Entrepreneurs for a better world

You've seen it in the business magazines and the television shows -- the hard-driving, risk-taking, passionate entrepreneurs who, according to popular mythology, make our country an economic powerhouse.

I've just spent three days with such entrepreneurs at the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) annual meeting, but unlike the stereotype, these entrepreneurs are not in business to earn six or seven figure incomes, to keep wages down and shareholder profits up, to transform pristine natural areas into profits.

These are entrepreneurs who are passionate about doing good in the world and doing well in business. They care not only about the quality of their products but about the quality of employees' work life. Some of them represent worker-owned companies.

They are looking for good quality materials to use for making their products, and they take responsibility for the environmental and social costs of their choices.

They love the product or service they are providing and they love the communities where they are based, and they believe their business can be a long-term asset to their neighbors -- not a fly-by-night venture that will accept taxpayer subsidies and than run off when wages and tax breaks are more lucrative somewhere else.

These new entrepreneurs may be the founders of the 21st century economy. They are creating businesses in which the health of the environment, the well-being of communities, the empowerment of employees are all part of the bottom line - and they are having a blast doing it.

The BALLE model is poised to take off in part because the model centered on large, global corporations is turning out to be such a failure. Big box stores come in, ravage a business district, replace family-wage jobs with low-wage jobs, and downtowns with sprawl. People are getting sick from diets of processed, lifeless corporate food, and are turning to fresh local foods. And the best and the brightest young people are looking for careers that don't require them to park their values at the door.

We heard from city officials who are abandoning the economic development model that centers on luring large corporations -- it costs thousands of dollars per job in taxpayer subsidies, and the jobs slide out of town as easily as they arrive. Instead, these cities are supporting and encouraging the development of their hometown businesses.

But there are other reasons a new model is winning widespread support. Most people at the conference agreed that the days of abundant cheap energy are over. We will not long be transporting the average bite of food 2,000 miles or building sprawling suburbs that gobble up farm land and rely on gas-guzzling commutes.

A money system based on huge trade and budget deficit won't last.

Climate change is already upon us and will require responses that are well beyond "inconvenient." David Korten talked of this perfect economic storm during his presentation at the conference.

Like the best entrepreneurs, those attending the BALLE conference view these concerns not as signs of doom but as challenges -- even opportunities. If we are to make the changes that will be necessary over the coming years, it will be because we take on the challenges of our time with the pizzazz, creativity, love of our communities and place, and passion of the BALLE entrepreneurs.


NOTE 1: YES! is planning an issue on local living economies for the Winter 2007 issue (to be published in November 2006). Last time we did an issue on this topic was in Fall 2002. The leads from this conference will be a starting point for that issue. Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

NOTE 2: I'm on a East Coast "tour" that turns out to include one conference for each of three sectors leading the change process -- progressive business (BALLE), politics and democracy (the Take Back America conference), and civil society and grassroots activism (the Southeast Social Forum). (Religion is the sector missing from this trip, but I did attend the Sacred Activism conference in Seattle last month.) I'll be reporting from each in this blog.

N. California voters reject corporate personhood

Lots of people talks about the problems of corporate power, but the people of a northern California county are doing something about it.

Voters in Humboldt County on Tuesday adopted "Measure T: the Ordinance to Protect Our Rights to Fair Elections and Local Democracy" by a vote of 55% to 45%. The measure prohibits corporations from outside the county from bankrolling political campaigns.

There are some good reasons the people of Humboldt County are fired up about outside corporate money "meddling" in local politics. In 1999, Wal-Mart put $235,000 behind an effort to site a highly unpopular big box store on the Eureka waterfront (and failed).

Then there was the time Pacific Lumber Company, owned by the Houston-based Maxxam Corporation, got ticked off at Paul Gallegos, then Humboldt's newly elected district attorney. Pacific Lumber, you may remember, is famous for its practice of mowing down ancient redwood forests, spurring many protests, the famous coalition of the Steelworkers and the tree-huggers, and Julia Butterfly Hill's long vigil in the redwood she named Luna. (See what she's up to now here.)

Maxxam spent over $250,000 to run a recall campaign against this D.A. - but lost by a nearly two-to-one margin. Why such a fuss about a district attorney? Evidently Gallegos had thought he ought to enforce the law -- including regulations affecting the corporation. (Gallegos, a supporter of Measure T, was re-elected on Tuesday also.)

What about the constitutional protection of free speech that corporations say give them the right to support, at any scale, the candidates and ballot measures of their choice, anywhere they choose?

Measure T supporters thought of that. The measure makes clear that Humboldt citizens do not believe corporations are legal people. (See Thom Hartmann's excellent piece on how corporations became "persons.") Measure T says only humans have constitutional rights.

This distinction is critical to our prospects on this planet. Publicly traded corporations are required by law to put profit to their shareholders first - before the well-being of employees, customers, their country, clean air or water, or, for that matter, the life-sustaining systems of the planet itself.

Whether it's cutting the last grove of ancient redwoods or driving down wages through outsourcing and union busting -- these activities take on a inexorable logic. As corporations grow to behemoth size and use their mammoth resources to further this single-minded aim, the destruction caused by this profit-at-all-costs ethic is becoming unbearable.

We humans, on the other hand, can weigh complex questions from the perspective of our pocketbooks, our families, our love of the outdoors, our empathy for our neighbors, our sense of right and wrong -- it is that complex balancing act that democracy demands of us.

Humboldt County voters have hit the nail on the head -- it is the responsibility of human beings to weigh the complex questions that are determining our prospects as a human species. Human beings who work for corporations can do that as individual citizens, but corporations -- which are constrained by their requirement to serve shareholders pocketbooks -- cannot.

Here and here are the websites of the Measure T organizers. Also, see John Nichols article from The Nation, "Citizens 1, Corporations 0." And see Liberty Tree's work on taking local democracy to a national level.