Two forms of government have dominated in the west over the last hundred years. In one big power is vested in the state, the government, in the other policy is dominated by the influence of big industry, big corporations, or big money. Well a hundred years after the Russian revolution, and ten years after the financial crash, a whole lot of people all around the world are saying “are there any alternatives?” especially as neither of those models has delivered on a promise of shared prosperity.

In Preston, Lancashire, England, a formerly industrial city, the birthplace of the industrial revolution in many ways, they’ve seen ten years of austerity, and partly out of need, and partly out of aspiration they’re practicing, experimenting, with a new model. They’re calling it the Preston model of community wealth building, and it’s inspired by a model in another formerly industrialized city: Cleveland, Ohio, the Evergreen Cooperative model. On today’s program a transatlantic experiment in cooperative community wealth building. This episode is co-produced with the Democracy Collaborative and the Laura Flanders Show.

After a few weeks overseas, away from the daily drip of US news, I’m home and horrified and thinking about Karl Polanyi.

One of the 20th century’s great economic historians, Polanyi wrote about economics, but he started with humanity. What does it take to create a willing worker, a follower, a servant?  What makes a person pliant?

To explain it, Polanyi looked at colonizers who cut down fruit trees and olive groves and uprooted relationships to break apart autonomous social networks. Smash society and you create craven people. Craven, from the early English word meaning crushed, defeated, overwhelmed.

You can probably see where I’m going.

What does it take to break apart social beings and turn them into fearful atomized ones — the ones I feel us becoming as we scurry about in our endless days, trying to make ends meet and digesting the news while the news we get becomes ever more shocking and more dire?

Award-winning cartoonist Jen Sorenson put her finger on it in an insightful strip about what’s been happening at the border. Families aren’t the only things being separated, she shows us. Americans, too, are being divided from their consciences.

You’ve heard of Brexit, but how about Blexit?    

Brexit’s what the British public voted to do when they felt the European Union wasn’t serving their best interests.   

Blexit’s what some Black residents of the Twin Cities have decided to do to free themselves from the city’s white-dominated financial institutions.

A week after Philando Castile was murdered by a police officer, residents formed the Association for Black Economic Power. At the time, Minneapolis had no black-led banks or financial institutions, even though it had plenty of black residents. Instead, the banks they had took money out of the black community in charges and fees but put little back even after a criminal history of redlining, foreclosure, and predatory lending. 

Now the Village Trust Financial Cooperative, a Black-led credit union, is due to open its doors next year to do things differently. 

Meanwhile, a coalition of grassroots and advocacy groups in New York is campaigning for their own sort of exit: from Wall St. 

In the heart of the world’s financial capital, The Public Bank NYC coalition is pushing for a municipal public city bank – one owned and operated in the public interest.

They figured out that the pensions of teachers, firefighters, and other government workers amount to a hefty sum – $194 billion – yet only two percent of all that is invested in the economically strapped places where many of those workers live, and only one percent is invested in the public infrastructure on which they depend. The rest goes to private funds, managed by private money managers, who, over a decade, pocketed more than $2 billion in fees.  

This June 5, 2018 – the day the city council is scheduled to adopt its $85 billion budget – the Public Bank NYC coalition will be on Wall Street asking the question: what if those billions were deposited in a public bank that served the public interest instead of the private ones like Chase, Citibank, and Bank of America, which serve their far-flung shareholders?  

It’s an idea whose time seems to have come: #BankBlack #BankPublic. After years of being told how poor they are, all sorts of people are wising up to the fact that they might be richer than they think, especially if they put their money where their lives are. 

You can read more about Blexit at NextCity.org, and learn about Banking For Justice at neweconomynyc.org; or you can listen to or watch an upcoming discussion on the Laura Flanders Show.

Community organizer Dominique Stevenson takes the LF Show on a tour through Tubman House, a community farming project in Sandtown, Baltimore. From a vacant, rundown lot to a thriving urban farm, Tubman House is addressing the issue of food apartheid in Baltimore and revigorating community wealth building in that neighborhood.

