Building Local Power

Building Local Power

By Institute for Local Self-RelianceSociety & CultureNewsNews Commentary
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Building Local Power episodes

  • How States and Cities Are Leading the Clean Energy Revolution (Episode 96)

    Jess Del Fiacco talks with ILSR Co-Director John Farrell about recent publications from ILSR's Energy Democracy initiative, including the Community Power Scorecard, which grades states on whether their energy policies help or hinder local clean energy action, and ILSR's recent report on community choice energy, which allows communities take charge of their energy supply.

    29 min
  • The Pandemic is Pushing Main Street Toward Collapse (Episode 95)

    This special episode of Building Local Power features a timely conversation between Stacy Mitchell, Co-Director of ILSR, and small business owner Sandy Grodin. Sandy owns El Paso Office Products in El Paso, Texas. He's been in the business for more than 30 years, but his company is now on the verge of collapse due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. He's shutting down for three weeks, and, like many other small business owners, isn't sure when or if he'll be able to reopen.

    16 min
  • Coronavirus Shows How Inequity Makes Us Vulnerable (Episode 94)

    Host Jess Del Fiacco talks with Stacy Mitchell, Co-Director of ILSR, and Christopher Mitchell, Director of ILSR’s Community Broadband initiative, about how communities are responding to the unprecedented challenge of Covid-19. It is already drastically impacting local businesses, and in many cases this crisis will further exacerbate existing inequalities -- making it impossible for people without high quality Internet access at home to work remotely, for example, and making it difficult for people without paid sick time to protect themselves and others.

    36 min
  • Democratizing Antitrust with Harry First

    Host Stacy Mitchell is joined by Harry First, law professor and co-director of New York University’s Competition, Innovation, and Information Law Program. They chat about how competition policy has become captured by technocratic lawyers and economists, and strayed from its roots as a political movement for economic justice. They also discuss:

    • The movement to “depoliticize” antitrust, and how decisions about how to enforce the law are always political on some level
    • How State Attorneys General can intervene to stop mergers when the FTC and DOJ refuse to intervene
    • The increasing number of students enrolling in antitrust classes
    • What can be done, and what is already being done, to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement

      •  

      “Everyone uses Amazon, everyone uses Google…this is not something that’s esoteric or removed from peoples’ lives. This is, particularly for the students we see, an integral part of their lives. They’re concerned about [monopoly power].”

       

      Related Resources

      1. Harry First
      2. Antitrust’s Democracy Deficit by Harry First and Spencer Weber Waller
      3. Woodstock Antitrust by Michael H. Belzer
      4. The Microsoft Antitrust Cases: Competition Policy for the Twenty-first Century by Andrew I. Gavil and Harry First
      5. ILSR’s Anti-Monopoly Resources

        6. Transcript

        Zach Freed:
        Hello and welcome to Building Local Power. I’m Zach Freed.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        And I’m Stacy Mitchell.
        Zach Freed:
        Today on the show we have a discussion between Stacy and professor Harry First of New York University law school. Harry is both a professor of law and a co-director of NYU’s competition innovation and information law program. Professor First is the author of several books and essays on antitrust, including one in particular called Antitrust Democracy Deficit with coauthor Spencer Weber Waller. Stacy sat down with Professor First to talk about that essay and what can be done to make up for antitrust laws democratic deficit. Just starting, one thing that stood out to me was how candid Harry First was about the need for democratic participation in this area of law.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Yeah, he’s really got, I think an interesting analysis in that article and we hear about it in the podcast about how antitrust law has become more and more the domain of economists in this really highly technical expertise. And as it’s it gone in that direction, ordinary people have been more and more excluded and the broader public purposes of antitrust law have been lost and kind of gone, it’s all gone behind closed doors.
        Zach Freed:
        Another thing that stood out to me was how forthright Professor First was about the discussion of values and how it’s impossible to “politicize” antitrust law because you’re taking into account value judgments when you make decisions about who gets what. Yeah. That was another thread that also came up with our conversation with Professor Sanjukta Paul in our last podcast.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Yeah. I think these two episodes actually pair really well together and you’re right, that was a common thread in both of them. And one of the things I learned a lot in this conversation with some of the details of history. And so one of the things a Professor First talks about is how Robert Bork, who we all know is a person who kind of appended antitrust law and helped to really neutralize it or even turn it on its head. And Robert Bork very directly said, “Antitrust is very political.” In today’s time, when people argue for stronger antitrust or that policy should incorporate a broader set of democratic values, the pushback from the establishment is often well you’re just trying to make it political. And the smarter, more accurate thing to recognize is that it’s already political.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        The question is, which values does it serve and whose values does it serve? One of the other things I thought was kind of interesting as just a historical fact that came up in this conversation, was that Harry First notes that in the 80s when these huge monumental changes were being made to antitrust law, there was a lot of pushback from state attorneys general, both Democrats and Republicans. And he said part of it was because they were closer to people. They were actually on the ground dealing with the problems of monopoly power and how it affected their states and their communities. And so they had a different perspective than the people in DC.
        Zach Freed:
        Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I was struck by that as well because we, it seems like we’re finding ourselves in a similar moment where you have bipartisan state AGs leading investigations into big tech platforms and in many ways pushing the federal agencies to scrutinize those companies more. Without further ado, let’s get to the conversation. Thanks Stacy.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Thanks Zach. So Professor Harry First, it’s nice to have you on the podcast.
        Harry First:
        Thank you. Nice to be talking.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        I first ran across your work when I read an article that you wrote several years ago called Antitrust Democracy Deficit and you wrote this with a Spencer Weber Waller. What is antitrust democracy deficit?
        Harry First:
        I’m tempted to say, well you have to read the article to find out, but what I’ll say is I’m glad you read the article. The basic idea that Spencer and I had was that antitrust would become very technical. And it had really since the mid 1970s, it had been a gradual, I want to say hostile takeover by the economists. Not quite hostile, but they wanted to move it away from a sort of a logic proposition that was based on the purposes of the antitrust laws to a much more narrow purpose, which could be attack through economics, the use of economic theory. So over time, that developed quite a bit and the economists when asked will develop models and think about these problems because competition problems are economic problems and are interesting.
        Harry First:
        So antitrust had become very technical. Technical isn’t bad in itself, but it has tended to remove antitrust from its values and particularly values that can’t quite be encompassed in just the word efficiency. So concern for economic power or size for the position of consumers as individuals, sort of sovereigns who are entitled to the benefits of a free enterprise system. So what our hope was, was sort of to move the needle back a little bit more towards the people.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        This sort of receding, the way the antitrust has receded behind closed doors and become this purview of economists, of technocrats, it’s had an effect that you noted about the way that the law has changed not to have these broader civic values be part of it, but instead has become very narrowly focused. Would you say that it’s also affected how much people understand about antitrust and the degree to which ordinary people feel like they know about this or have any say over it?
        Harry First:
        Well, you have to say that people who are technically trained want to be sure that there’s value to what they add. So yes, the more technical it becomes, the more lay people are excluded sort of by nature. I mean law in some sense is that way. Lawyers are technically trained and so that does tend to be a bit exclusionary. But as it became more technical, you’re right, it also became more and more impenetrable by the regular people who were being affected by it.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Mm-hmm (affirmative). I mean, I suppose that’s one of the ways that larger corporations can game the system, right? I mean they have a lot more power to influence economists, to hire economists to fund these expensive models that are done to show that a merger won’t have a negative impact for example. Whereas a set of workers in that industry for example, they don’t have that kind of access.
        Harry First:
        Yes, this is true. I mean it’s antitrust enforcement is focused on corporate behavior and should be particularly concerned with large corporations and particularly in merger situations. So yes, they can afford to hire the best economists, best lawyers. It’s always been a game of the government enforcers being outgun and having to figure out ways to deal with that unequal power just simply between the government and the private parties they’re trying to enforce it against.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Mm-hmm (affirmative). It really strikes me how much when I talk to people about issues of concentration and corporate power and corporate control, people understand corporate control. They feel that in their lives, they see that in their communities. But when you turn to the word antitrust, even people who are well informed and engaged on a lot of policy issues, who would feel very comfortable talking about Medicare for all for example, or any green new deal, any policy that you might be able to name, when it comes to antitrust they feel like, I don’t know. I don’t exactly know what that is and maybe I’m not in a position to be able to talk about it. And that seems to be one of the consequences of this.
        Harry First:
        Yes. Yes. And so the professionals love that idea. [inaudible 00:08:58]. But also I’ve always thought that antitrust got branded with the wrong name. So this is [inaudible 00:09:07] article feature of the 19th century and it was about trust, that were the large corporations of the day. So it was anti trust. But who wants to have a field that’s called you’re against trust? It sounds wrong somehow. So you already have to translate that. I think it would have been better off if it was pro competition. And in many places in the world it’s called competition policy or competition wall, which is more affirmative. So we sort of got stuck with bad branding from 1890.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Right, right. What do you think about anti-monopoly? I like the word monopoly.
        Harry First:
        There is a move, it’s interesting that you mentioned that because in some what you might call progressive circles or however they’re trying to brand themselves, the idea that it’s an anti-monopoly law sounds closer in some ways to what the law is actually about. And in fact if you … in Japan the law is the anti-monopoly law. I mean in Japanese, same in China. So where that’s gotten them, I’m not sure. Labels don’t determine everything maybe, but that label is coming back. The problem is antitrust deals with more than just monopoly. And so that’s a good descriptor but not a full one.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Mm-hmm (affirmative). So if we’re going to set about to change this, and I mean I think you’ve written that if we want to have more effective antitrust policy, if we want to have a chance to reform some of the things that have gone wrong, it’s really only going to happen if we can have an engaged public that there’s got to be a popular support. And this is a political process of change. So what do we need to do to remedy this democracy deficit?
        Harry First:
        Well, I think we’re starting to see it now, actually in what is in some ways to me an interesting and amazing moment for antitrust, I’ll use the old label, which we haven’t really seen since 1912 when antitrust was a central political issue in presidential politics. So I think in part because of the size of these major tech platforms, people have become concerned about the kinds of things that have always concerned antitrust, which is too much economic power and too few hands that affects a lot of people. And what’s interesting is the politicians are picking this up. So to the extent that people feel it’s an important political issue and express that through the political process in one way or another. Whether it’s supporting particular candidates or writing to a Congress person or Congress is investigating these issues. Writing to a state attorney general who is an elected official. It’s some way trying to become involved politically in supporting these kinds of investigations.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        If you were appointed in a new administration to run the antitrust division at the justice department, are there things that the agencies, you know we have these two agencies at the federal level, and I want to turn back to the attorney general’s in a minute. But at the federal level we’ve got the Department Of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission in charge of policing competition. Are there things that the agencies should be doing to be more transparent?
        Harry First:
        I’m not sure transparency is necessarily the key. In some ways we have a fair degree of transparency today. The question is what are you being transparent about? I think there are things we have in some ways an activist in some ways, I want to underline in some ways, activist enforcement agencies on the federal level. They’ve been holding hearings. Federal Trade Commission has held hearings around the country about competition issues. These are all to the good and in that sense transparency things. But the important thing is to start reorienting enforcement policy in a way that I think is more in line with the general purposes of competition with antitrust law and the statute dealing with mergers. So there are lots of things that the enforcement agencies could do to move the enforcement closer to what it should be and away from this completely technical view of antitrust. And frankly some degree of timidity in taking on big cases. We’ll have to see whether they’re really going to take on some of these big cases.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I mean I very much agree with that about the need for the agencies to fundamentally reform how they’re approaching their job. I think what I’m struck by is things like when Amazon bought Whole Foods for example, that was proof there was no … there was only a very limited review. There was no sort of fuller review done by the Federal Trade Commission and there was no explanation of their decision. So we know nothing, as a public, we know nothing about what their thinking was, how they looked at that case and decided that it wasn’t really worth looking at anymore closely.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Similarly, another example I was struck by was when the, I think it was the department of justice, some documents were accidentally disclosed to the Wall Street Journal about Google. And come to find out staff had done a lot of work and really felt that a case should have been brought a few years ago and the sort of higher ups didn’t move forward with that. And that again, it seems to me that part of the problem here, I mean clearly there are the choices and enforcement decisions that the agencies are making, but it’s also like we have no view. All of this stuff is happening behind closed doors and without understanding the decision making, it becomes hard to criticize it or to suggest ways it should have been different.
        Harry First:
        Yeah, I think those are very good points. The Google memorandum, we managed to get every other page.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        It makes for fun reading that way, right?
        Harry First:
        Someone’s going to write the other side, write the other half of the memo. What was in those other pages? I don’t know why they haven’t done that. Maybe that would be a good TV series. But in any event, yeah, I think transparency could help there. It’s not, it’s a medium cure. For example, every case that the justice department settles, it has to explain itself. It’s a requirement of the law since the last time we were concerned about misuse of antitrust frankly during the Nixon administration. And that’s of some use but somewhat limited use because those disclosures are always self-serving. It’s something, but it doesn’t necessarily get us completely far. And I think the agencies to some extent have realized that it might be helpful when they close a case to give some explanation for it. I guess what I would prefer is opening the case, not closing it. But not every case can be brought and sometimes the law is not on your side no matter what you’d like. And that may actually be Amazon Whole Foods.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Well in many of those cases it’s case law essentially. It’s the courts that have created that situation and one could argue perhaps have strayed pretty far from Congress’s intent with the laws. As you think about what is it going to take to actually change enforcement and change policy, does Congress need to step in and clarify what its intentions are? It seems like a long road to get the courts to revisit things like predatory pricing for example. The process of getting courts to like re look at these issues and think about, sort of go through an evolution in their thinking is long and uncertain.
        Harry First:
        Yes. Law is often a conservative proposition because a big idea of legal rules is you follow the old rules. So you should be a little reluctant to change them. And so that makes things inherently somewhat conservative. And then when you combine that with judges that approach the law conservatively, you don’t get much change. We did get change in the 1970s. The Supreme Court did change the way we look at antitrust law. So I think, and this was one of the points that Spencer and I made in that article that you mentioned, we’ve sort of forgotten that Congress actually does legislate and has a role to play in their particular areas.
        Harry First:
        One of them is the merger area where Congress could make changes that would stop some of the concentration that we’ve seen, which most people think is bad, but we didn’t seem to be able to do much about it or we didn’t. There are bills pending in Congress to do that and I think that really is one Avenue that we’ve neglected over time. And then the judges, the judges then ought to do what they’re supposed to do, which is they follow the law and there’s some interpretation they can do, but if the law makes a big change, they’ve got to go along and they will.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Okay. We’re going to take a short break. We’ll be right back. Hello everyone. Thanks so much for listening to Building Local Power. I wanted to ask as we get here towards the end of 2019 if you might consider making a donation to support ILSR’s work. We’re a nonprofit organization and we depend quite a bit on donations from individuals to make our work happen. If you can kick in a few bucks, that would be great. You can donate to help support this podcast, but the podcast of course is only a small part of what we do. It’s a kind of side hustle to our main work, which is that we work with communities across the country to help them build local power, take control over their broadband networks, their energy systems, rebuild independent local businesses.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        And of course we knit all of that together with advocacy at the state and federal level to change the policies that impact local economies and local communities. So in the last year we’ve helped a lot of cities build publicly owned broadband networks and take power back from the broadband monopolies. We’ve helped cities like Birmingham and Tulsa block the proliferation of dollar stores and dollar store saturation and put in place policies to support local grocers instead. We’ve helped cities think about how to reconfigure their energy systems and rebuild local recycling and composting infrastructure to both take power back from big waste and also to protect the climate. So we’re doing a lot of great work. You can read more about it on our website archive.ilsr.org and if you’d be so kind as to click that donate button, we’d really appreciate it. Thanks.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Okay, we’re back. Some people argue, some people who want to keep the status quo as we have it now have argued that this kind of technocratic, if you will, approach to antitrust is somehow neutral, apolitical, and that the people who are saying that we need reform, that we need to bring in values of equity, of citizenship, of democracy back into antitrust that that’s somehow politicizing antitrust. How do you respond to that?
        Harry First:
        A little self-awareness would be in order. I can’t believe that they really think any legal system is completely apolitical. There are apolitical aspects of it, and there should be. I mean, that’s what a rule of law is. But the sort of the, I don’t want to say founder, but the source that a lot of people look back to for this change is Robert Bohr and the book that he wrote The Antitrust Paradox. What’s really interesting to me in that book is that he said antitrust is inherently political. And he was very clear about it. And he didn’t think that was a bad thing. It wasn’t just economics.
        Harry First:
        There were political values that he had about the role of government and the role of markets. And he recognizes these were political issues and they’re up for debate and change and movement in every generation, which is why my students say, “How can we settle this thing? We passed the law on 1890. Don’t we know exactly what it is? Why are we still arguing about these things?” And I say, “Because they’re always contestable.” And I don’t think if you really push anyone, they would say, “Oh, this is completely apolitical.” They would say, “No, it’s the Casa Blanca moment. Oh, there’s politics going on.” You know.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Mm-hmm (affirmative). So you talked a little bit earlier about attorneys general and what is the role of states? We often focus on the federal government in antitrust, but the states actually have a pretty significant role.
        Harry First:
        Yes. It’s interesting historically. So state antitrust law, actually there were a few state any trust laws that preceded the Sherman Act, the basic antitrust law in 1890. So as was the case at that point in our economy where things weren’t nationalized, the states were to some extent out ahead in regulating the railroads. States did it before the federal government did and some degree of antitrust law to control major corporations and deal with the changes in the economy that were going on. So states were very much involved and continued to be for a while and then it sort of slacked off. There weren’t the sources that voted either on the federal or the state level. But the states do have the authority to enforce federal law under federal precedent.
        Harry First:
        So state enforcers can go into federal courts using the Sherman Act and enforce it in a way, just about the same way that the department of justice or Federal Trade Commission can. And they have at various times played a backup role to the federal government, a prod to the federal government enforcers or disagreeing with the federal government enforcers and saying, “Well, if you won’t bring the case, we will.” And that’s been a very important aspect of antitrust enforcement. And it is like, once again actually.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, talk a little bit about when States have led the way, when they’ve pushed on an issue that the feds were reluctant to and how you’re seeing that today.
        Harry First:
        You know, the last time really this happened in a major way was during the Reagan administration in the 1980s when the justice department was sort of withdrawing from really rewriting the way we think about mergers and dialing back its merger enforcement. The state said, “No, we don’t agree,” and brought cases and were very much pushing the idea that that new approach wasn’t a good idea. And I will say the state attorneys general who supported this move were both Democrat and Republican and what they were not was Washington people. They were in touch with the interests of their states and we’re concerned about concentration and economy, how it was affecting their citizens.
        Harry First:
        So the politics were different too. And that was a major time. The second point was litigation against Microsoft, the last major monopolization case that was brought to United States by the government. And the States and the federal government brought suit. But the state’s really, one of their efforts was to push the suit and make sure that the federal government didn’t let it go and brought suit. So that was another interesting time when state enforcement was quite important.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Today we’ve got a bunch of attorneys general who’ve opened investigation into Facebook and I believe Google as well. What do you think the prospects are for them to lead the way on big tech?
        Harry First:
        Yeah. I don’t know. Here’s probably my first reaction is that it’s a heavy lift. Taking on these cases is a big deal. These are very well resourced companies that understand their business in a way that government lawyers don’t and have to learn about. It is important to have, there’s not only safety in numbers but money in numbers. So it does give the state’s resources, people and budget. These are going to be tough cases. And one of the things that’s true when you have 48 States, 49 depending on how you count, it’s a challenge just to coordinate among those offices and what may be different views from different offices.
        Harry First:
        So you sort of have to keep that coalition together. Nobody really has authority. It’s an interesting process. But I think they seem serious about it. States are now litigating the Sprint and T-Mobile merger in a very serious way, and I think they’re serious about these investigations. Serious are not, they won’t be easy and they’ll require a lot of effort. But I think they’re determined to go ahead without regard to what the federal government does. And apparently now, not without a lot of coordination with the federal government, which has its downsides actually.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Mm-hmm (affirmative). Is there an interplay, do you think between what the states do, what the agencies do, how Congress looks at these issues? I mean, do they sort of spur one another along?
        Harry First:
        Yes, they can have that effect. I think sort of on the good side is I think to take on a case like this, you need general support. And this now seems to be bipartisan, which is a very interesting aspect of it and going on at multiple levels, both Congress and the federal enforcers and the states. So I think yes, they can spur them on. There is always the worry in cases like this that one group settles on terms that are maybe not what they should be and that affects the ability of the others to go ahead. So we have yet to see exactly the test really the federal agencies are in terms of moving these cases ahead. And I frankly don’t know. I think we’re going to go find out. So there are challenges even in that. But way better to have all of these groups involved because it does build a certain sense of consensus that something ought to be done.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Mm-hmm (affirmative). Just turning back to overall reform and the prospect of Congress stepping in and taking action to sort of set things right and turn the agencies and the courts back maybe to what Congress’s original intension was around the anti-monopoly laws. Yeah, I’ve been interested to read a little bit about some of the proposals in the 1970s. One called the industrial reorganization act and talk about a branding problem. I mean, that is a really boring act-
        Harry First:
        They should’ve called it break them up act.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it’s such a stronger proposal than we’ve seen so far. I mean, there are a number of bills that have been introduced by Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker and others in Congress to in various ways reform merger policy or other aspects of antitrust. But the industrial reorganization act or the break them up act as we’ve now renamed it from the 1970s really what much further and sort of in a way removed the role of technocrats and economists from the process. So tell us a little bit about that.
        Harry First:
        So this was not a modest bill as you said. And it would have created new institutions. It would have reorganized sort of the top of our economy. If you were over a certain asset size, you would have to show why you should stay that way and not be broken up. This bill was introduced I think in three separate congresses with Senator Phil Hart who was chairman of I guess it was the antitrust subcommittee of the judiciary committee from Michigan. Very powerful and thoughtful Senator. And I’m not quite sure politically that he ever thought these bills would get passed. I’m not sure Congress was any more ready to restructure large corporations in 1970 than they are today. But it did form, gave a forum for really thinking through what might be done and the reasons for or against it.
        Harry First:
        Now in the end you might say nothing came of it, but it was extremely ambitious and far-reaching. Senator Klobuchar’s bill on mergers is maybe less ambitious in its scope but maybe more achievable. So we’ll have to see if anything happened. It didn’t pass the last Congress, hard to say it’s going to pass this one.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        What I thought was interesting about this legislation from the 70s is that it basically said if you are a company with monopoly power, if you’re very large and you have a substantial and long lasting share of a market that that’s problematic and it removes the need to show that you somehow engaged in anti competitive behavior, which is a complicated process to show, and said there is a public interest in not having markets monopolized by these big companies. And that is, I found quite appealing in the sense that it dealt with companies, very powerful companies, just sort of the top tier of companies and recognized that bigness can be problematic in and of itself and that sort of market power and removed the need to go through a very complicated process in terms of trying to show anti competitive behavior and really got straight to the issue I think in some ways.
        Harry First:
        Yes. So this was the push for what was called no fault monopolization. Interesting thing that you’re talk about the technocrats. A lot of the, sort of the important commentators of the day, one economist who later got an Nobel award actually, were in favor of this because it was a straight case that monopoly wasn’t good economically. And straight economic grounds forget the political issues and they did favor that sort of approach. I think we’re ready to reconsider that. And some people are dusting this off and saying this might be a useful thing to talk about, not just mergers which is how firms grow, but the position of firms as monopolies. One of the difficulties of transposing that to today’s economy is the concern then was for what was called durable monopoly, just as you said, long lasting monopolies.
        Harry First:
        And I think today’s concern about the big tech companies is a different sort of monopoly and some not even monopolies. So Apple’s not a monopoly. So it’s an even more complicated issue. But the core of not needing to say, “Oh you did X bad thing, don’t do X bad thing.” But saying, “There’s something about the structure of the market and the incentives that if we change that you wouldn’t do X bad thing or Y and we’d have more control over large economic actors.”
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Mm-hmm (affirmative). Are you finding as a law professor that law students that are coming in now have more knowledge or interest in antitrust? I’m curious if the growing sort of public interest in this area of law and policy has changed the mix of law students.
        Harry First:
        I do find law students who are really interested in the area for lots of different reasons maybe. It’s hard for me to say. I always feel that interest increases when they go to work in the summer for a law firm and find that the law firm has antitrust issues they’ve got to deal with. And then they say, “Maybe we’re going to learn something about that.” So a factoid is that or for a seminar as a semester and seminar sizes are limited and it’s the first time I can remember maybe ever, but certainly in a long time that my antitrust seminar was oversubscribed. It wasn’t just me. I’d like to think, oh they love me. But one of my colleagues also had that.
        Harry First:
        I think there is a general upswing for various reasons. It may be just because what’s on the front page and the kinds of companies that they see and deal with. Everyone uses Amazon. Everyone uses Google. And unfortunately, apparently everyone uses Facebook. So this is not something that’s esoteric or removed from people’s lives. It is particularly for the students we see, an integral part of their lives and they’re concerned about it.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Well that seems promising.
        Harry First:
        Yes. [inaudible 00:00:37:28]. I have to have students to teach you know. It’s much more fun that way. And they’re going to go out and I think some will be involved in the area for sure.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Uh-huh (affirmative). Well I really appreciate this conversation. It’s been great to talk with you a little bit about your work and to help us understand a little bit more about how this area of policy works. I wanted to close just by asking if you had a reading or a watching recommendation.
        Harry First:
        Who has time to read anything when there’s so much on so much competition in television entertainment programming until we all just have Netflix and Amazon. Well that’s for a future one. So here’s this series that I really love. It has nothing to do … There are lots of blogs on competition. There are lots of interesting blogs, lots of things to read and so forth on competition law. For a TV program, so I don’t know if you know Shtisl.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        No.
        Harry First:
        I’ll give a plug to Netflix, not that they need it. It’s a show about orthodox Jews in Jerusalem and how they live. It’s a very human interest to me. Interesting show and the people who star in it have become sort of minor or major important actors and hits in these roles. So it’s a great human interest and series. And it also gives you an insight into a different culture that many of us don’t really know how it operates. So Shtisl it is, S-H-T-I-S-L.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Shtisl. Great. And it’s a drama, not a documentary, right?
        Harry First:
        It’s not a documentary. It’s a drama series and a very, very human series.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Excellent. I’ll have to check it out. We will put that in the show notes on our website for this episode. And we will also put links to several of your articles on that so people can read more about the antitrust democracy deficit and other work that you’ve done. Harry First, thank you so much for being on our podcast.
        Harry First:
        Great. It was a lot of fun. Thanks.
        Stacy Mitchell:
        Thank you for listening to this episode of Building Local Power. You can find links to what we discussed today by going to our website archive.ilsr.org and clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s archive.ilsr.org. And while you’re there, you can sign up for one of our newsletters or click the donate button to support our work. If you like this podcast, please consider rating and reviewing it on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is edited by Lisa Gonzales and produced by Lisa and Zack Freed. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction Al. For the Institute for Local Self Reliance I’m Stacy Mitchell. We’ll see you again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

