Cooperatives and Credit Unions Deliver Economic Justice to Black America

Economist Jessica Gordon-Nembhard’s research into black history revealed a cooperative business model that had been largely forgotten, but is now being revitalized.

Building community assets through cooperatives is essential to repair the harm done by colonization and slavery in America. Cooperatives can regenerate poor communities that still suffer worst from white supremacy, pollution, monopolies, and financial extraction. Resilient people are tapping into ancient ways of collaborating through shared ownership. By participating in coops, individuals are more effectively stewarding resources and taking responsibility for meeting the needs of the community in mutually beneficial ways.

People are engaged in utility cooperatives, food and pharmaceutical coops, community-supported agriculture, and housing cooperatives to create more vibrant local economies. These decentralized networks of citizens contribute to a solidarity economy which is especially important in times of financial hardship. Decentralized organizations are more agile, because of the agency given to each participant to offer their unique intelligence.

With increasing climate chaos and the collapse of old-fashioned hierarchical systems, we need quick and efficient processes and structures to align a community’s actions with the health and well-being of living systems. Two African American women, Jessica Gordon-Nembhard and Ebony Perkins are each engaging predominantly black communities in a solidarity economy through the use of cooperatively owned structures. These women are changing hearts and minds of people, and increasing the well-being in some of the most disadvantaged populations in America. Listen for my podcast interviews of them at Money-Wise Women in early 2020.

Jessica Gordon-Nembhard has been a political economist for over three decades and is a professor who studies worker-owned cooperatives and credit unions. Her book is Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice . Jessica’s decades of research explores cooperative economic development and worker ownership, community economic development, wealth inequality, community-based asset building, and community-based approaches to justice.

She says, “I am more interested in decreasing poverty, democratizing capital, and re-distributing wealth than simply closing the wealth gaps.”

Ebony Perkins is the investor and community relations manager at Self-Help Credit Union. Last October, she was named a recipient of the “30 Under 30 Award,” at the 2019 Socially Responsible Investing Conference. Ebony wrote this recent article, “Plan for Tomorrow by Supporting Vulnerable Communities Today,” in the “Community Impact Investing” issue of the GreenMoney Journal .

Self-Help Credit Union finances underserved populations, including people of color, women, rural residents, and low-income families.They have made loans totaling over $386 million to projects with environmental benefits, including recycling businesses, land conservation, efficient affordable housing, and solar energy.

Ebony says, “If our goal is to achieve environmental and economic justice, we need to prepare for tomorrow by investing today in the communities that are most vulnerable to the shocks and stresses of climate change and most impacted by the burdens of pollution.”

More critical of the privately-owned non-cooperative banks, past Money-Wise Women guest Ellen Brown writes, “Banks are not serving the real economy. They are using public credit backed by public funds to feed their own private bottom lines. She quotes Pam and Russ Marten of “Wall Street on Parade,” who write: “‘According to its SEC filings, JPMorgan Chase is partly using federally-insured deposits made by moms and pops across the country in its more than 5,000 branches to prop up its share price with buybacks.’ Small businesses are being deprived of affordable loans because the liquidity necessary to back the loans is being used to prop up bank stock prices. Bank shares constitute a substantial portion of the pay of bank executives.”

Clearly, we need to remove our money from these predatory banks and use cooperative banking structures. My interviews with Jessica Gordon-Nembhard and Ebony Perkins will illuminate the way to circulate value locally through cooperative structures. Stay tuned!

—by Crystal Arnold, founder of Money-Morphosis, director of education at Post Growth Institute

For more: check out this video of a Truthout Laura Flanders interview with Dr. Gordon-Nembhard on the black radical tradition of economic solidarity.

He Only Cares about Big Stuff

If you’ve been too busy to watch the televised impeachment hearings, like me, you rely on news sources to highlight what’s most important, only catching pieces. As I ate breakfast yesterday, I watched while Minority Chairman Devin Nunez ready for the testimony of Jennifer Williams, a VP Senior Aide, and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who had each served under presidents of both parties. Rep. Nunez’s attacks on the whistleblower came as no surprise, as I’d tuned into Fox and learned this is their theme too.

But his repeated “False!” declarations as he listed “hysterical” mainstream reports troubled me. What evidence? Reports of John Solomon, he claimed. Who’s he? No reporter; he’s a media “executive” like Steve Bannon, with a long history of reports catching fire in far-right online news. His allegations about Ukraine and Biden in The Hill were weaponized by Giuliani and Sean Hannity. Solomon’s columns were questioned by other reporters at The Hill, and now its editor has ordered his columns be fact-checked and annotated.  