Self-driving cars, biased algorithms, and a social media quiz that scrapes your data -- it seems like the only tech headlines we have are about disasters. But what about the original promise of tech -- to innovate and empower? This week, Bex Hong Hurwitz, a Data & Society fellow and Rashida Richardson of the AI Now Institute, join me to discuss the subversive and democratic potential of technology, and how we harness it. Then, we talk to Kayleigh Walsh from the UK-based tech cooperative Outlandish - a model that centers on empowerment and sustainability. All that, plus a primer on how to secure your digital networks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5VTx8f6mi8&t=341s

Liz Ogbu: I think now we're seeing in a lot of cities the process of gentrification, which has sort of been synonymous with the displacement of poor residence by wealthier new comers as the city which was abandoned as people moved out to the suburbs is now being seen as sexy again and people are moving back in and we're once again seeing a pattern where the poor end of people of color are being displaced. It's not that these areas don't need new services, new resources, new housing, but we should figure out a way to allow people to have the capacity to stay in their homes and in those communities rather than saying we're going to repeat the cycle of displacing people again.

Deanna Van B.: Gentrification and incarceration. You can't get section 8 housing if you've been formally incarcerated. And then in Oakland, there is no section 8 housing so people end up homeless. If you're incarcerated, you come back, people are already being displaced, you can't get section 8 housing so you just end up in the streets. In Oakland, our tent cities are blooming. This specific project is less restorative justice and more restorative economics.

Laura Flanders: Housing affordability and power by design, this week on the show Monique George of Picture The Homeless and Gianpolo by Yorkie of the New York University Urban Democracy Lab, argue that a truly just housing policy requires a shift in power. Then from our Ted Women's Series, two architects who are combating the effects of gentrification and serving low income communities through innovative design. It's all coming up on the Laura Flanders Show, the place where the people who say it can't be done, take a back seat to the people who are doing it. Welcome.

Housing stress, it's a part of life for millions of people. If someone isn't experiencing it, they likely know someone who is. So states a new report by the Homes For All Campaign of The Right to City Alliance. Decades of leaving matters of housing to the market or to politicians or landlords just isn't securing housing for everyone who needs it. A new land ownership structure just might help. Models exist here and around the world. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has put some financing behind new community land trusts, the British labor parties housing plan includes a million new homes and affordability to find by prevailing incomes not rents.

In many places is an election year, so by why criteria should housing policies be judged? Our guests know this topic from the inside out. Gianpaolo Baiocchi is director of the Urban Democracy Lab at NYU and the lead author of Community over Commodities Report, I just quoted. Monique "Mo" George is the Executive Director of Picture The Homeless, which was very involved in this report. She also describes herself as a proud product of public housing herself. Welcome both of you to the program, glad to have you. When you say Communities Over Commodities, what do you mean? Gianpaolo.

Gianpaolo B.: So in this report we wanted to take stock of the discussion we've been having among social movements and advocates of housing, and think from a sort of big picture way, what do we stand for? And what kind of housing do we want? And it came down to a values question. We believe that housing is a right, and we believe that communities are more important than commodities, which is to say, we want to think about the right to housing first before talking about public policy discussions about what works and what doesn't, sort of ... The title says it. It's a values question. We believe housing is a right and we think that thinking outside of the market structure is really important.

Laura Flanders: Now, values have been mostly tied with buy and sell values, the commodity value. Where has that brought us? How do you describe the situation that we're in Mo?

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If Ida B. Wells had depended on Facebook, would we ever have had a National Lynching Memorial? 

Two stories collided in my head this week. One of which was the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama—this country’s first major effort to confront the vast scope of the racial-terror lynchings that ravaged the Black community under a pervasive, prevailing culture of white supremacy. It is the first because, until now, that same majority culture of white supremacy hasn’t wanted to look. 

At the memorial, a special place is set aside for Ida B. Wells, the crusading journalist who forced Americans to pay attention to these murders. Over a lifetime made shorter by repeated attacks, she documented and publicized the killings, collecting names, dates, and descriptions.

She wrote editorials for various newspapers, but her longest running outlet was her own, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, which she edited and published until it was burned to the ground by her critics. And this is where the opening of the memorial intersects with another important story from this week.

Would Wells’s Free Speech ever have made it into my news feed on Facebook? I doubt it because Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced May 1st in a meeting with media executives that his company had started ranking news organizations by trust. 

News sources that score higher will be promoted, while those with lower scores will be suppressed. 

As he put it, “You’re not going to be able to bridge common ground in society if people don’t have a common set of facts.” 

To determine trustworthiness, the company plans to survey its two billion users about the sources with which they’re most familiar and best recognize. 

Laura talks to SEIU International President, Mary Kay Henry (of Service Employees) and labor journalist Sarah Jaffe about worker wins, challenges, and some new models for organizing. Then, a conversation with Palak Shah and Michelle Miller on a new online platforms that's helping labor activists cooperate and win.