         

         

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        Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

        Photo Credit: US Department of Justice via Wikipedia

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        41 min
      6. How Cities Are Adapting to the Mobility Revolution

        John Farrell spoke with ILSR Senior Fellow and Co-Founder David Morris about how new technologies — such as app-based ride sharing, e-scooters, and online shopping — are changing how we move people and goods around cities. Their conversation focuses on how cities have to reevaluate the use of public space as companies like Uber move in. They also discuss:

        • The long history of cities grappling with transportation revolutions, from bikes to scooters to delivery drones.
        • How mobility, social movements, and equity are closely tied together.
        • The cities that are leading the way in regulating these new technologies, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Austin.
        • How mass transit systems fit into our current mobility revolution.

          •  

          “Cities are going to have to reassess the public spaces, reprioritize who has access to those public spaces, and gain a great deal more sophistication and capacity.”

           

          Related Resources

          New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

          Transcript

          John Farrell:
          [00:00:00]
          John Farrell:
          Welcome to Building Local Power. I’m your host, John Farrell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. For this episode we’re talking cities and the mobility revolution with David Morris, ILSR senior fellow and co-founder. From Uber to scooters to drones, we talk about the ways technology is changing how we move people and goods and how cities have to wrestle with prioritizing the use of public space to match the demand. I know that this is forgoing local power and I’m supposed to give some sort of like, clever intro or welcome or ask you about a number or something but I’m not good at that in the way Chris is.
          David Morris:
          That’s fine, by the way.
          John Farrell:
          That’s good. I just like to dive in. There’s so much interesting stuff to talk about.
          David Morris:
          Go.
          John Farrell:
          I think I’ll start by just saying, electric scooters. I’ve ridden on them a couple of times. I find them fascinating. I’ve also been in enough cities even across the world to see that they’re all over the place. I was hoping to start by talking to you about scooters and other mobility options, bikes and e-bikes. I feel like cities are confronting a sort of wild west of transportation mobility in this day and age. Where I wanted to start with, because I know that you are someone who researches deeply these threads throughout time, is this something that cities have had to confront before?
          David Morris:
          Well yes, cities did have to confront it before and when I say “this,” what I mean is a technology driven, in some ways, transportation revolution where cities are going to have to reassess the public spaces, reprioritize who has access to those public spaces and again a great deal more sophistication and capacity. This happened once before, it happened in the 1890s and it happened around the introduction of the bicycle. Actually the introduction of the safety bicycle, that was the bicycle that we ride today that has two equal wheels and the like. It was easy to ride and what it did, it became a craze in the 1890s. There was a million, more than a million bikes that people were riding. It was like a tidal wave and it was embraced most vigorously and aggressively by women. It was seen as a very liberating technology for women because they had the ability then to just get on their bike and go. Women were very constricted in their activities in those days and if they were on transportation there was a male chauffeur.
          David Morris:
          This was their liberation and Suzan B. Anthony, who was a leader of the women’s movement for many years, said in 1895, “Let me tell you what I think of bicycling, I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” It also, since bicycles are cumbersome devices to ride on if you happen to have your corsets and your low flowing dresses and the like, low hanging dresses, it changed the dress code if you will for women. Women created what they called the “rational dress movement” where they wore, we call them “pants,” they called them “bloomers.” It was a very useful technology to create a social movement but also it created the question of who has access to streets because at that time in the 1890s everyone had access to streets almost equally.
          David Morris:
          You had, of course, horses, then you had pedestrians, then you had horse drawn wagons and the like but they had fairly equal access. In the 1890s two technologies came into cities. One was the bike, as we mentioned and the other was the electric street car. The electric street car got a lane all to itself because it was laying down tracks. The bicycle then was having to dodge the electric street car but also had to dodge very angry men on horses and their wagons. There had to be some rules created about streets and at the same time they had to create a walking path for pedestrians, which we call sidewalks. The 1890s was a time where they really were creating new rules and by the end of the 1890s you had electric bikes that were beginning to look a little like cars, you had the first electric motorcycles beginning to be created and you had motels, if you will, that were for bicyclists. You had people who would take your bike, their concierges and they would park your bike, they had parking garages. They had bike paths between cities. That is, there were bike paths next to the roads but they were much better maintained than the roads.
          David Morris:
          Then the car came in. When the car came in it came in timidly at first and then after the Model T was introduced in 1908 and it became a mass vehicle it became a great deal more aggressive. We sort of know the history of the car. Where it essentially claimed the streets. In the 1920s and the 1930s, for example, you couldn’t park on the streets. In fact, by the 1870s there were rules that you didn’t park on the streets, you didn’t leave your wagon on the streets and the like. That etiquette had to be changed for the cars to demand not only the width of the street but it had to demand that it could also take up part of that for stationary vehicles. It got to the point where the sidewalks became narrower and narrower and at one point there were some who were thinking that sidewalks should be eliminated if cars were going to be so dominant.
          David Morris:
          Then the car companies undermined the street cars and by the 1950s the cars were so dominant that cities were passing rules, regulations about parking on private land. So far we’ve been talking about cars on public land, which is the streets and the parks, but here we’re talking about codes that required a certain number of off street parking for businesses. By the late 1950s you really had the heyday, if you will, of cars.
          John Farrell:
          It feels like since the 1950s we’ve dabbled in other forms of transit. We have buses, which of course just share the road with cars for the most part, we’ve gotten some new transit by rail in various cities but a lot of cities that had their transit, like subways, kept them and cities that had street cars lost them. Then some have come back with other forms. This seems like a really dynamic time all of a sudden where we have private companies coming in, providing mobility options so there’s … A decade ago or so, or maybe a little longer we started talking about car sharing, which was interesting but it didn’t really change the rules. Now like you’ve said we’ve got all this issue about public space and whatnot. I feel like I have a couple different questions for you. One is about what are some of the technology drivers here? We’re not talking about the introduction of a bike in the way that we did in the 1890s but we are talking about technology driving this. Then the second one is about how are Uber and Lyft fitting into this? Because they sort of created this craze around ride hailing and cars but they’re now getting into these other forms of transportation, as well.
          David Morris:
          Yes well it’s a good question and what we’re seeing here is a revolution in personal transportation. The reasons for it is the coming together of several trends sort of simultaneously. One is the technology, which is the introduction of the smartphone, the introduction of GPS systems and the introduction of lower cost batteries. You had for the first time the capability of essentially calling up a vehicle, which would be the ride share like Uber, or renting a vehicle by the minute with your smartphone, which is your electric e-scooters or electric bikes. You can have on demand personal transportation. That technological revolution came about around 2010, 2012 if you will. The second thing was the revolution in business financing. This is also a-historical. Where you used to start a business and you started it small and you gradually got larger. Then you might become global eventually.
          David Morris:
          With the new startups the capital, they raise enormous amounts of capital up front and then their goal is not to start a e-scooter in one city or an e-bike in one city, but actually to start them in 100 cities or 200 cities within 12 months. That is to dominate the cities, to brand themselves and dominate the cities. As a result they lose an enormous amount of money for a long time. Some might say forever. Certainly Uber and Lyft are still losing a great deal of money. What it means is that cities are caught unaware and overnight, literally overnight, they suddenly see all of these things within their jurisdiction. The third sort of coincidental movement is political and the political movement was the renewed or resurgence of the bike, that is the pedal bike. You had, in fact, a group of people, bicyclists that is, that began to demand bike lanes. Then around 2010 or so you had these docked bike racks and so you would go and you would essentially put your credit card in and then you could rent the bike but they were docked.
          David Morris:
          There was an enormous increase in the number of docked bikes. In fact, from 2010 to 2017 the number of trips that were taken by docked bikes went from 300,000 to 35 million. Then in late 2017 the e-scooters came in and in 2018 the number of rides on e-scooters was 40 million. That is it dominated the docked bikes and docked bikes have just about disappeared, actually. You have dock-less bikes but you no longer have docked bikes. Those are the three things, the three sort of coming together, the fact that technology has made it possible, the new finance systems made it everywhere at the same time and the political movement was that there was already the beginnings of the struggle around access to the streets by personal vehicles and by bikes.
          David Morris:
          That’s what essentially is the new revolution and e-scooters came out of Santa Monica and I believe it was June or July of 2017 that they in fact dropped a few of them around Santa Monica and then sent a note to the city saying they’ve done this and within six months they were in 50 to 75 cities. Within a year and a half there were many companies and they were going around the world. The revolution there was simply, there was a technological revolution but the essence of the revolution was that you didn’t need to have a dock. You just rented it and when you were finished you dumped it someplace and somebody else would collect it during the night and then they’d set them up and you’d do the same thing. Cities literally woke up one morning and saw these things were all over the sidewalks and all over the parks, people were stumbling across them, people were putting them on fire, people were dumping them in the rivers.
          David Morris:
          You literally had to deal with them. Cities had to deal with these new creatures and cities had had experience a couple of years before that with Uber and Lyft. Uber and Lyft were sort of the first generation of these technologies that essentially scaled very quickly because of the capital behind them and abided by the principal that you essentially do it first then ask permission afterwards. That you go fast and break things. That’s the motto of Silicon Valley. They came into cities and cities had to deal with these new vehicles. That was a real learning experience for cities and so when the e-scooters came in a number of cities, not that many but a number of cities, actually had some sort of capacity to understand what these creatures were based on their experience with Uber.
          David Morris:
          For example, when Uber came in it essentially said, “We are going to get rid of the car. People aren’t going to drive anymore because they’re going to call an Uber vehicle” and cities bought into that. Of course, part of this political movement that’s in favor of the bike was against the car. You have a massive anti-car movement for a whole bunch of reasons now and so you essentially had Uber saying, “We’re going to reduce congestion” and it turned out that the data indicated that they increased congestion. That if you didn’t drive your car but you called Uber, that’s sort of a one-for-one relationship. While the Uber drive is roaming around waiting for another ride that’s a car that’s essentially congesting the streets. Cities felt they were taken by that propaganda and when the e-scooters came in they felt that they needed to treat them very differently.
          John Farrell:
          Yeah, let’s talk about that. It seems like the big issue here with all of these is the use of public space. Whether it’s Uber ride hailing cars trolling around looking for jobs or dock-less scooters or now dock-less bikes, there’s all this new use by these different mobility things of streets or sidewalks and public right of way. How are cities dealing with that? Then I think after that let’s tackle some of the other big issues that are raised by these forms of mobility but let’s start with that issue of public space. How are cities confronting this?
          David Morris:
          Well what cities did originally was to ban them. Then some cities just picked them up and essentially confiscated the vehicles. I mean, they were sprawling all over the place and there was huge public outcry against them. Cities banned them. Then cities began to figure out regulations for how they could regulate them. Cities have been essentially promoting personal transportation. The feeling is that this is a technology that could be liberating, that could be helpful and they shouldn’t, essentially, ban it but there needed to be rules around it. Over the last two years cities have been evolving the rules that they impose. First of all they had to impose their authority. They had to say, “You can’t do this unless you get a permit from us.” That was the first step because there really was no regulations around this.
          David Morris:
          Then the second step was what would that permit entail? What would be the conditions attached to it? Part of those now are that you are limited to a certain number of vehicles. It might be a bike, it might be a scooter. The second that a number of them have done is you can’t ride on the sidewalk. They identify the public space that you’re allowed to ride on. Then the third might be a helmet or insurance and the fourth might be lights and the like. Just the way you have regulations related to bikes riding at night. Slowly but surely cities are in fact trying to grapple with this and the pedal bicyclists have been very supportive. There’s been a coalition if you will of pedal bicyclists and electrified bicyclists and e-scooter operators, primarily because the pedal bicyclists felt that the e-scooter companies had an enormous amount of capital and in fact they would be the battering ram that could in fact raise that whole struggle over public space because the bikes were taking … It was a very slow struggle to get a lane of a street carved out for bikes, especially a protected lane. There was a coalition.
          David Morris:
          As the technologies themselves have evolved there’s an evolution and it’s interesting. The scooters to me are a technological fad which will, I mean, it’ll be a niche thing and it might continue but it’ll be niche because people don’t like to, I think, they don’t like to be mobile standing up. Let’s just put it that way. You’re going to have a seat. Once you have a seat it becomes a somewhat different vehicle. Then you have a seat and you have a roof. Well you have a roof, now you have doors, so you now do have these vehicles. You have cargo bikes, for example, electrified cargo bikes that carry things. These new types of vehicles are small enough and narrow enough that they can go into the bike lanes. Now the bicyclists are not happy. Pedal bicyclists are not happy about that. You’re now having attention, really, between different forms of technology. There would be less tension if the entire street was available for them but there’s a lot more when it’s just a narrow lane that is.
          David Morris:
          Cities have learned about this and I was just reading an interview with a director of the San Francisco Metropolitan Transit Association and San Francisco and Los Angeles have one of the more sophisticated transportation agencies in the sense that they really are pondering what this thing means. He was talking about how what he would like governments to do is view this the way the federal government viewed the electromagnetic spectrum in the 1930s. That is, what the federal government did was to say, “This is public. We own it. That is we collectively own it and we want to create rules that foster innovation but do it in a way that promotes competition and a free and a fair market.” It was a limited resource and they would allocate it based on what promoted the public good.
          David Morris:
          Now, we know what happened to that in terms of commercialization and privatization and the like but he, and I think so, too, it’s a useful way to think about how we use the public space. It’s a very sophisticated way of thinking about how you use the public space. We haven’t talked about the issue of transit and personal mobility because mass transit systems still exist and is the cheapest way, by far, of getting from point A to point B if there’s a lot of people that want to go from point A to point B. Cities are dealing with this by, a number of cities, growing number of cities have bus lanes but they’re bus lanes that nobody really respected. That is commercial freight vehicles would park there and other people would drive onto those bus lanes. What they did interestingly enough was to paint them red. Now it seems like a very minor innovation but when they painted them red suddenly people actually didn’t use them. I mean it was astounding the reduction in the amount of traffic on those bus lanes which meant that there was a great deal more speeding up of the bus and also a great deal less congestion overall on the roads, believe it or not. There’s that kind of innovation that is going on.
          David Morris:
          Finally in terms of innovation there are cities starting with Los Angeles that said to the scooter companies at first and now it’s the e-bike companies and the ride share companies that they needed to share their data with the city in real time. That is, well actually somewhat delayed time but not greatly delayed so that the city would have access to the information that it needs to design a transportation system within the commons. The companies have been very reticent of doing that. They scream about privacy rights and of course there are privacy issues involved in that but essentially they wanted to own that information and not share it at all. Cities said, “You’re using a public space. You don’t have to use it but if you’re going to use it you’re going to have to share that information with us so we can plan to use that space more efficiently.”
          John Farrell:
          [00:23:49]
          John Farrell:
          We’re going to take a short break. When we come back, David explains how mass transit fits into this mobility puzzle. The role of e-commerce in clogging public thoroughfares and what cities need to do to adapt to the micro-mobility revolution.
          John Farrell:
          Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Building Local Power with David Morris, ILSR senior fellow and co-founder. Hey, do you think you’d be a great guest on Building Local Power? Are you dying to tell Chris Mitchell what he could do better? Want to just share some love? Email us at [email protected]. You can also send your love with a small donation. If you listen to other podcasts you might hear about a mattress company or a meal delivery service but the Institute for Local Self-Reliance is a national organization that supports local economies so we don’t have national advertising. Instead, please consider making a donation to ILSR. Not only does your support underwrite this podcast but it also helps us produce all the resources from reports to podcasts to interactive maps we make available for free on our website. Please take a minute to go to ILSR.org/donate. Any amount is welcome and sincerely appreciated. That’s ILSR.org/donate. We also value your reviews on Stitcher, iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much. Now, lets get back to our conversation with David about the micro-mobility revolution.
          John Farrell:
          I think this is really fascinating. You’ve raised, I think, a really crucial question here about transit at large and you brought up this notion of mass transit and bus lanes because it seems very interesting, right? I feel like the way that cities have been involved in trying to facilitate transportation planning is number one, they have had transit agencies and bus service and ways to help people who sort of can’t be part of the personal car transportation economy for one reason or another. Maybe they can’t afford it, maybe they can’t drive a vehicle physically, maybe there are other values laid and reasons why they don’t want to. Now we have mass transits in some ways sort of competing with personal transit for space and it raises a number of interesting sort of equity issues not just about income, which has been kind of the defining factor between mass transit and personal transit to some degree but you also have issues around disability access. Someone in a wheelchair using the sidewalk, the sidewalks now got scooters all over it. You have bike lanes and bus lanes.
          John Farrell:
          How does this whole issue of transit fit into the puzzle? I feel like you were starting to get there, too, as you were talking about this notion of sharing information, right? How can cities make these good decisions but talk a little bit more about mass transit versus some of these personal transit options and where there are tensions and where there might be some harmony?
          David Morris:
          Yes, well the issue of equity came up very quickly and in terms of the e-scooters, for example, one of the conditions that cities now routinely impose on those companies that are allowed to essentially introduce their vehicles into the city is that they introduce them in a way that are in all parts of the city because these were essentially focused on downtown and the sort of square mile around downtown. The feeling was that low income neighborhoods needed this just as much if not even more and they also required them to discount their rates in low income areas. There has been an equity position related to that. In terms of the mass transit, Kansas City, Missouri is just about to make their bus system free. Their light rail system is already free but their bus system is just about to be free and they see that, in fact, as equity. In fact, they see it as transportation is a right for people and access is a right for people that they should share equally. In some ways you could think of it as comparable to a medical system that says that everyone should have access to medical care and that means free or low cost for people that can’t afford it but in this case it’s free. It will be free for everyone.
          David Morris:
          In terms of the disabled issue, that’s a fascinating issue because it was people on wheelchairs that initially, and the elderly who needed help in moving around, who complained most bitterly about the e-scooters that were littering the sidewalks. That was the major, if you will, impetus to cities essentially imposing a ban initially. The disabled have also been suing cities on the issue of sidewalks. Now sidewalks, you know we talked about how sidewalks almost disappeared in the early part of the 20th century and sort of held on but they have been in complete disrepair for the past 60 or 70 years in many cities. You have roots that are growing out, you have uneven sidewalks, you might even have a pothole or two in a sidewalk. The disabled actually got a law, which is the ADA law and before that they had another one, that got cities to put ramps on so that a wheelchair would not have to somehow get over a curb but more recently you’ve had the disabled sue cities for the fact that they’re hurt on the sidewalks.
          David Morris:
          There was a suit just in the last few years in 2015, Los Angeles settled the suit and agreed to spend $1.4 billion to fix its sidewalks. Just a year ago Portland, Oregon settled a class action dispute by agreeing to upgrade its sidewalks at a cost of $110 million and other cities are being sued as we speak. It’s a fascinating situation where you’re having to really deal with so many different variables but cities are beginning to create the capacity to do that. There’s one other ground transportation issue that we should talk about, which is e-commerce. That is that you now don’t go to a store you just, on your phone, you order something and it gets delivered to you. It used to be that it got delivered to you in a few days and then it was delivered to you in two days and then it was overnight and now it’s two hours in some cities. That’s just overwhelming the streets.
          David Morris:
          In fact, daily deliveries to households in New York City tripled in the last eight years and in a number of places there is more deliveries, that is product deliveries, to households than to businesses. You’re pushing this congestion into neighborhoods that really, the streets weren’t built, the neighborhoods weren’t built for truck traffic and that kind of traffic related to those deliveries. Cities are having to deal with that already. We’re only talking about ground transportation, you know? We haven’t even talked about the air invasion. Cities were invaded by ground, electrified vehicles, by ground in 2017 and 2018 and then in 2019 you began to have the beginnings of what you’re seeing full fledged in 2020 which is an invasion by air. That is by drones, initially, then by air taxis. The thing about air is that cities can’t regulate the flying vehicles.
          David Morris:
          In fact, Newton, Massachusetts, about two years ago passed an ordinance that banned drones and a federal judge overturned them. They banned low flying drones and the federal government, the federal judge still overturned it saying it was preempted by the federal government. But cities can, in fact, regulate the landing. They can’t say that no drone can fly but they can say that no drone can land. They’re having to essentially create rules, if you will, that relate to the delivery of goods and soon maybe people by air as well as by the streets.
          John Farrell:
          I mean, the fact you even brought in drones and air taxis, my mind is sort of spinning thinking about what the job of a city planner is like right now trying to account for all of these things that are happening. You have the individual movement of people that is changing rapidly with ride hailing and cycling and scooters. All these different ways of using that public space that is between the sidewalks, the street, which now there’s all that competition for that space. Then you have the competition for that same space because of package deliveries because of course instead of going individually to get things as we used to do all the time, now we’re having that stuff delivered right to us but somebody still has to take that trip and now it’s these delivery vehicles. Then now of course we’re going into the air to do that, as well. I guess I’m trying to think of a couple different things here.
          John Farrell:
          One is what are the things that cities are having to grapple here? What is the scope of this? It seems like there must be so many different departments within a city that have to sort of coordinate and work together to do this. Then I want to follow up with that and ask if there are cities that are providing a good example of how to grapple with this. Even if they don’t have the solutions yet but are even like, able to wrap their heads around the challenges that are presented in terms of public right of way and the regulations of space?
          David Morris:
          Yes, well I mean I think some of the bigger cities are grappling with it best. Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City. There are smaller medium size cities, Austin and the like that do have a relatively good handle on this which doesn’t mean that they’re coping in a way that doesn’t keep them up at night but they are beginning to understand how to approach it. When you think about a city, a city, that is a local government, makes the rules and has jurisdiction over a finite piece of land. That’s what it is almost by definition. That’s why, by the way, when you ever have corruption among city officials it almost invariably has to do with land development. Cities have been having to grapple with the issue of affordable housing, the issue of how tall you can build your buildings, density, public parks and so forth. In this case we’re also talking about the streets and it’s not unusual for 30 to 40% of the area of a city to be devoted to transportation. Either in moving transportation, in parking, in the driveways and the parking lots and the like.
          David Morris:
          It’s an enormous swath of the city and when you look at it when you step back you can look at it and say, “Who should have priority? How do we create rules around this?” There’s an interesting, I mentioned that interview with the director of the San Francisco Metropolitan Transit Association and he said that you might begin to think about imposing a fee based on the amount of space that you take up. For example, somebody on a crowded bus in San Francisco the fee would be, the admission fee, the bus fee, is $2.50 and that’s for two square feet of space, essentially. The question then becomes, “Well what should it be for a single occupancy car that takes up 300 square feet of space and how do you play with those different parameters?” It’s fascinating because after all what are you taking into account? You’re taking into account how many people can pass a given point in a given amount of time and by the way, that turns out to be bikes. Certainly not cars. Then you have to have enough bikes. Then what do you do if you happen to be a city that has a very hard winter so everything is peaking in June or July and that area’s not really used in February and March.
          David Morris:
          There’s a lot of things that are on the table and one takes into account the impact on the environment, one takes into account the equity implications of it and cities are trying to develop the rules but no city has done what I’m about to suggest but I think that they need to which is to essentially get on the bully pulpit and say to people, “Look, here’s the problem. We all have wants and desires and the technology is now capable in a physical way of catering to those wants and the desires but we have a finite amount of space available and a finite about of psychic energy available. Maybe we should have a discussion about which of those wants and desires will not be fulfilled” or I think more obviously, “Will not be fulfilled as quickly as you would like it to be.” For example, drones are noisy. Well you’re now imposing a noise. Now cities can create noise ordinances for ground level traffic but they can’t for air traffic. What do you do? Do you say, “Well you’re just not going to have one hour delivery by drones. You will have the use of drones the way you have the use of helicopters that is for medical emergencies or the like but you’re not going to have it routinely.
          David Morris:
          What about your two hour deliveries in cities? What is the cost of a two hour delivery? Maybe what we should do is have a culture that says, “No, we’re actually not going to have two hour deliveries. Is it that important? After all, 50,000 years and let’s just say 200 years or 100 years or 50 years or 25 years of living perfectly well with having to go to a restaurant rather than having the restaurant come to you. It seems to be we need to begin to think about these things in a meta way as well as thinking about things in the rules way because right now we’re trying to effect rules that enable these things to happen. I mean, every city that I have been in touch with is trying to figure out rules that enable the delivery of things within two hours and it may be that we need to step back and say, “Well why don’t we think about whether in fact we … What will be the cost of those rules?” There will always be a cost and maybe they will overwhelm the benefits and we can have, maybe delivery for people who can’t get out, maybe delivery in certain circumstances but that, once again, will not be routine.
          John Farrell:
          This is, I think, a really interesting question. I’d like to leave it, this conversation, and in some ways I just … Ground it with a couple more examples. I don’t know if these would be specific examples, real examples, I guess, but in terms of these trade offs, in terms of [inaudible 00:40:37] with this, I think you’ve really highlighted cities sort of have to call this question of values about how we use public space. What’s maybe an example? I think I’ve heard you talk before about bike lanes as an interesting example and you mentioned the winters. I’m hoping you could talk a little bit about that. Then is there any other kind of example like that about when we make a decision? Like to build a protected bike lane and take away a lane from cars that requires us to make this kind of values trade off. Maybe you could start with Minneapolis is a great city to give this example, right? Not a a lot of cyclists in the winter but we do have a number of miles of bike lane that have taken a lane from car traffic that is claimed year round. What implication does that have in terms of the values that we have and how might we change that policy or change what we do to more align with the values that are behind having that bike lane, which are presumably around environmentalism and different kinds of mobility?
          David Morris:
          Yeah, that’s a very good question and in some ways it’s a key question. People now when they think about the street they think about the current car, which is an internal combustion engine car that gets 20 miles, 30 miles maybe per gallon and it’s big. Now one can envision electric cars and so now electric cars you’re talking about much less polluting and not polluting at all within the city and one could envision small electric cars. We do now have very small electric cars. If one thinks that the actual, the car piece of the street, will be profoundly different then when one thinks about the environment impacts of these it becomes a very different equation. The second thing is that if you’re building a new city or a new neighborhood and you can do it from scratch then you may very well have streets that aren’t as wide or you will have more lanes within the streets, either lanes will be narrower. There’s that, as well. In terms of the issue of the bike lane maybe it’s not a bike lane, maybe it’s a light vehicle lane and then if it turns out that really in terms of health, let’s say it’s pedaling that you’re actually doing in that vehicle and are having the same number of people pass a certain point so you can get from point A en mass, then that might be something that you put into the city.
          David Morris:
          It becomes an interesting question if, let’s say for example, you are talking about smaller electric vehicles essentially as the vehicle that’s the primary if not the only vehicle that’s on the street and then you have a protected bike lane that is taking some of that space and is protected and people don’t use it three months out of the year. Well then what you need to do is to have a discussion about that. We can make choices. That’s what we do, really. You don’t want an algorithm to make that choice and you don’t, in some ways, want transportation planners to make that choice because they might not have your values. It may be that a city says, “Look, that’s okay and there are a number of people that will, in fact, do it during the winter months and we might have a technological ability to expand the number of months out of the year that we travel on our personal vehicles but let’s say we don’t, still the advantages, the enormous advantages in so many different ways of being able to have that access without worrying about public safety for six months a year, or eight months a year, or 10 months a year outweighs the fact that that lane’s not going to be used that much during the winter.”
          John Farrell:
          Well David, thank you so much for taking us through not only what’s happening now in cities but also the history that has led us to this fascinating debate about mobility and equity in cities and how they are wrestling with the use of their authority around this. We often wrap up Building Local Power with a reading recommendation and I realize I didn’t prompt you before our conversation to think of anything but you seem to be reading amazing things all of the time so I’m confident that if I toss this to you, you probably could recommend something that you’ve been reading recently.
          David Morris:
          Well it caught me unaware, otherwise I would have had a marvelous book for you to read about transportation but let me not do that and suggest a book by Kim Stanley Robinson, who’s a science fiction writer, also happens to live relatively nearby me now and he’s been writing for a number of years. He wrote a book, his most recent book I believe, is essentially New York 2040. It’s the first book that I had read, which is a book set after global warming has melted the ice caps. The seas have risen by 15 feet but it’s not a post-apocalyptic book, it’s a post-sea level rise book and it’s set in Manhattan in New York City because in Manhattan, the upper Manhattan is about 30 feet higher than lower Manhattan. Lower Manhattan is submerged, middle Manhattan is sort of, half of the buildings are submerged and upper Manhattan they’re dry.
          David Morris:
          Then the book essentially talks about how life goes on. You have a finance industry, you have crooks and frauds and developers and tenants and so on and so forth that are all trying to figure out how to operate while the seas are now 15 feet higher. I found it to be a very, very useful way to sort of get the point that no matter what happens to the environment, human nature may very well not change and the institutions are going to change very, very slowly and so we need to think about what it would mean in a changed environment if we did have the same institutions and the same value systems.
          John Farrell:
          I really like that recommendation, David and I think it’s really apropos to our conversation because in a way it’s saying in the same way that human creations like technology, like GPS or scooters, have caused us to have to wrestle with how do we deal with this? That the environment right now is going to throw similar curve balls at us and we have to adapt but not necessarily that everything’s going to come to an end but that we have to wrestle with very interesting challenges. So thank you for that recommendation.
          David Morris:
          Well thanks for asking.
          John Farrell:
          Thank you so much for tuning in to Building Local Power. This is John Farrell, ISLR co-director. I was speaking with David Morris, senior fellow and co-founder of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can read more of David’s work on our website feature From the Desk of David Morris, where he explores complex issues of the public good in depth. While you’re at our website you can also find more than 80 past episodes of the Building Local Power podcast and show us some love with a contribution to help cover the costs of producing this podcast. You can also help us out a lot by rating this podcast and sharing it with your friends via Apple Podcasts or Stitcher or wherever you find your podcasts. Or just drop us a line at [email protected]. This show is produced by Lisa Gonzales and Hibba Meraay. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunctional. Please join us next time in Building Local Power.