Fact-checking is something you’d hope they’d do BEFORE they published. So are we in some carnival hall of mirrors? Yes. Much of it is a new virtual world owned by billionaires. So how do we find our way out?

Like Dorothy in the land of Oz, all we can do is follow the yellow-brick road—the money. In the background is news about Energy Sec’y Rick Perry’s attending Zelensky’s Ukraine inauguration, after the President and VP Pence both declined the new president’s invitation. Lower down the pecking order, Perry was one of the “three amigos.” He recommended to Zelensky his favorite trusted Texan energy consultants—who also just happened to be Perry donors—who just happened to win a 50-year drilling contract despite a lower bid than competing Ukrainians. Perry recently resigned. Adios, senor.

Another of the amigos on special assignment by the president, millionaire donor Gordon Sondland made ambassador, has been filmed explaining his business philosophy of quid pro quo, his words, claiming something for something is more useful than the usual government diplomacy. He doesn’t say useful for whom, but I don’t think he means you and me or the Ukrainians.

Two recent movies reveal how awful and laughable these generalissimos and their amigos are, their sociopathic egos a danger to themselves, as well as to us. Check out The Laundromat, now on Netflix, for its coloring in the gray details of offshore banking and shell companies’ money-laundering, exposed by Monseca’s Panama Papers. What’s not to like when Meryl Streep appears as an ordinary grandmother who cannot be stopped. Money scandals aren’t over until we say they are, she says.

Then watch The Brink on Hulu, filmed by a young woman descended from holocaust survivors. I don’t know how on earth Alison Klayman talked Steve Bannon into letting her film him for months—his ego? This film is darker, alarming even, lightened only by glimpses of a real life as grungy as any, and the rising resistance of women in 2018, defeating Bannon’s guy, Roy Moore. Their voices and our reanimated elections remind us that bombastic fake-men, impeachable bores and liars, are far from inevitable. The trail of “big stuff,” namely “big money,” marks our way out of a fantasy Oz.

Time to Break Up Race and Gender Monopolies

from Rickey Gard Diamond’s column in Ms. Magazine. See them all at msmagazine.com/tag/women-unscrewing-screwnomics-series/

In a demographically changing world, uniformity is not great for business, says research regularly reported by McKinsey and Forbes. A growing body of evidence shows diverse and inclusive companies outperform heterogeneous peers. There’s no simple, causal relationship, but across business sectors, research patterns show innovation and market-share increase in companies with more diverse leadership.

Because money talks even louder than white guys at the water cooler, diversity’s now a buzzword—and on every CEO’s radar.  But a common mistake is thinking that hiring a more diverse workforce is all there is to it. Any tokenism will be quickly detected, harming company retention rates, with training expensive and differences real. A recent research report from BCG on flawed approaches says, “Our data shows that most company leaders—primarily white, heterosexual males—still underestimate the challenges [their] diverse employees face.”

“No one has it all figured out yet,” says La’Wana Harris about the word diversity, to which she’s devoted her career. “Some talk about diversity as inclusion, or diversity as equity, but I like to think diversity is also about belonging. Belonging is a big one.” Harris is an ICF-credentialed coach who has created inclusion-awareness workshops, cultural competence programs and trainings in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, and South Africa. Her new book Diversity Beyond Lip Service from business publisher Berrett-Koehler is a corporate coaching guide for challenging bias, still too often denied within male-dominated business cultures.

In 2015, McKinsey & Company reported that corporate executive teams in the US averaged only 16 percent women.  According to Catalyst, an organization focused on women’s leadership in business and on corporate boards, by 2018 US women were nearly half the labor force but held only 40 percent of all management positions; often these are middle-management jobs. They noted that the higher up the corporate ladder you go, the fewer women you’ll find.

Like white men, white women still have an advantage, they note. Of the 40 percent of managers, nearly a third were white women, while Latinas were only six percent, black women under four percent, and Asians 2 percent. Far from universal, gender experience carries unique, intersectional stresses.

 Unless company leaders actively pursue issues of perception, inclusion, equity, and bias, work teams may only sort out into camps or fall apart. That’s the reason corporations hire diversity coaches like La’Wana Harris to raise awareness of race, culture, and gender, while discovering deeper values, beliefs, and motivations.

 In a recent interview Harris pointed out that talking diversity isn’t easy in today’s polarized political climate. People worry, she told Ms. Magazine, sharing things she’s heard from clients: “‘I won’t know what to say,’ or ‘What if I offend someone? Or ‘I kind of would like to express myself, but in this environment, I wouldn’t dare.’”

