I would like to see everyone involved with urban reform and with democratic activism to read this book. There is a powerful undercurrent of change going on in both the United States and Canada, definitely something moving up from the grass roots and ignored by both the media and the elite political drones. It’s something far more creative and significant than a mere flaky fashion for “anti-globalism” demonstrations, with which the reader might at first confuse it. It’s the fact that people — ordinary people — are starting to question the orthodoxies they have been taught about how things “have to be”, and realizing that their self-interest, as well as their future, depends on re-invigorating local economic and political power. You would never guess it from following the media, but Americans and Canadians are starting to shake off the passivity and morbid fatalism that their rulers have energetically cultivated. They’ve begun to notice that Wal-Mart moving into your neighbourhood produces poverty, not prosperity, that North American society has been rapidly hemoraging cash into a “global” empire of multinationals-kings-dictators, and that if they don’t do something about it they are going to become helpless paupers. Shuman describes some of the things that people have been doing, mostly in small scale entrepreneurial and social action, to turn the tide. His analysis of the issues and processes is not entirely accurate — he still suffers from the confusion of categorical terminology, such as the idiotic “left-right” concept, that cripples reform thinking — but he is definitely on the right track.
At the heart of his study are the premises that every consumer choice that prefers local sourcing over distant sourcing increases the “multiplier effect” of transactions in an economy, and that import substitution is the engine of economic growth. He exposes the disastrous consequences of luring and bribing distant corporate powers into a locality, rather than creating conditions for organic local economic creativity. These are arguments that Jane Jacobs outlined decades ago, and which have largely been ignored by conventional economists. Shuman grasps that the “greater efficiency” of trans-national corporate business consists entirely of collecting free money from taxpayers, exploiting market distortions manufactured by government, and deploying criminal and destructive strategies against people who have been stripped of defensive resources. The examples he gives (such as the corporation that received a quarter of a million dollars of free money from taxpayers for every job it vaguely promised to produce in a city, and did not even do so) should wake up the reader to the absurdity of their governments’ policies. He also grasps that those same governments will quickly “agree” with rational critics and make a big, but entirely phony, show of following the rational path, while changing nothing. This shows that he has some real-life experience of trying to reform things. But he is at his best when he describes situations where dedicated people have actually made advances in democracy and prosperity, despite all the obstacles. The good news is that those advances are more numerous and vigorous than one would guess. The media have no interest in telling you about them. To describe these successful initiatives, Shuman coins the acronym LOIS (“local ownership and import substitution”). The term is useful, and I’ll incorporate it into my own discussions.
There’s nothing in this book that I haven’t been trying to talk people into for the last twenty years, but I’ve not been in the position to influence very many people. Schuman is better placed to do so. He relies, for the most part, on conventional terminology to explain his points and outline his recommendations, rather than take the next logical step to the reform of terminology and conceptual framework that I feel is necessary. But anyone who reads and absorbs his material will be better equipped to take that logical step.
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