           

          Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by rating Building Local Power on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. And please become a subscriber! If you missed our previous episodes make sure to bookmark our Building Local Power Podcast Homepage.

          If you have show ideas or comments, please email us at [email protected]. Also, join the conversation by talking about #BuildingLocalPower on Twitter and Facebook!

           

          Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS

           

          Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

          Photo Credit: pxfuel

          Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.

          49 min
        • How Small-Scale Composting Is Empowering Baltimore Youth

          Host Linda Bilsens Brolis sat down with Marvin Hayes of the Baltimore Compost Collective for an inspiring conversation about the future of small-scale composting in Baltimore. Marvin and Linda talk about how the Baltimore Compost Collective is empowering and employing local youth while also revitalizing South Baltimore, creating quality compost and fighting food deserts. They also discuss:

          • How 80% of Baltimore’s trash can be recycled or composted, instead of being landfilling or incinerated.
          • The startling impacts of burning trash including $55 million per year in health costs due to one of Baltimore’s incinerators.
          • The opportunities that local composting creates for engaging and empowering youth, including those with learning disabilities or those that are otherwise disadvantaged.
          • How the Baltimore Compost Collective and their partner, Filbert Street Community Garden, have created the “Wakanda of South Baltimore.”

            •  

            At Curtis Bay, we’re providing opportunity for youth in that neighborhood to learn small scale composting, entrepreneurial skills, and life skills for them to be supported to become the new leaders to lead Baltimore towards zero waste.

             

            Related Resources

            1. Composting for Community Podcast
            2. Baltimore Compost Collective
            3. Composting for Community Initiative

              4. Transcript

              Hibba Meraay:
              Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power. I’m Hibba Meraay, communications manager at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. This episode we’re sharing a conversation from our Composting for Community podcast. Our very own Linda Bilsens Brolis sat down with Marvin Hayes of the Baltimore Compose Collective. Marvin and Linda talk about how the Baltimore Compost Collective is empowering and employing local youth while also creating a model that can be replicated throughout the city of Baltimore to build a distributed composting infrastructure. Marvin’s passion for the project is really contagious and his enthusiasm comes through as he talks about how composting helped make Filbert Street Community Garden the Wakanda of South Baltimore. So without further ado, here’s their conversation.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              For this episode, we’re joined by someone I have a great amount of respect for, Mr. Marvin Hayes, who’s the program manager for the Baltimore Compost Collective. Marvin is born and raised in Baltimore and has been mentoring youth for more than 20 years. With the Compost Collective, he mentors and trains youth from the Curtis Bay neighborhood in composting and work skills. I’m so excited for you to meet him, so say hello Marvin.
              Marvin Hayes:
              Hello. My name is Marvin Hayes, and I’m the program manager for the Baltimore Compost Collective, a youth-led food scrap collection service.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              Awesome. So Marvin, tell our listeners a little bit more about the Compost Collective and how composting fits into the work.
              Marvin Hayes:
              Okay. All right, excellent. So once again, we are a youth-led food scrap collection service. We serve an amazing place called the Filbert Street Garden. I like to call the Filbert Street Garden the Wakanda of South Baltimore. A reason why I call it, one of my favorite quotes from the Black Panther movie was, “In times of crisis, while the foolish make barriers, the wise make bridges.”
              We are in a crisis in Baltimore City because we are burning trash, and we know that compost is the alternative to trash incineration or landfill, so we serve one of the most toxic communities in Baltimore City. We provide soil enhancers for residents who rent raised beds at the Filbert Street Garden. The amazing thing about the Filbert Street Garden is that it’s located in a food insecure neighborhood, so those residents would have to travel about 25 minutes to get access to some fresh produce.
              So we provide the soil enhancer for residents who live in a concrete jungle to be able to grow their own food. Also, we serve as anti-trash incineration. We are also surrounded in Curtis Bay by three incinerators: one that burns medical waste, one that burns waste from out of town, and one, the notorious BRESCO Wheelabrator who claims that burning trash is clean energy, and we know that it’s false, that it creates carbon dioxide in our incinerators and creates methane gas in our landfills, and causing about $55 million in health issues in Baltimore City.
              So right now we have 70 customers. I want to give a big shout out to my pioneers for composting in Federal Hill, Curtis Bay, Locust Point, Riverside and Brooklyn. We are currently diverting from the landfills and incinerators 400 pounds of food scraps, so we’re doing some amazing work.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              Perfect. So for those of you that don’t know Baltimore very well, the neighborhoods that the Compost Collective serves are basically in South Baltimore. And then they bring the food scraps back to Curtis Bay, which is where the Filbert Street Community Garden is, and that’s where the composting system is.
              Marvin Hayes:
              Yes.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              So tell our listeners, Marvin ,a little bit more about your community in Baltimore. If somebody has never been to Baltimore, what would you want them to know?
              Marvin Hayes:
              If someone has not been to Baltimore, I want them to know that we are going to be this small scale composting program that’s going to lead Baltimore to large scale composting. We are working for mandatory recycling for Baltimore City, and we’re asking for curbside composting. A couple of facts, Baltimore City Municipal Trash, 80% of it can be recycled. About 30% is food scraps and the other 50% can be recycled, so if we did that, we would only need a five gallon bucket for our waste.
              Baltimore is loaded with a lot of people who have tenacity, able to deal with issues that probably would break some other communities but at Curtis Bay we’re working together with the community to have a community-run and operated garden that provides fresh produce for residents, and also we provide an opportunity for youth in that neighborhood to learn small scale composting, entrepreneurialship, skills and also an opportunity to get life skills and development and just for them to be supported to become the new leaders to lead Baltimore towards zero waste.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              Awesome. It sounds very exciting, a very positive spin on the current way we manage our waste, a positive alternative. So for folks that maybe have heard these sort of rumors about Baltimore, or all these like negative things about Baltimore, what would you want them to know? What are maybe some of the real challenges that some of the youth that are growing up in Baltimore are, but also some of the opportunities that exist?
              Marvin Hayes:
              Yes. I think you just hit the nail on the head, Linda, when you talked about, I think that youth are lacking opportunities. I think at the garden we provide them an opportunity to learn a skill and a lot of our young people are lacking support. I find that young people can do anything that they want to, or accomplish any of their goals that they’re supported by adult that can help lead the way, so I think we’re doing a great job at the Baltimore Compost Collective. Not only are we diverting or rescuing food from going into the incinerators and landfills, but we’re rescuing young people by giving them an opportunity to earn a living wage, to learn small scale composting and get an opportunity to give back to their neighborhood in an environmental way.
              My youth composter, currently Mr. Kenneth Moss, big shout outs to Mr. Kenneth Moss from Ben Franklin High School and all of my youth composters from Ben Franklin High School. I get so excited when I talk about my youth. Kenny is a track star at Ben Franklin High School. He’s a youth composter for the Baltimore Compost Collective. He’s a BMORE Beautiful Block Captain, so not only, he’s managing two jobs while he goes to school, but he helps take care of his blocks. So anytime they have any litter or any dumping, Kenny cleans that up and reports it to 311 so that they can be maintained.
              Along with that, he got an opportunity to be a youth fellow at the mayor’s office through Zeke Cohen’s office where he just completed his math fellow internship this summer. He started his own business, Kenny Captions, got to give plug, just a kid with a camera, so please support him. Look for him on Facebook, and like I say, we had a young man, not only one of my first youth composters, I had a son of a dreamer and I had a level five student. This young man never left Baltimore City and the Baltimore Compost Collection gave him an opportunity to leave Baltimore and go to Atlanta to a conference to speak about environmental justice work that he’s been doing it.
              He’s one of the pioneers for this youth composting, youth-led food scrap collection service. He had never got on a plane. His mom worked in the airport for four years. As he went down the runway to enter the plane, he started to cry and he said, “Mr. Hayes, I never left my mother and I’ve never left Baltimore before,” and I said, “You know, Ramon, your mom is so proud of you. You be brave for her and do this,” and just to give him an opportunity to leave not only Baltimore, but he never left South Baltimore.
              So to give him an opportunity to expand his horizons and see that it’s possible, he looked at the board and he said, “Mr. Hayes, I can go to Denver. I can go to Los Angeles,” and I said, “Yes, all of these are opportunities for you,” and who know that we could do these based on some food scraps, rescuing food scraps could also rescue young people, can give the squeegee kids of Baltimore an opportunity for workforce development, so let’s open up a large scale compost and I can provide opportunities for youth.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              Great. And just so that folks who aren’t familiar with the term level five, what does that refer to?
              Marvin Hayes:
              A special education student, one who now can do small scale composting, and is a composter, trained me on composting. So I learned what I learned from Ramon. Ramon was one of my first teachers when it came to compost, so never put any type of… I would never say that him being a special education student stopped him. The hands-on learning help enhanced his learning, so having the opportunity to work with his hands, he could actually explain how to go about, how to compost. So he has those skills. He’s now working as an assistant manager with a food franchis, has his own apartment.
              When he started with me, he didn’t have a Maryland state ID, a social security card, birth certificate. We worked with him, got his birth certificate, social security. The program shut down for about four months and we had to restart, so we lost our first composters. Doing that organization that had held the compost for two years closed down after 41 years, and I was able to stick it out for four months, but the young people were… The great thing, the the bad thing was that they lost their job. The great thing through the program, they were job ready. So immediately after the opportunity closed with the Baltimore Compost Collective, they were ready, they were employable. So I think we’re doing a great job of making sure that young people are job ready.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              Definitely. And just to clarify, how long has the Baltimore Compose Collective been around?
              Marvin Hayes:
              Three years. When I started, we had five customers. We walked around door to door through Federal Hill, Riverside and Locust Point educating people on the benefits of composting, and I just want to thank those three communities for just supporting the Baltimore Compost Collective and being the pioneers to lead Baltimore towards zero waste.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              Awesome. Super exciting. So some research that ILSR did last year or so, we found that there are 50 or so community gardens in Baltimore and that there are some, over 5,000 vacant lots in Baltimore that have not yet been served by an existing adopt-a-lot program. Keeping those couple of facts in mind, what do you think the potential for community composting in Baltimore is?
              Marvin Hayes:
              I think it’s a great potential to have composting sites at all of those, at the majority. They can be turned into urban gardens, urban farms, and have composting sites there. We’re able to divert 400 pounds if every community garden or open space that can be used for our composting and we can set up three bin systems there, then we have a potential of diverting tons from going into the landfills and incinerator, so we have an opportunity with all the space that we have to turn a negative into a positive and create community gardens where our residents can learn from the table healthy living, healthy eating, and actually learn the benefits of composting because those neighborhoods are affected.
              55 million people suffer from health issues due to us burning trash. The asthma, we had the third largest asthma rate in the country, so if we stop burning trash, we can help eliminate some of those problems, and with all the space that we had, we had the space, we just have to use it, so I’m all for development without displacement and using those areas that were once maybe full of crime, now they can be turned into community gardens. Just like the Filbert Street Garden was once a dumping site on an abandoned lot and now it’s one of the most thriving parts of that neighborhood, the most positive part of that neighborhood.
              Like I say in all of my interviews, it’s like stepping into the Garden of Eden. Coming from West Baltimore, Sandtown, I am so blessed to work there, to be greeted by ducks and chickens when I walk into the gate and just is sustainable and give young people opportunity.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              It is a beautiful spot, and I think when we’re talking about the Baltimore Compost Collective, it is acting as a model of what could be happening on other vacant lots, the Baltimore Compost Collective and Filbert Street Community Garden paired together. I’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that one of the inspirations for the Baltimore Compost Collective was BK ROT up in Brooklyn, New York.
              Marvin Hayes:
              Sandy!
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              And Renee.
              Marvin Hayes:
              Renee.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              Yeah. All those guys, super inspiring, so they have employed a number of youth. I think they’ve been around since 2013 or so, and we very much draw inspiration from them because they are leading the way in teaching the full cycle of the food system. Where does food go when we don’t eat it? If it doesn’t get wasted, we can compost it, and then that compost goes into feeding the garden and so shout out to BK ROT. You should definitely check them out if you haven’t before.
              Marvin Hayes:
              Yes, thank you.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              Marvin, what advice would you give a composter that’s just getting started. What do you wish that you would have known when you were getting started?
              Marvin Hayes:
              Wow. I would just say just stick to it. Compost you cannot learn in one training session. It’s going to come from flipping those piles, troubleshooting those piles. Remember that you’re doing something great for the community, that you’re diverting that waste and turning it into beautiful soil enhancer. As Linda said, our campaign at the Baltimore Compost Collective, “Compost, learn so you don’t have to burn. Starve the incinerators. Feed the soil, feed the community,” so if you can make healthy soil enhancer, you’ll have healthy food, healthy vegetables, and just stay with it.
              It’s very labor intensive, but it’s so rewarding when you get that black gold at the end of four months and you’re able to give it, and so many people are excited about it. I’ve never been so excited about black gold in my life, or didn’t know that it exist. Now really, it’s an art to me to make it, and my recipes and trying different things. It’s amazing to be able to give back. I can make one of the earths elements, so that’s amazing to me and I’m able to teach that to other people.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              And you don’t need a gym membership?
              Marvin Hayes:
              No, you do not. You do not need a gym membership. You just need a spade shovel.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              A chopper?
              Marvin Hayes:
              A chopper and a compost shovel. Yeah.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              And a composting system helps, too.
              Marvin Hayes:
              Yes. Yes, six bins or more. Yes.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              All right. What are some of your goals for the coming year that you might want to share with folks?
              Marvin Hayes:
              Okay, so goals, we want to do a community drop off for our gardeners at the Filbert Street Garden,. So we’re working on that. We have been blessed by NRDC and the Office of Sustainability, so we’re going to be expanding our composting unit. They’re going to provide a concrete pad for us, so we’re going to be researching what system to deal with the amount of waste that I’m receiving on a weekly basis. So I’m looking forward to building that new system and learning more about composting, and be able to share what community scale composting can look like, and severl, and we’ll have several systems to be a model for other gardens and other composting units.
              Also, my goal for this year would be more educating. I want to be able to educate Baltimore City youth on the benefits of composting. I think that we have to reach the age group through K through 12. They are our leaders and I need to teach them about anti-incineration and that composting is the alternative to trash incinerators so they can be here. So like I tell everybody, I hope that will be my legacy. I know we will never get to 100% zero waste, but if we get to 80 or 90, or if I just start Baltimore City to start their large scale composting site and hire some youth, hire some ex offender, hire the squeegee boys, give them an opportunity to be the entrepreneurs that they are, and give them opportunity for workforce development.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              That sounds like a very inspiring vision. Can you tell folks, what is a squeegee boy?
              Marvin Hayes:
              Oh, so squeegee boys are young men who want to be entrepreneurs. They want to make an income for their selves, and they go around and they clean people windows throughout Baltimore City. Some of them have done some negative things, but it’s not all of them. So you can send me all of the positive… They have great entrepreneurial leadership skills, so I think if we take on their positives and give them an opportunity, once again they’re just young man looking for an opportunity. They don’t mean to hurt anybody. They don’t mean to harass anybody, but unfortunately, here in Baltimore city, we don’t have a lot of opportunities for the youth.
              So open this large scale composting, and let me run it and hire all the youth of Baltimore City. Please give me all your ex offenders who are doing amazing composting in the institutions and doing amazing. They’re master gardeners, so if you give them out and once they come back and they can transition into workforce and making a living, they won’t have to go back to negative. We will not have a retention rate over at the jail. We will have a recidivism rate where they’re coming and being prominent, positive members of our community.
              So that’s what I would like to see happen, so that’s a little bit of a squeegee boy. A squeegee boy is just a guy that goes around with a squeegee and a little bit of Windex and wash your windows for you for a small fee and they are the entrepreneurs, but they just need support and opportunities.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              I think those, that’s a very good perspective, that if we can funnel people’s energy and intention into something positive, especially something that benefits the environment during this climate crisis that we’re facing at the same time that we’re helping people meet their own needs, I think that’s a win-win for everybody.
              Marvin Hayes:
              I think exposure is so important. Three years ago, could I tell you that I would be a master composter? Would I tell you at Sandtown-Winchester that I would have vermaculture, that I would be composting my food, my food scraps with worms, with a hundred red wigglers, two totes and a little bit of soil in two inches of food scrap? It’s come from exposure and come from support. I think if you provide support for anybody, they will flourish and I have been so supported.
              The Collective truly is a collective. Without my partners, another quote, “It’s hard for a good man to be king. You must surround yourself with good people,” so any advice for anybody that wants to do composting, get a great team. Get people that’s going to support them. I’m so blessed to have the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, United Workers, the Filbert Street Garden, Baltimore City, the Office of Sustainability, NRDC, my residents in Federal Hill, Curtis Bay, Brooklyn, Locust Point, Riverside. You guys are why the compost collective is successful, so surround yourself by good people.
              Create a team, help somebody else out. When you’re starting out, it can be overwhelming trying to find space to put your food scraps or to process them, so just have patience and be willing to learn and you’ll make some amazing black gold soil enhancer.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              That’s great advice for everybody. As a closing, how can folks learn more about the Baltimore Compost Collective?
              Marvin Hayes:
              You can go to baltimorecompostcollective.org. Please go to our gallery section where you’ll see all of the amazing workshops that I’ve been having an opportunity, me and myself and my youth composter, Mr. Kenneth Moss to educate Baltimore City about the benefits of compost. Please go to our new section. We have a new article, In These Times, Asthma Compost Can Be An Alternative To Lower The Asthma Rate, so please read that article. Excellent article. Thank you In These Times. Thank you so much.
              Linda Bilsens Brolis:
              Awesome. Well thank you, Marvin, so much for joining us and thank you all for listening.
              Marvin Hayes:
              Thank you. Thank you. Compost, a rind is a terrible thing to waste.
              Hibba Meraay:
              Thank you all for tuning into this episode of the Building Local Power podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find all the links to what we discussed today including the Composting for Community podcast at archive.ilsr.org by clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s archive.ilsr.org.
              While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and connect with us on social media. You can also rate and review this podcast on iTunes. It really helps other listeners find us. This show is produced by Lisa Gonzalez and me, Hibba Meraay. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction AL. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Hibba Meraay, and I hope you join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

