is ‘no alternative’ has increased awareness that revolutionary change extends beyond ‘economics’ to every aspect of our lived experiences.
  • the new municipal citizens’ movements have arisen out of the failure of national political parties or street-based organising to deliver transformative change
  • This new municipalism may be picking-up where the alter-globalisation movement left off, retaining and reinvigorating the concepts of prefiguration, experimenting with ‘diagonal’ methods for dispersing power, and fuelling the expansion of non‑state, non-market ways of organising our societies.
  • This provides fertile ground for the development of a progressive post-capitalist politics that can win.
  • Women are at the forefront of many of these citizens’ movements
  • The feminisation of politics means encouraging a political style that openly expresses doubts and contradictions – backed by a values-based politics that emphasizes the role of community and ‘the commons’.
  • open spirit is at the centre of the new political culture
  • The commons is much broader than an economic strategy for resource management; it’s about building forms of autonomy and social solidarity as the substance of our day-to-day lives.
  • the Commons Lab
  • Department of the Commons
  • These are not occupied but liberated spaces.
  • social centres
  • ‘citizen patrimony’, which would formalise and expand a network of spaces across the city where the municipality provides greater resources and public infrastructure for self-managed common use.
  • The collaboration between citizens’ groups, cooperatives and municipalities is also at the heart of many of the attempts to return public services to public ownership.
  • There are many reasons why cities and regions want to take services back under public ownership, but reducing cost (especially for poor people), improving the quality of services, and increasing financial transparency are recurrent themes. Efforts to create better conditions for workers are another key driver. In the energy sector, which accounts for around a third of the cases where services have been returned to public ownership, the shift is often driven by efforts to tackle climate change.
  • Taking control of the energy supply also means that the council can better coordinate efforts to reduce energy use.
  • A number of French municipalities have taken back control of school meals from corporations to protect local agriculture and improve the quality of meals.
  • Increasing citizens’ control is not just about taking over existing institutions, but building new democratic processes that involve citizens in the day-to-day decision making of their cities.
  • it involves changing how citizens interact with the city government.
  • participatory budgeting
  • These municipalist projects are beginning to define new ways for progressive movements to organise, challenging and moving beyond dichotomies that have traditionally haunted the left.
  • The objective is to use municipal institutions as part of a project of autonomy – to expand the commons, to build non-state institutions and to empower citizens (not their representatives) to control the collective conditions in which they live their lives.
  • The new municipalism isn’t about winning elections; it’s about building, transforming and distributing power.
  • We must do it ourselves. It’s time to win back our cities.
Jukka Peltokoski

Incubator.coop: an Incubator for Platform Cooperatives | P2P Foundation - 0 views

blog.p2pfoundation.net/...13

Incubator.coop kiihdyttämö start up osuuskunta cooperative yhteiskunnallinenyritys rahoitus yhteisörahoitus Unioni alustaosuuskunta

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 13 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • 1. Conventional Incubators are not viable in themselves.  Instead they act as a business development tool for “side-car” investors trying to pick winners.  We think you need an incubator that exists to serve its incubatees.2. Conventional Incubators look for a 1-in-1000 unicorn to repay their many wrong bets.  We think you need an incubator that creates businesses of value that go the distance.3. Conventional Incubators looks for exceptional talent.  We think you need an incubator for collective endeavours4. Conventional Incubators function with a top-down approach.  We think you need an incubator that harnesses the wisdom of the crowd.5. Conventional Incubators promote returns for the 1%.  We think you need an incubator where 1 Member = 1 Vote6. Conventional Incubators run for 6-months.  We think you need an incubator that supports the whole period of development from formation through to operation.
  • We help any type of Cooperative to ‘Form, Organise, Fund and Operate‘.  The exciting areas of new CoOp formation include:– Community Owned Enterprises – anything from a pub to a post-office, school to satellite, house to hospital– Platform or Online CoOperatives – these are being created by online communities in place of Venture Capital backed 2-sided marketplaces
  • Collaborative ventures employ a variety of tools (web apps, social media, wikis etc.) and strategies (regular group meetings, webinars etc.) to make working as a group functional.There are some challenges with working as a group that aren’t solved by todays technology and they include1. Reaching a timely and productive consensus that in turn creates “collaboration paralysis“.  2. Groups try to be decentralised, but often most have a bottleneck around finance related decisions.3. Collectives need a way to track and incentivise efforts with non-financial and / or financial rewards and4. Groups need a way to create agreement contingent on future outcomes on the blockchain to improve trust within commerce
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  • The extent of the tools we can offer comes down to the success of this crowdfunding campaign.If we get the money to develop the technology, then projects going through incubation can offer supporters black chain agreements and in turn offer payment contingent of future events.  This is a big deal.
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