 Harris said one sensible reason for inaction and silence is that people don’t want to be called out or dropped from the favor and privilege of the dominant culture. “No one wants to be excluded. What’s important is that we examine privilege and how it plays out in the power construct.”

Keynoter at Human Capital Institute’s May 2019 conference, La’Wana Harris discusses Inclusion Coaching in a talk titled, “Exploring the Radical Truth and Transformative Power that Lives within Each of Us.”

She added, “When you talk about oppression and real bias, people will go into their own corners and come out swinging and fail to find common ground. But it isn’t ‘us’ and ‘them.’ The question is how do we begin to move forward as an organization? We don’t make excuses; we don’t deny privilege. People like to talk about this in one dimension—white heterosexual male privilege— but everyone has a measure of privilege.  I’m a black woman, and I’m a Christian, so I have religious privilege in America. In marginalized communities, I’m privileged by my education and my income.”  

She says privilege is part of a much larger system that exists to protect power, and the unconscious biases supporting it. “That said, the goal of coaching is not to remove workplace privilege and bias, impossible anyway. Rather, let’s meet people where they are, so that they can do the self-work necessary to acknowledge their truth and how it affects their decisions. I’ll want to understand your diversity and inclusion story as a white man, too.”

White male diversity?! Does it exist? Everyone inherits a DNA shaped by a set of expectations rooted in one’s cultural context. Influences can be resisted or embraced in conscious and unconscious ways depending on circumstances and personality. Harris’s program structures, described in her book, are rooted in deep questions and self-reflection. One of the most challenging is: “What is the story you are telling yourself about….?” Fill in the blank.

 Harris advises companies upfront to make room for controversy and conflict. “Tell the truth,” she says, “even when it hurts.” Just as white men don’t want their career judged as the product of unfair advantages, women and people of color don’t want to be judged as tokens to meet a quota. “As part of a team,” she says, “we all want to be acknowledged as qualified, valuable contributors. The question is, how can we use our talent and privileges to move the organization forward?”

 The politically correct management perspective might be: “I am a white male, and I know that we need to increase diversity and inclusion.”  But Harris insists on allowing more honest conversations, without shaming and blaming. What if mainstream management admitted something as true as: “I am a white male, and I know that in theory we need to increase diversity and inclusion. But the current power construct works for me. I’ve had a thriving career. Honestly, I don’t see what’s so wrong about that; I’m very comfortable.”

 Still honesty without action amounts to lip service, by Harris’s measure. While leaders can and do discover creative ways to self-reflect and share power by welcoming differences, in a competitive world, where time and money count, diversity’s more personal work can seem at odds with short-term business objectives. In 2016, for instance, Apple shareholders rejected a proposal to prioritize diversity efforts, saying changing their leadership team, 72 percent male, would be “unduly burdensome and not necessary.”

I much admire Harris’s work and worldview, but unable to be as noble, still shame and blame. I confess I threw up in my mouth a little when in August, 2019, our biggest 200 CEOs issued a Business Roundtable signed statement, declaring “shareholder interest” or profit is not all there is to business! Led by JP Morgan CEO Jerry Dimon, paid $31 million a year, and signed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who has already broken his pledge, the group’s shameless discovery of a new world of insight claims the environment and workers matter too.

Der. You think?

Do You Speak Money?

This great video from one of our favorite Cambridge University economics professors. (We also love Guy Standing, who wrote The Precariat.) Ha-Joon Chang agrees with what Screwnomics says—Economics isn’t just numbers, it’s language, too. And language and metaphors really matter.

Why? Because language not only describes what we’re talking about—it shapes HOW we think about those things and how we value them or not . It’s hard to understand how money works on Wall Street when the language isn’t familiar to you, or the language obfuscates, or tries to impress you with insider knowledge that poor-you doesn’t know. Besides, maybe Wall Street has a purpose that doesn’t match up with what you want at all.

You might not hear this often, but ultimately economics is talking about relationships. But what sort of relationships are they? This short video shows you how it works these days—so do watch it.

Still I confess I felt some cognitive dissonance between Chang’s references to “people” in this and the images you see. It’s a strange omission, or maybe a misnaming. Do YOU see a scarcity of some “people” too? HINT: It’s what Screwnomics gives a name to, exactly what’s most wrong-headed in today’s “free market” economics.

Let’s compare notes! Post your responses on Screwnomics Twitter or Facebook. What do you see? There’s no right or wrong, here, and you don’t have to have read Screwnomics I’m just wondering what you’ll think about the language and the images, what you see and what you don’t see! I’ll post my thoughts and what you said about it next week.