               

               

              Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by rating Building Local Power on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. And please become a subscriber! If you missed our previous episodes make sure to bookmark our Building Local Power Podcast Homepage.

              If you have show ideas or comments, please email us at [email protected]. Also, join the conversation by talking about #BuildingLocalPower on Twitter and Facebook!

               

              Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS

               

              Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

              Photo Credit: ILSR’s Composting for Community Initiative

              Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.

              23 min
            4. How Native Hawaiians Built Their Own Community Broadband Network

              Host Christopher Mitchell interviews Matt Rantanen, Director of Technology for the Southern California Tribal Chairman’s Association, and Brandon Makaawaawa, Deputy Head of State for Nation of Hawaii while attending the Internet Society’s 3rd Annual Indigenous Connectivity Summit. Christopher, Matt, and Brandon discuss how the digital divide has impacted native Hawaiians and what communities are doing about it. They also discuss:

              • The difficult history of the nation of Hawaii and how it has left indigenous people without sovereign nation status and access to funding.
              • How Brandon’s community built the first community broadband network in Hawaii after large telecom corporations left them without connectivity.
              • The significance of the Indigenous Connectivity Summit and the role of the Internet Society in promoting equitable Internet access.

                •  

                With the lack of [Internet] provision by the existing incumbents to the Native American communities, it is our duty to provide for ourselves and dictate our future and become self-determined.

                 

                Related Resources

                1. Indigenous Community Launches First Community Broadband Network in Hawai’i – Community Broadband Bits Podcast 385
                2. Internet Society – Indigenous Connectivity Summit
                3. Native Community in Hawaii Gets Broadband Network by Now This

