{"id":9943,"date":"2018-10-13T11:09:06","date_gmt":"2018-10-13T18:09:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=9943"},"modified":"2018-10-13T11:09:06","modified_gmt":"2018-10-13T18:09:06","slug":"after-rahms-destruction-can-chicago-create-a-cooperative-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2018\/10\/13\/after-rahms-destruction-can-chicago-create-a-cooperative-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"AFTER RAHM’S DESTRUCTION, CAN CHICAGO CREATE A COOPERATIVE ECONOMY?"},"content":{"rendered":"

TUE, 10\/9\/2018 – BY\u00a0MATT STANNARD<\/a>\u00a0(Occupy.com)<\/p>\n

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When Rahm Emanuel\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0last month that he would not seek a third term as mayor of Chicago, he broke no hearts among people opposed to neoliberal privatization and the power of finance capital. In Chicago under Emanuel, as the editors of the 2016 anthology\u00a0Neoliberal Chicago<\/em>\u00a0write<\/a>, \u201cneoliberalism led officials to privatize everything from parking meters to schools, gut regulations and social services, and promote gentrification wherever possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

To take just one lurid example, Emanuel\u2019s Chicago \u201cprivatized janitorial services for our schools,\u201d organizer Amara Enyia told me, only to end up with rodent-infested schools, literally \u201crats and mice running around in classrooms. Those schools had to be closed and cleaned. This is what happens when you privatize services.\u201d<\/p>\n

The proliferation of private schools under a theory of market and corporate dominance, which Enyia doesn\u2019t see as valid, has been terrible for public education in Chicago, creating a school system where \u201cwhoever has the better marketing budget\u201d rather than better academic outcomes determines education policy.<\/p>\n

Enyia<\/a>\u00a0should know. A longtime community organizer and policy expert from the city\u2019s Austin neighborhood, she is again running for mayor of Chicago (she made a brief run in 2015) where she promises to not only facilitate cooperative economics citywide but also to begin the process of\u00a0creating a public bank<\/a>\u00a0for the city \u201con day one\u201d of her administration.<\/p>\n

Enyia says a public bank will save on infrastructure, provide loans to small businesses and save the city millions \u2013 maybe billions over the long term \u2013 in interest rates and fees. It will also protect the city’s revenue from toxic deals like interest rate swaps and derivatives \u2013 deals Rahm Emanuel seemed to love like a kid loves cake.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want Chicago to be the number one city in the country\u201d for cooperative business models, says Enyia. \u201cThere\u2019s no reason why we shouldn’t be. Traditional business models have reached a plateau in my view.\u201d Collective ownership, she argues, will make everyone feel invested in the community.<\/p>\n

Enyia is not alone in her enthusiasm. In August, Chicago held a cooperative economies summit where \u201clots of different people doing lots of different things in silos\u201d were able to come together and do \u201ccross-sector cooperative work” developing plans to forge policies and cooperative cultures across the city, according to Mike Strode, exchange coordinator at Chicago\u2019s Kola Nut Collaborative.<\/p>\n

The collaborative’s mission is \u201cto make social infrastructure more visible within our communities.\u201d Cooperativism is emergent in Chicago, Strode says. Chicagoans have already accomplished a lot in food and housing cooperation, and the summit’s purpose was to get people thinking and working together on a cooperative economy as a whole.<\/p>\n

Also in August, the Illinois Worker Co-operative Alliance, in partnership with the Business Enterprise Law Clinic at the John Marshall Law School, released\u00a0\u201cCooperation Chicago,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0a report detailing \u201cthe challenges and opportunities of worker cooperatives in the Chicagoland region.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report recommended that the city, and Cook County, ought to invest in and contract with cooperatives \u201cthrough public contracting and procurement of goods and services.\u201d The report also calls for the State of Illinois to pass a law recognizing Limited Cooperative Associations to \u201cbetter accommodate access to worker-ownership for low-moderate income entrepreneurs and immigrant communities in Illinois.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such changes, along with creating a more robust legal definition for worker cooperatives in the state, would make government partnerships and assistance available to cooperative entities as it currently is to traditional businesses, says Strode.<\/p>\n

Economic democratization through cooperatives is also a material antidote to the city’s long-term effects of racism, patriarchy and capitalism. The \u201cCooperation Chicago\u201d report notes that two-thirds of all worker-owners nationally are women. Since 2010, 60 percent of incoming worker-owners are people of color. Those statistics are reflected in Chicago, where over half of new worker-owners are also nonwhite.<\/p>\n

No other business model can even come close to making that kind of claim, and cooperatives may be the only instance where entrepreneurialism in America has actually fulfilled the promise of diversity.<\/p>\n

For Enyia, Chicagoans need to begin \u201cto believe in public space\u201d again. After years of work in public administration and community organizing, she concluded that the interests of privatization and those of public service are simply incompatible.\u00a0Under Emanuel<\/a>, a Democrat, more than 50 public schools closed along with half of the city\u2019s mental health clinics. It\u2019s hard to examine Chicago\u2019s much-lamented violence problem without first understanding the closure of social services, public spaces and the transfer of wealth from the public treasury to the private financial sector.<\/p>\n

Enyia supports a public bank \u201cbecause it strikes at the very heart of where that mass transfer is taking place.\u201d She believes that, combined with worker, housing and agricultural cooperatives, and community land trusts, Chicago could lead the nation in cooperative economics. \u201cThese should not just be niche ideas,\u201d she says. \u201cTo me they are the core of a new economy that is inclusive.\u201d<\/p>\n

For now, activists in Chicago are following the examples of other cities. \u201cThe grass is always greener on the other side,\u201d Strode says, speaking about organizations like\u00a0Solidarity Economy St. Louis<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Cooperation Jackson<\/a>, in the hope that his city realizes its potential.<\/p>\n

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\"Illinois<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Matt Stannard is the Director of\u00a0Solidarity House<\/a>, a policy research and media cooperative. He has worked with Commonomics USA, the Public Banking Institute, and Farm Commons. He writes and produces podcasts on cooperative economics, law and farming.<\/em><\/p>\n

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TUE, 10\/9\/2018 – BY\u00a0MATT STANNARD\u00a0(Occupy.com) When Rahm Emanuel\u00a0announced\u00a0last month that he would not seek a third term as mayor of Chicago, he broke no hearts among people opposed to neoliberal privatization and the power of finance capital. In Chicago under Emanuel, as the editors of the 2016 anthology\u00a0Neoliberal Chicago\u00a0write, \u201cneoliberalism… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9943"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9943"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9944,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9943\/revisions\/9944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}