                  4. Transcript

                  Hibba Meraay:
                  Welcome back everyone to another episode of Building Local Power. I’m Hibba Meraay, communications manager at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and our community abroad band director. Chris Mitchell is here to tell you a little bit more about today’s interview. Hey Chris.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  Howdy. How are you?
                  Hibba Meraay:
                  I’m good. How are you doing today?
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  I think I’m doing really good today cause I’m not actually working today. We’re recording this ahead of time since it’s the day after Christmas and right in the middle of a nice little break that we’re taking. So I hope that people are having a happy holidays and preparing for a wonderful new year and all that sort of stuff. But I’m definitely excited to talk about this wonderful story about Hawaii. I was just going to make a reference to the famous Hawaiian Christmas song, but I think, or this the Christmas song that’s about Hawaii, but I’ll save that.
                  Hibba Meraay:
                  It would be great if you could actually sing us a little portion of that song.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  This would be the episode that if we could have analytics for, nobody would listen past the third minute. If I started to sing, it would just be over. I was actually trying to work this out statistically, I think I am in the less than one percentile of people who can sing.
                  Hibba Meraay:
                  Oh-no.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  I have the worst absolute worst singing, so I won’t do that.
                  Hibba Meraay:
                  Okay. So maybe we’ll just stick to talking about the interview then.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  That’s probably safe.
                  Hibba Meraay:
                  So you met the folks that you interviewed at the Internet Society’s 2019 Indigenous Connectivity Summit. Can you tell us what is the Internet Society?
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  Yes, so this is actually an organization that I didn’t know enough about until recently and they’re in the news a lot for reasons that we’ll talk about. But when the Internet was being commercialized, Vint Cerf and several other people that whose names I should know, but I am not recalling right now, they were wanting to make sure there was an organization that would promote the values of the Internet in many ways and make sure that it lived up to the hope of being, a technology that was used for tech, for communicating, for promoting people’s good values that people would be able to use it and specifically that everyone would be able to use it in a safe manner. So they both promote connectivity and also things like encryption and security practices and keeping people well informed. They’ve been funded by money that every time someone registers a .org name.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  So when reregister ILSR, which is the first part of ILSR.org/donate for instance, $1 every year goes to the Internet Society. And that makes up their budget in which that they then use for programs around the world to get people connected and help them to use the Internet in a safe manner.
                  Hibba Meraay:
                  That’s awesome. So like you all mentioned is actually the Third Indigenous Connectivity’s Summit put on by the Internet Society, and you talk a little bit about what the connectivity summit is and past ones that have been going on. But my question for you is why is it even significant that there is an Indigenous Conductivity Summit?
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  Well, the North American Internet Society Organization, which is actually run in part one of the people who’s helping out with it now, I forget her exact position, is Katie Watson, Katie Jordan now, who used to be working with us at Next Century Cities, and I’ve tremendous respect for the work that she’s done. But she and Mark Buell and others at the Internet Society, North America, recognize that tribal lands in North America are some of the least connected and on a trajectory that suggests they’re not about to be connected unless they take action. And so they started this event three years ago, I believe. Maybe it was technically two years ago where the first one was in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The second one was in the Arctic Circle among the, I believe the community was the Inuvik, but I might’ve mispronounced that a little bit.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  And then this third one was in Hawaii split between the Big Island where the conference was and Waimanalo on the Island of Oahu, which is a fairly rural part of Oahu, which is where Honolulu is, not very far away and is quite large. And I want to note that even I had some reservations about going because you take money from people that are making our work possible and I tell them I’m going to Hawaii to work. People have questions.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  One of the things that, I mean it’s legitimate, but one of the things I found was that even, this is a problem even in Congress, among committees, the native Hawaiians have really been, I think under invested in and under appreciated because there’s a real lack of groups that will travel out there for events because of that perception that it’s more of a vacation. And so in retrospect, I think it’s important that we do pay attention to these areas and do what we can to help them to develop and just have the rights that they need rather than feeling like it would look bad if we’re doing events that are out there because there’s been a lot of events in which they have trouble getting people to go there.
                  Hibba Meraay:
                  That’s such an interesting point, but I feel like they’re not mutually exclusive. You could go to Hawaii for work and also enjoy the scenery there. But I want to get back to what you said about rural, because this is a really interesting situation where the community that built their own network that you talked about in the episode is technically not that far away from the main major city. And so it’s not technically classified as a rural in that makes it get left out of the picture for getting rural funding. Basically. I thought that was super interesting because it’s really a blind spot in public policy. Right? And I’m wondering is there any way around this? Or where else is this happening?
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  Hawaii was formed by volcanoes and so it’s not flat, which, I think of things in terms of Minnesota, which is also not flat technically. We have a lot of nice hills people don’t give us credit for our wonderful hills, but when you do a look at the way the federal government considers rural, there’s a certain distance away from more urban areas. And as the crow flies, parts of Oahu are very close to Honolulu, but topographically they’re quite far away effectively. And so that is not picked up. And I think we see that in other places too. I mean, I think Kentucky may well suffer from this where you have places that are quite close as the crow flies, but it could be quite far in terms of an actual road that will get you there. And so I think this is again, why local self reliance is important and we should have more local decision making because what appears to be rural or urban and DC may not actually be on the ground.
                  Hibba Meraay:
                  Yeah, I think that’s right. It’s such a cool story of how tribal communities are really saying, okay, we’re not, these definitions aren’t serving us, so we’re going to make better connectivity happen for ourselves. So I think we’ve given a pretty good overview of the conversation. But I do have one last question for you. Chris. Can you let us in on the controversy around ISOC?
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  Yes, this has been something particularly worrying nonprofit organizations and I think there’s a lot of complications involved that make it so that it’s not clear that one side is right or wrong, but there’s been a number of petitions that listeners may be aware of regarding the management of .org and there’s been some changes in the recent year that removed the price cap, which is to say that the price of renewing the .org domain. So for instance, archive.ilsr.org roughly $15 a year to keep it going, that price could theoretically go up quite a bit. Shortly after that happened, the Internet Society, which manages that decided to sell it to an organization that is private equity. And I think many of us here have a knee jerk reaction against private equity and I think a lot of people legitimately have that same reaction.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  But in this case I feel like the Internet Society side of why they’re doing that hasn’t been told and Unit society is an organization that, like I said, the North America chapter, I’m very impressed with what they’re focusing on and I think it’s very important the work that they’re, and as we’ve seen more domain names like .biz and .info, the number of.org registrations we expect in the future will be declining.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  And so Internet Society viewed this as an opportunity for them to get out of managing domain names, which they don’t want to do and to have a stable revenue source through this endowment that they’ll get from selling their management of it that would allow them then to be, have a predictable revenue stream in the future for doing these kinds of programs. I think that’s entirely justifiable. I wouldn’t want to peg my financial future on just one source of income. At the same time, I think some people have accused some ISOC chapters of being not as well run or as well focused. And so, there’s all kinds of reasons to be I think to have concerns. But I’ve come down on this in that I think some of the people that are, that are very worried don’t know enough about what Internet Society is doing or why this has made sense even though there’s some issues that should have been more transparent.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  And so I don’t want to I don’t want to go any deeper into it, but I wanted to put that out there cause I feel like there hasn’t been a lot of defenses of ISOC or balance. So I’m not telling people that they should support the way this is going or not. But I think it’s important to note that there are some good reasons for Internet Society to not want to be doing domain management and to focus instead on these sorts of programs. And I hope that no matter what happens and how we move forward, that we see the Internet Society able to focus more on these kinds of events and programs to really make a significant difference. I mean, as we’re about to hear, the Internet Society itself, led to the creation of a community wireless network, which is bringing this high quality Internet access to people who would not have had it otherwise. People who did not have a lot of resources who were stuck with these hotspots. And so I have tremendous respect for what Internet Society’s doing in this and I really hope they’re able to continue doing it moving forward.
                  Hibba Meraay:
                  Those are all great points. I think I’ve heard some murmurings around the controversy just like within the nonprofit community. And so that’s super helpful to know. And like you said, the goal is that they really continue to focus on the programming, right? So that there can be not just three indigenous connectivity summits but like four and five and 10 and more community networks. So yeah, give that episode of listen folks, we hope that you’re enjoying it. Maybe next to your nicely decorated tree with some hot cocoa in hand. That’s what I’ll be doing. So great.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  Yes, and maybe join us in Winnipeg next year. That’s where the next one will be for the Indigenous Connectivity Summit in Winnipeg in 2020
                  Hibba Meraay:
                  Awesome. Now to the interview.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  It’s Chris Mitchell from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and today I’m back with Matt Rantanen and a new guest, Brandon Makaawaawa who’s from Waimanalo. Welcome to the show.
                  Brandon:
                  Aloha. Thank you man. I mean Chris.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  No, that’s fine. That’s totally perfect for the intro. Matt, who are you?
                  Matt Rantanen:
                  Matt Rantanen, director of technology for the Southern California Tribal Chairman’s Association. I’m also partnering in business development for Arcadian Infracom who’s building fiber across the Southwest of the United States through the Navajo nation.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  We are here for the Internet Society, and we’re starting on the big Island for two days of background on what all kinds of North American indigenous connectivity, what’s happening there. And that’s sort of a space. And I’m going to give the mic back to Matt in a second to go a little bit deeper. But we’re going to be going over to Waimanalo to actually build a community network. And this is going to be, I mean, we’re not just talking about like how to build it. We’re going to go learn how to build it and literally turn screws and attach wireless devices to things. And you’re going to have connectivity when we’re done and you’re going to be in charge of me and keep going after that. So, Matt, why are we here? What is this Indigenous Connectivity Summit from the Internet Society?
                  Matt Rantanen:
                  So this is the third annual Indigenous connectivity Summit, and it’s really an opportunity for indigenous folks to get together to support the concepts
                  Matt Rantanen:
                  -building networks and bringing community networks together to share opportunity, for those who want to build new community networks, those who want to solve problems within their community networks and those who want to understand policy and funding and an opportunity around this space. We feel that, with the lack of provision by the existing incumbents to the Native American communities, it is our duty to provide for ourselves and dictate our future and become self-determined.
                  Matt Rantanen:
                  So this is the third Indigenous Connectivity Summit. First one was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and that kicked it off. We had tribes from Canada and the US convene for the very first time and we were able to have conversations and realize the value of this group getting together. It spawned a lot of projects. A lot of networks were being built because of that actual meeting. And I can specifically address three of those projects, having consulted as a free service to our own communities.
                  Matt Rantanen:
                  The second one was held in Inuvik, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. A very extreme change in temperature, geographic location, and a completely different place. Amazingly enough, the same exact problems, the same exact issues with connectivity and access to communications. And here we are in Hawaii and we see the same thing.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  The problem for our community at least is, Hawaii is a pretty small place. We don’t fit the usual description of what rural is because everything’s within less than a hundred miles. We’re less than a hundred miles to the city of Honolulu. We’re less than actually 20 miles. So we’re not really recognized technically as a rural area. So sometimes we get left out of the picture as far as getting rural funds to us to have companies like the one we deal with, which is Hawaii Telcom, to actually come out to us. So they gave us this whole speil of, “It’s not economically feasible.” And so when that happens, our community gets disenfranchised. It gets pushed back and it gets ostracized and it gets suppressed even more. And so we feel that this opportunity now with the Internet Society and them coming out and helping to kind of spearhead this initiative to build our own network so that we, like how Matt said, we can self-determine our future, falls right in line to what we do as the Nation of Hawaii in Waimanalo.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  The Nation of Hawaii is our organization that actually governs over our lands where this network will be put up. Now this is the first time that we have actually partnered with the state of Hawaii, with Burt Lum, with the DBED department. Burt Lum is actually the strategy expert on implementing broadband across Hawaii. So he went to one of the Internet Society Indigenous Connectivity Summit’s last year and he got them to say that, “Hey, why don’t you come out to Hawaii next year? Because we have communities out here that actually need the help.” And so when he came back, he tried to look for an indigenous community that could kind of fit the parameters that would be able to run their own network. But Hawaii is a very unique place. Native Hawaiians aren’t federally recognized. And we come from a history of, in 1893 our people, we had a sovereign and independent nation and that nation was overthrown with the help of America and businessmen.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  And so for over 125 years, we’ve been stuck kind of in this limbo of not really getting federal funding, not really getting any kind of assistance. We’ve just been kind of stuck out here to kind of figure it out on our own. It wasn’t until 1993 when President Clinton signed the Apology Law that the federal government and the state ever acknowledged the wrongdoings that had happened. And at that time, the leader of the Nation of Hawaii, he organized a bunch of houseless Hawaiians to actually occupy lands that the federal government had just apologized for stealing. And so we actually leveraged that occupation, which was at a beach called Makapu’u into the first ever sovereign Hawaiian land base in existence.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  So for the last 25 years, we’ve been in a village called Pu`uhonua O Waimanalo, where we have our own autonomy, where we have our own set of rules. We don’t ask the state of Hawaii what to do. If we need houses, we build them. If we need roads, we build it. And so this is the first time that the state of Hawaii, through somebody like Burt Lum, had the vision to look at us as, “Hey, these guys might have the way for us to bring something like the Indigenous Connectivity Summit here without having to go through the usual red tape that the state has to go through and the federal governments have to go through.”
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  And we just met everybody in June and this is November and we’re rolling already and it’s happening. And so I think just our involvement alone allowed the state to live up to what Burt wanted to do, which was bring the conference to us. And in turn, we have finally found a mutual goal, which is to build our own community broadband network, because this will be the first ever in the state of Hawaii.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  Right? There are no community networks to my knowledge and not to yours either.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  None at all.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  So that’s a good description of the collective situation. I want to just quickly get a better sense of you personally. For people who aren’t sitting in the room with us, which is everyone on the planet except for us. The two of you, I mean, Matt, you’re like six foot 20, and Brandon and you’re like six foot 30. Did you get into this because, as the tallest person, it would be easier for you to put radios up?
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  Well, my uncle is not six 30 but he’s pretty intimidating. So if he wants to do something, he tells me to do it, I just do it.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  Who’s your uncle?
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  My uncle is the Head of State of the Nation of Hawaii. His name is Dennis “Bumpy” Kanahele. You guys can Google him. He’s a controversial figure in our Hawaiian community. But he stood for what is right and he being this independence force in Hawaii, he’s always open to the opportunity for us to take advantage of situations such as this. And we felt that it was a no brainer. If we had people like the State of Hawaii, like Burt Lum involved, we had people like Internet Society, which was so gracious in lending their expertise, bringing in other partnerships that actually helped us push through this initiative without us coming out of pocket.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  Because of our stance, we’ve been kind of ostracized here and so anytime we want to do something, we got to come out of pocket for everything. And so this is a no brainer for us. If they’re going to provide the service and they want to do it, we know how important the Internet is. Without the Internet, we’d have to rely on regular media and regular media doesn’t really paint us in the best picture. So Internet is very vital to our community and not having that access is a weakness that we see that is now going to be fulfilled with this summit.
                  Matt Rantanen:
                  I think one of the things that I’ve seen in the last 18 years of working in community wireless and working with 573 federally recognized tribes, and now native Hawaiians, I think that Brandon, to me, you are the champion of this.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  Oh, thank you.
                  Matt Rantanen:
                  Your uncle is obviously the motivator and Uncle Bumpy is wonderful, but you are the one that will probably take lead and manage the determination of the future of this network and how it evolves and work with your people to grow this. And that’s the required element in every situation, in Indian country across the United States, across Canada, and across other continents in the world, is you have to have somebody on the ground that embraces the technology, embraces the concept of the network and what it means to the community, and is the champion of that. And so that’s how I see you. And since you’re bigger than me, yeah, you’re my champion.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  Yeah, no, thank you Matt. And we’re growing into this, but we see the potential of how high speed Internet access lifts up communities and it’s all about empowerment today. We can’t be stuck in this victimhood thing where we’re just going to accept whatever is given to us. No, we have to find ways to create independence and to create situations where our people prosper and it’s governed and controlled by our people. And so creating this community network, it just fits. It fits what we do and it fits where we’re going, which is for total independence for our people. To have the best opportunities that everybody else has. And so this is an empowering event.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  And so to build on that a little bit you’re not seeing this just as the technology.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  No.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  It’s not just about having better broadband Internet access in Waimanalo.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  Right.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  So why is the community ownership important? And you mentioned how it fits into the greater independence struggle, but tell me a little bit more about why that community ownership has been important to you.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  I think for us it’s having practical means to create independence. So ownership is a big one. Creating economy is another big one. Creating political action, creating social movements. You need an economy to fund these things. We can’t stand frontline and protests every single development that comes in because we won’t ever survive like that. We need to have a voice. We need to have resources behind us so that when these colonizing or when these multinational corporations want to come in here with their big bucks and their money and their whatever they want to do, they can’t just force their way in here because somebody is going to be in the place and we’ve already taken up that position, and so they’ve got to work with us now.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  So that’s why it’s so important for us. Not just with the Internet, but with everything we’re trying to create independently, is that we need to start solving our own solution, stop outsourcing to other companies and corporations because we’re just trading one colonizer for another. And so the more that we eliminate these dependencies on, whether it’s the government that hasn’t treated us right or these multinational corporations that talk a good game, but when they come in, they take over everything and then we’re stuck. This kind of helps.
                  Matt Rantanen:
                  What we’ve seen along those lines is that tribes are able to be proactive instead of reactive to issues. They can be involved in the issue when it’s just in conversation before it actually becomes a law or becomes written down as a rulemaking. You can be involved in the conversation if you have access to the Internet because you have the current flow of information, you’re not getting secondhand or information delivered to you.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  Exactly.
                  Matt Rantanen:
                  You’re actually part of the information flow.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  So let’s talk now about the prep work. So you don’t have very good connectivity now. What have you had to do to prepare for the building of the community network?
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  We dug our own trenches. Working with Hawaiian Tel, now, in this new capacity where the state is involved, it kind of gave us an opportunity to kind of push Hawaiian Tel closer to working with us. And so in that sense, that was good. But then also when they come onto our land like I was talking about, it’s our land. We govern it, we do the work on it, and so it was only right that we’re the ones that dug our own trenching and laid our own conduits. And so we did that. From the street level up to our building where we will have the main hub. We dug a
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  -600 foot long trench. Luckily we have good operators in the village, we have good machines, we have good foremans, that they have experience laying all kinds of different plumbing pipeline for our houses, electrical, roadway. So something like this, it might seem amazing to a lot of people, but for us it’s just part of the gig. We’re used to it. We’re used to getting dirty. We’re used to getting down, because that’s the only way things are going to get done. We can’t wait for somebody else to come in and do it for us. And so we’ve dug trenching. With Hawaiian Tel, we pulled the fiber in. We set up hubs to where all the new equipment that’s going to go in to build the mesh net around our village is ready to go. We sunk a telephone pole down at the bottom of the village because we will have two entry points.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  And so, yeah, no, we’re game for everything. And a lot of this prep work that we’ve done is just stuff that we’ve done in the past. But now it relates to Internet and broadband access.
                  Matt Rantanen:
                  And call it trial by fire, but it is a great experience builder. When you’re forced to have to dig your own trench, to lay your own conduit, to have fiber brought in. You are much further along than most community networks before you even have the first connectivity lit. Most people have some sort of delivery of service that they start using before they actually start building infrastructure, really heavy duty infrastructure, and this is great to see you get that experience and now you know what it takes.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  Right, mahalo.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  So what are we going to be doing the next two days in Waimanalo?
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  Well we’ll probably be eating some good Hawaiian food.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  Some lau lau I hear.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  Some lau lau. We’ll probably be checking out the scenery. But we’ll be in there and we’ll be building the network. And we’d like to thank Baicells for bringing in the equipment and helping to donate all of that. And we’re just kind of looking to see and experience finishing this whole thing off. We did the first part. Now we’re bringing in the technical side, we’re bringing in some of the experts from around the world that’ll come in. To me, I just want to see how this takes place, because we have so much experts here. It’s going to be like 150 guys changing one light bulb. And so I want to see how this is organized. Who’s the chief and who’s the Indians and who’s going to make it go?
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  But that’s part of the excitement. And we kind of spread this story out amongst our network and amongst our community, so everybody’s excited. So we’re expecting a couple hundred people to be there and just kind of watch and learn. And we’re just so excited to get this network going. But hopefully by Friday we’ll be totally lit up. But I think-
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  That’s the second day.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  That’s the second day.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  So, the first Day Two.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  Right, right, right. So the first day I guess, we’ll be in a training with Baicells in the morning, and then we’ll be kind of watching the experts kind of light up that first line. And then the second day they’ll just kind of shadow us and whatever we learned on the first day we’ll do for the second entry point and we’ll see if we did a good job on that and we’ll try and light it up then.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  So what are the connections going to in this initial round of the network.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  Okay. The first connection is actually going to our front gate so that we can kind of get around this huge tree that is in the way of getting this connection down to the bottom part of our village.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  Sorry, when you say a huge tree-
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  I’m tall.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  -as I said before, you’re already tall. You’re a big guy.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  Yeah. I’m talking like 150 foot tall, a hundred feet wide. It’s probably more than a hundred feet wide, 200 foot wide banyan tree. And this equipment doesn’t go through that type of you know.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  I don’t think much of anything goes through a banyan tree.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  I don’t think so either. And so we had to do two installations. So the first installation is going to go kind of at the bottom of our village near our front gate. And then the second installation is actually going to go to our community hall, which is actually set up on a hill that overlooks all the homes. And so I guess from there we’re going to shoot the mesh network called and connect to all the homes from there. It’s kind of a central hub and a place where everything can kind of originate and be spread out.
                  Matt Rantanen:
                  Yeah, that’s almost exactly right. And the design of the network is designed because of geography, which is typical to tribal installations. Most tribes are in very geographically diverse areas that have obstacles and you have to get creative to be able to deploy the network to all the people. And you have it right. I mean we’re going to… Spencer Sevilla and Mariel Triggs and myself and a few others are going to do some demonstration of product and probably show how the installation of the of one or two pieces goes, and then we’d love to hand it over and have you do that because experience in hands on is the key. Because then we know that you’ve done it, you’ve experienced the process and there’s success after that because you can rely on yourself and your knowledge of what happened. And if we shadow and just offer suggestion or support, it’s a great way to start this. And hands on is how most tribal people learn. Visual and hands on. We’re all about seeing what happens and how it works.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  So let me ask you, and I want to follow up in maybe a year or two to see how accurate this is. How do you think this is going to change things? Like what’s the result going to be of this network?
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  Well already it’s kind of brought in this new excitement to our village, and we’re so independent and we’re so used to doing things on our own and just scratching and crawling just to get roads in there and just to get houses built, that this’ll kind of just bring us up to modern times because honestly, our network is nonexistent. We have no Internet access in our village right now. So most of our things are run off of cellular data, off of hotspots, which can be really expensive. And that kind of cuts into the things that we could do otherwise. So first off, it’s going to save us a lot of money by doing this. Secondly, it’s going to enhance our reach because we rely a lot on social media. We rely a lot on the Internet for research and development issues and to stay connected with the world because we believe that connectivity is actually the real sovereignty that is emerging around the world.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  Because we’re not trapped behind these political barriers, these landlocked barriers. We’re not going to be fighting over land anymore. We feel that with this Internet connection, it’s the beginning of the rise of a digital nation and we want to be the people on the forefront of that. So just this opportunity alone allows us to imagine and to hope and to bring excitement to our village. Because with the Internet, with stuff like blockchain technology, stuff like cryptocurrency, e-commerce, just connecting with these people that have these experiences and expertise in technology and innovation that the state governments and the federal governments are not bringing to us. So now we don’t need them. Now we can go around them, we can go through them, we can go to anywhere around the world and connect with people that want to help. And so it’s a way for us to improve our political, economic and social standards. And just raise the standards of life inside our village and eventually to the rest of the Hawaiian population around the other islands.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  Great. Well thank you so much Brandon Makaawaawa from Waimanalo. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  Mahalo, Chris. Thank you for having me. And thank you for Matt and thank you to ISOC and everybody that’s here. We really appreciate what’s going on. And this year it’s about us, but when we’re lit up, we’re ready to help everybody else. So it’s about empowering, and it’s about empowering every single community after this. If we can be an example of hope, then let’s be that example. Let’s shine that light.
                  Chris Mitchell:
                  You know, next year’s scheduled for Winnipeg, I think. I don’t know how often you’ve experienced a winter that far North, but I think we should move it to a little later, maybe January or February in Winnipeg.
                  Brandon Makaawaawa:
                  You guys are the boss of cold. We’re just following you. So if you lead us into a blizzard, next time you come to Hawaii, we might take you to North Shore during December and teach you how to swim out there.
                  Stacy Mitchell:
                  Thank you for listening to this episode of Building Local Power. You can find links to what we discussed today by going to our website archive.ilsr.org and clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s archive.ilsr.org. And while you’re there, you can sign up for one of our newsletters or click the donate button to support our work. If you like this podcast, please consider rating and reviewing it on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is edited by Lisa Gonzalez and produced by Lisa, Hibba Meraay, and Zach Freed. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL. For the Institute for Local Self Reliance, I’m Stacy Mitchell. We’ll see you again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

                   

                   

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                  Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

                  Photo Credit: ILSR’s Christopher Mitchell

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                  37 min
                4. What Does Antitrust Law Really Mean For Workers?

                  Host Stacy Mitchell is joined by Sanjukta Paul, law professor and antitrust and labor expert. They delve into the history of our antitrust laws, and how they were originally written to help working people and small businesses. Over the last several decades, however, antitrust has been weaponized against labor and small firms, while big corporations have been given free rein. They also discuss:

                  Sanjukta Paul

                  • How current antitrust policy gives large corporations powerful “coordination rights” in the economy — but denies these same rights to workers and small businesses.
                  • Powerful examples of antitrust enforcement and how economic theory has been used against unions and small businesses in favor of corporate monopoly power.
                  • How today’s approach to antitrust harms Uber drivers and other people working in the gig economy.
                  • Why regulators must choose to balance competing interests and values, rather than look for a perfect economic equilibrium that may not exist.

                    •  

                    We have to build a new edifice and the new edifice has to be built by many hands and not by a few hands. And that’s what antitrust law originally came from, was from a mass movement and a popular movement. Basically if we decide that there aren’t these sort of independent ideal theoretical answers that can be given by lawyers and economists, well then we need to give answers to more specific empirical questions, we do need people who are grounded, who are in those particular sectors. That’s how we determine how to govern those markets and sectors.

                     

                    Related Resources

                    1. Sanjukta Paul
                    2. The Double Standard of Antitrust Law, The American Prospect by Sanjukta Paul
                    3. Sweatshops on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking Deregulation by Michael H. Belzer
                    4. Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America by William G. Roy

                      5. Transcript

                      Hibba Meraay:
                      Hey everyone. Welcome back to Building Local Power from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. I’m Hibba Meraay, communications manager, and today we’re bringing you an interview between Stacy Mitchell, ILSR’s co-director and Sanjukta Paul, law professor and antitrust and labor expert. Zach is with me today to give you a sneak preview of the conversation. Hey, Zach.
                      Zach Freed:
                      Hey, Hibba.
                      Hibba Meraay:
                      What I thought was really interesting was that antitrust law doesn’t always work the way it’s designed to work or protect the people it’s supposed to protect. What did you think?
                      Zach Freed:
                      Yeah, totally. Our antitrust laws were originally written to help workers in small businesses from corporate monopoly power, but if you look around today, small businesses and especially workers and unions are severely constrained by antitrust law. While businesses like Amazon and Walmart had the go ahead to do whatever they want for a long time now, those are really the results of political decisions as professor Paul goes into during the podcast.
                      Hibba Meraay:
                      Antitrust law really determines kind of who gets to coordinate for a better deal. Another interesting part of the conversation was how Stacy and professor Paul talk about how economics can’t always deliver us the answer in all cases, right? There isn’t really an objective economic equilibrium because what we’re really talking about is how we balance competing interests and even more than that, competing values.
                      Zach Freed:
                      So if you look at the history of antitrust enforcement, economics has really been weaponized against unions and small businesses in favor of corporate monopoly power. That’s why it’s so great that professor Paul is studying the history of these laws so closely and how they’ve been enforced because if we are going to take back power, we need to know how the other side won, so we can avoid making those same mistakes again.
                      Hibba Meraay:
                      Awesome. We hope you enjoyed this sneak preview and stay tuned for the full episode.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      Well, Sanjukta. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      Hi, Stacy, I’m really happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      So you started out your career working for many years as a labor lawyer. Tell me how you ended up bumping into antitrust and getting involved in antitrust law.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      I was doing really a mix of labor and civil rights and employment work on behalf of workers and plaintiffs in the Los Angeles area. I was working on essentially, a year long special project with an organizing campaign through a nonprofit, LA Alliance for New Economy, which does a lot of great work in that area, working in the port trucking sector. So the Southern California ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach are know at this point, handle the highest volume of any port in North America. Most of our consumer goods come through that port and there are many, many truck drivers who basically work in on those short haul routes from the ports to all the warehouses that you’ve heard of that Walmart and the big box stores and the other retailers have a little bit inland in Southern California. So that’s actually a pretty large sector in Southern California.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      This was a workforce that was unionized back through the 1970s up through the very, very early eighties and had pretty stable middle-class jobs. It’s a sector where the bottom really dropped out following trucking deregulation and then following just kind of rampant price competition among the trucking companies in the ’80s exactly as big box retailing was actually sort of becoming big. So therefore, the buyers were also becoming more powerful and had essentially controlled that market, the actual short haul trucking market. Anyway, that’s a little bit of the history of it. I got involved in the campaign to basically work on reorganizing into unions, those drivers in that sector. This is several years ago now, and by the time I was involved and for several years prior, these were not good jobs. What had been previously union jobs, stable, pretty mid wage had become definitely low wage jobs way, way over 40 hours.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      So kind of a classic sweatshop labor scenario. In fact, Michael Belzer wrote a great book about trucking and trucking deregulation called, “Sweatshops On Wheels,” which I really recommend. Long story short, I’m working on this campaign and what I learned was that antitrust law had actually played a significant role in the early days of this campaign way before my time in shaping what it could do and what was possible because these drivers were classified as independent contractors. By the time in our campaign, we were working on trying to get them classified as employees. But the reason we were doing that, there were many reasons, but one reason was so important to do that was because any of their organizing activity, any type of collective action to better their wages or working conditions or certainly, to organize and to union, would be if they were not employees, would be conventionally considered by antitrust law to be anti competitive, to be a violation of antitrust law and would subject them to potentially criminal liability and to trouble damages.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      And that in fact, way before my time in the late nineties and early 2000s, that is exactly what had happened; that they had engaged in collective action on their own, strikes and walk offs off the job and had been hit with lawsuits under antitrust law. And in fact, the FTC opened an investigation into worker leaders, just truck driver worker leaders who were trying to make their workplaces a better place for everyone. As a result of that, that shaped everything that happened thereafter. Immediately engaging in collective action was off the table. Stay, that was huge because if you can’t organize people to engage in collective action, it takes a lot of organizing tools off the table.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      Right.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      To come back to I guess how I got into antitrust- I learned about some of that when I was working on the campaign and at the time, I knew nothing about antitrust law. I just filed it away in the back of my brain and thought, “Well, that’s really weird. Antitrust law being used against truck drivers who are trying to make a living wage, this is bizarre.” So then as it turned out kind of unconnected to that, when I sort of finished up that project, I had this opportunity to start a research and teaching fellowship at UCLA and had the opportunity to kind of research anything that I wanted to research and this is what I chose to do and just went down a rabbit hole that I have yet to emerge from partly because… Even though this sort of started out as seeing this as an obstacle to worker organizing, now my perspective is that actually working peoples’ perspective is integral to antitrust law and really originally was inte-
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      As you know, is what created antitrust law and it’s actually been massively changed particularly since the 1970s. Also, as I went deeper into this rabbit hole, discovered colleagues and comrades coming at it from different angles and we just learned so much from each other, including meeting you and discovering that actually what I saw as an ops- and is still an obstacle can also be turned into a way of reforming antitrust law in a direction that it really needs to go.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      Yeah. I’m really eager to talk with you about sort of where we go from here and how, as you put it, worker voices can really be part of how we reshape antitrust law and actually make it work for decentralizing power, what it was originally intended to. But before we get there, I want to dig in a little bit on understanding exactly how antitrust impedes workers because I think people are familiar with the idea that we’ve allowed a lot of mergers, that we haven’t been policing Walmart for example, in terms of their predatory conduct. We’ve had this lax attitude; our policymakers have had this lax attitude with applying our antitrust laws to big business. But I think for most people, it will be a little bit of a shock to learn that antitrust has been actually actively going after ordinary people who have no real economic power. Can you give us some examples to help people understand how that happens?
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      So certainly the truck drivers I mentioned. This is way before the gig economy or Uber or anything like that. We have a large number of workers in our country now who basically labor beyond the bounds of employment. Some are probably misclassified, some are not, but they are basically workers. They are people who primarily are selling labor or services on the market. Those folks, even though this is totally contrary, in my opinion, to the original intention of antitrust law and what the legislators intended, those folks would conventionally be treated by antitrust institutions and antitrust law today as just independent businesses; so people who are not receiving a W2, but are receiving a 1099. Those folks coordinating among each other to sort of either engaging in joint bargaining with a more powerful buyer or supplier or in the case of the truck drivers, actually going on strike, anything like that would be considered collusion, anti competitive activity under Section I of the Sherman Act.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      So that would include, as I said, any independent contractor worker, really anyone, whether it is a truck driver, or a hairstylist, or a court reporter, or a translator or you know, any of those folks. It would also include sort of what we now consider gig economy workers or platform workers; so Uber drivers, task rabbit, anything like that. Then finally, I would give a final example, which would include small businesses and franchisees and other kind of micro enterprises. Obviously, there’s different definitions of small business, but oftentimes that category also includes people who might have a few employees, or it might be a few people together in a partnership, or it might be someone who has some capital investment. Maybe they own some land or maybe they own a truck or they own something else that’s from amount of capital investment, but they’re really primarily still bringing their labor or services, their effort to market. They’re not primarily managing a bunch of other people or hiring a bunch of other people to work in a factory or some other type of capital investment. Right?
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      Those folks too, often as you know, don’t have a lot of power in our economy. Franchisees are a great example and economist, Brian Kolachi who’s done great work on this, has shown how franchisees did try to organize and at one time, it was actually considered as a policy solution for them to have kind of NLRA style, labor style collective bargaining rights and that was rejected. But you can see a lot of the rationale for them having those collective bargaining rights. In the absence of all of that and in the presence of the proliferation of kind of work beyond the bounds of the legal employment relationship, we really have antitrust law increasingly functioning as an obstacle to the organizing efforts of frankly, the very people that antitrust law was originally intended to help, even as antitrust law as you know, has been rendered somewhat impotent as to what it is actually supposed to do, which is to go after the powerful actors in the economy who may not be using that power very responsibly.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      It’s really astonishing when you think about it. I ran into this myself a few years ago and I was sort of surprised. The example I ran into is that independent bookstores… So if you add up all the independent bookstores across the country, they are maybe 15% of the book market, something like that. But they have to be careful. They can’t band together and negotiate with publishers. They can’t say, “Okay, we’re all going to feature… We’ve, as a group have sort of decided that these 20 books that are coming out this month are really great and we’re going to feature them and we want to ask publishers to help support that with additional marketing dollars, or we want to negotiate over prices.” That gets them into hot water with antitrust and yet, you have Amazon, which captures half of all books sales, right? They can go negotiate with a publisher and there they are. They’re sitting there with three times as much market share. They can have an internal meeting and set prices or do anything, and antitrust has nothing to say about that.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      That’s 100% correct and just such a perfect example. That is exactly right and that is why I think these two things are actually deeply connected.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      Tell me a little bit about that link and the history of how we got here.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      As we were kind of both talking about before, when antitrust law was actually passed, when the first federal antitrust legislation was passed, the Sherman Act in 1890, that was really the product of a farmer labor coalition and is widely acknowledged by historians who study the topic. When you read the legislative record of the Senate discussions, which is what I spent a chunk of my summer, this last summer doing, how many times they actually referred to that fact. The senators would say, “Well, it’s the farmers and the workers who have sent these cries, these pleas up to us and ask us to act on this.” Right?
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      It’s pretty clear that that is the coalition that drove that version of the anti monopoly movement that resulted in the Sherman Act and it was absolutely not on the table that cooperation among farmers or among workers and farmers, if you think about it, were clearly very much like your independent book sellers that you’re talking about. These are people who definitely work for a living, but who do you have some investment. They do own that land and might have some employees and workers. In addition to pushing for antitrust legislation, this coalition was also really fostering cooperation and solidarity among themselves. Now, that didn’t always go perfectly; movement does, but it was one of their aims, right? It was
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      Cultivating solidarity among working people and among just ordinary people went alongside breaking up power structures that were seen as harmful. So those two were always supposed to go together, and the push for this … and the senators acknowledged that and you see them time and again talking about that. And actually, when you carefully read the debate, what you discover is that they talked about how they should write the bill to avoid the courts interpreting it against workers and farmers. So they talked about that. They were worried that the courts would do that for reasons that already had to do with the dynamic between courts and the congress at the time. We were just entering what’s called the Lochner era in kind of our legal history, which is of course the era in which courts struck down things like minimum wage legislation, maximum hours legislation in kind of the emerging industrial workplace on the basis of “freedom of contract”, which really was more about expanding the property rights of the people who were winning in that economy, the people who owned the factories and the railroads and so forth.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      And this is like the 1890s, turn of the century? Is that the right period?
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      Yeah, I think technically the Lochner era started sometime during the 1890s and then through the 1920s basically. But yeah, that was definitely already happening at the time that they were deliberating on this bill in 1889 in 1890, so I think they saw the writing on the wall and they were worried about drafting the statute in a way to avoid that. And so in fact, I think that, in fact, the bill went through different versions and they actually rewrote the bill at one point because one, Senator Platt gave a speech saying that, “Look, if we go forward with this bill as it is now,” and that was an earlier version of the bill that isn’t what got passed, “Then we really can expect the courts to interpret it this way against farmers and workers and also against just small dealers and small sellers in general.”
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      What’s really interesting is that they’re having that whole discussion and debate, but it’s evident that they all want to avoid that result. There’s almost just basically zero debate about that. We all want to avoid that result. How do we avoid it? And then right after Platt gives that speech, they send the bill back to committee and they rewrite it into pretty much the version that we have today of the Sherman Act. It’s my belief and certainly earlier scholars who studied this issue also concluded the same thing, that they rewrote the bill and thought they had taken care of the problem, right, and that they had taken out sort of this language about passing on the cost to consumers and full and free competition. They’d take an out that language. I thought that was going to be what possibly would lead the courts to interpret it against kind of smaller actors in the economy.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      And of course, as we now know, the courts just went ahead and did that anyway, right? And without getting into why they did that so much and the reasoning they use, they did that in a few early cases, and essentially the Sherman Act was turned into a strike breaking tool for the federal government at a time when the labor, industrialization in production had really just taken off. And so the industrial working class was growing. And so just to explain the link, and then at the same time, the act was used in a very limited way against sort of actual corporate monopoly.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      And I think the two things are linked in the law that the judges developed at the time, because essentially what judges did in some of those early cases is they focused on property rights, so that same thing that was such a big deal in the Lochner era in general, they basically said … and they went back and forth a little bit, so not all the justices agreed, but they ultimately sort of said that “Shareholders have a kind of property right in the corporation,” or they they extrapolated from that, “And we can’t really interfere with that,” effectively is what they said.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      And so what grew up around that is what I actually have started calling the firm exemption, or we could call it the trust exemption, the antitrust, right, so that basically if you’re a firm, if you’re a corporation, anything you do … not quite anything, but certainly a lot of things that you just would not be able to do outside the corporation are just presumptively legal inside of it. And that sounds maybe in some sense obvious now, right? Because we’re so, so used to that idea that of course, firms can just set prices. But this is not what they were contemplating.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      So at the same time that I told you what they were saying, the legislative history about workers, at the same time, they’re talking about the Standard Oil Company and John D Rockefeller, and it is so interesting because the trust that they were targeting … and it’s why it’s called anti-trust legislation, right? The trust that they were targeting were actually these effectively large firms, right? The only reason they weren’t single firms, the only reason the Standard Oil Trust wasn’t a single firm in 1889 was because state corporate law basically made that still pretty difficult. State corporate law was changing and state corporate law previously had made interstate asset acquisitions and mergers much more difficult than it would be now.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      And so it was almost like state corporate law was functioning as a type of antitrust law through much of that time, but it was changing actually under the same forces, and so there are legal historians who have written about this and also sociologists, how the rise of financial capital that was happening at the same time in New York City resulted in the rewriting of New Jersey’s corporate code. And now we think of corporations are all headquartered in Delaware. Well, New Jersey was the first Delaware, and effectively it was the first Wall Street lawyers who really rewrote that corporate code. Charles Yablon has written a great article about this and William Roy as well, a sociologist who wrote a book called Socializing Capital, if people want more information about that topic.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      But so basically what happened with state corporate law was what was transforming, and then also the Supreme Court in the Lochner era was going to put limits on state’s ability to impose those limits. And then finally, even if there hadn’t been those kinds of legal limits and changes on state corporate law, there was a limit to what an individual state could do in a market that was becoming a national market, right? So if the threat was that if Ohio, which by the way continued to have pretty progressive radical corporate law until pretty late, had just stood out there in the wind and continued to take this position, right, the idea is, “Well, you can just go incorporate in Delaware or New Jersey and just lose all this business.” And that was a lot of the impetus for federal antitrust legislation, that, “Okay we need to have the federal government do this.”
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      Right, because we start to sort of have these corporations that are spreading across state lines at that point, in some ways a new thing, railroads as well. And so at that point, the ability of states to keep corporations in check is really waning.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      It happened earlier in the railroads and then it started happening in material production after that because there was a period of time when we had sort of railroads operating in the national market, but material production, manufacturing basically, had not moved over into sort of a national corporate model at all. It was still done in workshops and things like that.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      Sherman and the other senators were very much talking about Standard Oil and the Sugar Trust and these other trusts that basically were in name only multiple firms. The brilliant innovation of the trust was, “Okay, we’re going to get around state corporate law by creating this board of trustees that is centralized.” It’s basically just like the board of directors in a corporation now. That’s what they are, right?
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      And so in the Standard Oil Trust, you have all these different little standard oils, and then all the shareholders, and all those different little standard oils basically give over their voting power to this board of trustees that then holds their share certificates in trust for the actual shareholders, right? But then now they’re exerting the control. And so John D Rockefeller is on that board of trustees, and it’s just like he’s the chairman of the board, right, in a corporation state.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      So effectively, the Standard Oil Trust is operating as a corporation, and yet the senators, that’s whose power they wanted to break up, basically what was effectively a single corporation, and they even talked about single companies as well. I don’t think they had an idea of the firm exemption as we know it today. And then those exact same trusts, because as state corporate law did get liberalized through the 1890s, particularly in New Jersey and in other places too, they just went ahead and incorporated.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      So then they just got rid of the board of trustees and they just engaged either in directly acquiring shares of the constituent corporations or asset acquisitions. They did it in different ways, but then essentially those did become, in most cases, single firms, sometimes with a holding company structure and sometimes just directly through asset acquisitions. And those were the entities that the Sherman Act was aimed at.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      So even though today I think if we don’t stop and think about it, it might seem like, “Oh well, of course Amazon can do that,” what you were saying, like have that internal meeting, of course they can do that, that’s just sort of normal and natural, but that is exactly I think what Sherman was talking about when he was talking about Rockefeller sitting there with the board of trustees, very similar to that internal meeting that Amazon can have. Meanwhile, antitrust law is being turned, as you said in that example, against the independent booksellers who are just trying to keep a foothold in that market.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      Okay. We’re going to take a short break. We’ll be right back.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      Hello everyone. Thanks so much for listening to Building Local Power. I wanted to ask as we get here towards the end of 2019 if you might consider making a donation to support ILSR’s work. We’re a nonprofit organization and we depend quite a bit on donations from individuals to make our work happen. If you can kick in a few bucks, that would be great. This is the time of year as we close out the calendar where we’re really hustling to meet our fundraising goals and so it makes a big difference. It’s a great help to us and it really will help us kick off 2020 in a big way.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      You can donate to help support this podcast, but the podcast of course is only a small part of what we do. It’s a kind of side hustle to our main work, which is that we work with communities across the country to help them build local power, take control over their broadband networks, their energy systems, rebuild independent local businesses. And of course, we knit all of that together with advocacy at the state and federal level to change the policies that impact local economies and local communities.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      So in the last year we’ve helped a lot of cities build publicly-owned broadband networks and take power back from the broadband monopolies. We’ve helped cities like Birmingham and Tulsa block the proliferation of dollar stores and dollar store saturation and put in place policies to support local grocers instead. We’ve helped cities think about how to reconfigure their energy systems and rebuild local recycling and composting infrastructure to both take power back from big waste and also to protect the climate. So we’re doing a lot of great work. You can read it more about it on our website at archive.ilsr.org and if you’d be so kind as to click that donate button, we’d really appreciate it. Thanks.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      Okay, we’re back. One of the things I really like about the papers that you’ve written on this and the article you did for The American Prospect … We’ll link to all of that on the show page for this episode … is really a great way of helping people step back from the assumptions. The world we live in is not … There isn’t necessarily a logic to things that we just assume that’s the way it is. So I want to jump ahead here because we’ve done a few podcast episodes where we’ve covered the history of antitrust policy, so that period after the Sherman Act when the courts are very much using it, not as you point out in the way that Sherman and other lawmakers at the time intended, but the courts are then interpreting in exactly the opposite direction, allowing corporate power to grow using these laws against worker organizing.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      Then we have the New Deal and things shift around for a few decades and then we come to the ’70s and ’80s and we sort of enter the era that we’re in now really driven by kind of a return in many respects to some of the thinking that was the early part of the 20th century that you were talking about the Lochner era, and we have Bork right in the middle of all of this and his thinking about antitrust.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      So one of the things I wanted to ask you about is sort of how the notion of efficiency fits into all of this, or even consumer welfare, because I think one way that people have thought about it is like, “Well, if you have a bunch of small producers like farmers or you have a bunch of small merchants or you have a bunch of workers in an industry and they get together and they band together in order to get a fair wage or a decent price for their work, that might mean that consumers are paying prices.”
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      Some of the logic, at least that we’ve internalized around corporations being allowed to do that is that we sort of picture Walmart is driving a hard bargain. It’s like it’s driving a hard bargain with workers and it’s driving a hard bargain with suppliers, demanding the lowest prices and in the end consumers get something out of that. How does antitrust think about efficiency? Do you think there’s good efficiency and bad efficiency and is that part of what maybe is missing in the law?
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      That brings up, I think, so many things that I think that we need to work through. If we are going to remake antitrust law, I think we need to sort of honestly grapple with some of these things. But let me say a little bit about why I think that certainly what we have is not at all obviously true or right. I don’t think that the lowest consumer prices were the goal of the law at all. And I’m not the only person certainly who thinks that. I think an honest reading of the legislative history, again, shows that legislators were just as concerned about monopolies increasing prices on consumers
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      … As they were with actually forcing down the prices of small suppliers and farmers and workers. They say that repeated times. So it is really more about that power than it is about the lowest consumer prices. So they repeatedly say driving down the prices of suppliers is an antitrust harm. And the thing is, that’s recognized today as well. Even within the kind of dominant framework that’s still exists in antitrust law in this sort of idea of monopsony, which of course you’re familiar with. The idea of of there being buyer power as well as seller power. But the problem is…
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      Sort of I feel like where the debate is now, at least I think a number of people would say, well of course that can also be a harm and that the goal is competitive prices. Not the lowest possible prices, but competitive prices. But then what I try to argue in the, one of the papers that I think you looked at, is that this notion of a competitive price, it’s not this sort of independent social scientific principle that we can just sort of have experts figure out what it is and then that should be the standard for antitrust harms.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      I guess actually two things before I say why that is. One point though, is that even if that were the case, even if you could somehow arrive at that, that is not what antitrust law is doing as a day to day matter. You might have as a matter of theory people saying that that’s what, oh, of course, first you say consumer welfare standard, then if you’re pushed on monopsony point, then it becomes, “Oh no, no, no, it’s not the lowest possible price. It’s the competitive price.” But that’s not what most decision makers are actually acting on.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      And the way that we know that is that when you look at briefs and other decisions that are filed on a daily basis in the antitrust space, that you do see sort of a direct uncritical reference to sort of just what lowest consumer prices. An example of this that comes to mind is that recently the DOJ antitrust division filed briefs in these consolidated cases involving no poach agreements between, that franchisors imposed upon franchisees regarding hiring each other’s worker. So this clearly is not good for workers. It decreases their mobility.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      It would be like McDonald’s, for example, I don’t know if they’re one of the companies, saying to different McDonald’s restaurants, you can write a no poach so that an employee at one McDonald’s can’t go work at another.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      Exactly. For the record, I don’t think McDonald is part of that particular consolidated case, but exactly. That’s exactly right. So what’s so interesting is that the DOJ and the antitrust division, which at the same time is saying that, okay, we’re really interested in the labor market. We’re really interested in enforcing antitrust in the labor market and we do take into account worker harms, et cetera, et cetera. They have been saying that, and they filed a brief on basically arguing that the court should consider efficiencies and pro-competitive benefits of these no poach agreements, which are, and it’s extremely speculative, so I can’t even say exactly what their theory is, but their theory is 100% couched in terms of consumer benefits. Which I think are speculative in any case and I don’t think ultimately consumers benefit from that.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      But regardless, it shows that it’s not symmetrical. That even if antitrust law institutions today, like the ones that have been sort of still shaped by the 1970s revolution, say that they’re taking, looking at the labor market symmetrically, it’s not the case. There’s still applying a consumer centric standard. So I think that’s the first problem is that even if they say, oh, it’s really competitive prices, in fact, we’re still looking at consumers at the expense of everyone else. And then as many others have pointed out, in many, many, many cases, it’s not even beneficial for consumers. There’s no guarantee at all that any of these cost savings, if there are cost savings, are getting passed down to consumers, as opposed to just going to shareholders or profits or executive salaries or whatever it may be. So there’s empirical evidence on bat that’s emerging.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      But beyond all of that, even if we didn’t have all of those problems, what I try to argue in that UCLA paper that you mentioned is that the very idea that there’s a competitive price that we can just have economic experts come in and say this is competitive or not competitive, I think really breaks down if you look carefully at the way that antitrust law… Basically the way I put it in the paper is that it allocates economic coordination rights. And it has always done that. The legislators wanted us to do it in a particular way.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      I think the original legislative history and the purpose of the act was to allocate economic coordination rights in a way that balances those rights. In other words, John D Rockefeller had too many economic coordination rights, that it’s dangerous for the economy and for society to have those coordination rights concentrated in one person or in one room full of men, as I think Senator Sherman put it at one point, and that we really need to disperse those coordination rights. And that’s exactly what giving small farmers or independent booksellers or workers coordination rights would do is that it would balance and disperse those rights.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      So what you’ve found and really documented with this research is that there’s kind of a built in bias within antitrust where it favors bigness. It gives companies internally kind of free reign to exercise that kind of market power, and very much disfavors smallness and decentralization. If you’ve got this sort of hierarchical company with this centralized ownership structure, it can do it at once. But a collection of individuals coordinating in some fashion is treated in a completely different manner. Also I think what, the other aspect of how you’ve been describing this is also just sort of reminding everybody that it’s not as though economics can deliver us the answer in all cases, because really what we’re talking about is how do we balance competing values and interests. And what are the principles that we’re going to use to balance those things so that we can get to a fairer kind of society first?
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      First of all, so this is kind of at the meta level, and this is what I think should replace the consumer welfare standard. I don’t know that I have the exact name for it yet, but I think what should replace the consumer welfare standard is sort of two sets of ideas. One is the idea that antitrust law should work to disperse economic coordination rights rather than to concentrate them. So that entails, first of all, acknowledging that that’s what it’s doing, and then basically saying that the bias that it has toward hierarchy and bigness should be reversed.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      And that that doesn’t mean that there’s not places where it really does make sense that there’s one network or something, or public utilities, or then maybe they should actually be public. So that doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be very sector specific things that we need to look at even in those contexts, by the way. You can disperse coordination rights in more than one way. If you have a public utility, then you can disperse coordination rights by giving the public through sort of the legislature and other mechanisms a say in how that’s run. It doesn’t have to be ten different utilities.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      So I think you have to look at different ways to disperse economic coordination rights and mechanisms to do that. I absolutely think encouraging small business and producer cooperatives and worker cooperatives is one big part of that, but I also think public coordination of markets at the, permitting that to happen at the local level… Another thing that the antitrust establishment really is generally wanting to do is to clamp down on the state action exemption, which makes it more difficult for states and localities to engage in local management of their markets. So I think we have to encourage that and that can be another mechanism.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      But I think that’s all one. So I think reverse that principle. But I think there’s a second element actually, because I don’t think it’s all just about dispersing coordination rights. I think that antitrust law is also about fair competition. So we need to reverse our criteria for allocating coordination rights so that we’re dispersing rather than concentrating, and I think we need to be honest that there are already limits on competition in the form of the corporation, in the form of big firms, in the form of property rights, which is what essentially the courts used in the Lochner era and then really again in the Borkian era to build upon certain biases that now aren’t called property rights, but they’re ultimately built upon that. So that’s already a limit upon antitrust law.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      What I and I think others are saying is that let’s be honest about what kind of limits we do want upon competition because that will then be our rules of fair competition. Do we think that fair competition should include not undercutting each other on living wages for workers, or something like that. And I think there’s much more to it. But coming up with rules of fair competition. So I think those two things should be kind of the guiding meta principles for antitrust reform going forward. And then of course lots of policies and directions that would then flow from those principles.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      What do you think the prospects are? It seems to me that part of what has to happen for those changes to happen are for working people, especially small businesses as well, to actually be engaged. For a long time antitrust has been this technocratic affair that happens behind closed doors and it’s run by specialist lawyers and economics scholars. And if that continues, we’re not going to really get any change, except maybe at the margins. To do the kind of fundamental change in direction and rethinking of first principles that you’re talking about is going to really require a much broader set of people. It’s going to require everybody to be at the table. I feel like that’s a challenge, both for how policymakers operate, but also just how do we engage people? How do you think about that?
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      I think that’s exactly right. Whether it’s by design or not, I tend to think sometimes these things aren’t really a matter of individual intentionality, but more like kind of group intentionality. But it’s absolutely right that there’s a logic to this whole system that, oh, there’s this objective social scientific result and really, so you need really specialists, economists, and then maybe a few lawyers to translate what they’re saying for judges. And that’s what antitrust is.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      But the promising thing is, so I think first we have to break that down. I’m trying to do a little bit to do that and I think others are trying to work to break that down and to break down that edifice. But then you are absolutely right that breaking down the edifice is not enough. We have to build a new edifice and the new edifice has to be built by many hands and not by a few hands. And that the involvement, and that’s what antitrust law originally came from, was from a mass movement and a popular movement, and that… I threw out my sort of two ideas for replacing the consumer welfare standard. Maybe others have others. Basically if we decide that there aren’t these sort of independent ideal theoretical answers that can be given by lawyers and economists, well then we need very… To give answers to more specific empirical questions, we do need people who are grounded, who are in those particular sectors. That’s how we determine how to govern those markets and sectors.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      For example, in your state, the Maine Lobstering Union is that just something, a cooperative that eventually became affiliated with the union and was able to use the sort of obscure antitrust exemption for fisheries to be able to do that. But so we need people who know how that market works, both the people who are out on the boats, but also the people who are working up the supply chain. I think that you would need that kind of involvement from workers, from small businesses, from people who understand a particular market, a particular supply chain, a particular distribution chain, to help actually govern that market. And of course it needs to be in the public interest as well. And so of course we do need consumer representatives to make sure that it’s fair and everyone’s interests are represented. So I think that’s the direction we need to go. I don’t necessarily have, I’m afraid, a blueprint for exactly how to get there, but I think that’s what has to happen.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      Well, I’m encouraged by just all the growing interest in antitrust law and the fact that the word monopoly is back in our vocabulary. And the fact that we’re talking a lot more about structural solutions and this idea that people who work for a living really should be at the center of economic policy making as opposed to just completely disempowered by sort of this corporate run system. It does seem like there’s a shift going on. So I hope we continue down this road. And may the Maine Lobstering Union become a blueprint for a new kind of economy that could be much more, involve people really having control over their own labor and benefiting from the fruits of it.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      It’s been so much fun. This has really been a really enlightening conversation and great to have you on. I really appreciate it.
                      Sanjukta Paul:
                      Thank you so much for having me.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      Thank you for listening to this episode of Building Local Power. You can find links to what we discussed today by going to our website, archive.ilsr.org and clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s archive.ilsr.org, and while you’re there, you can sign up for one of our newsletters or click the donate button to support our work. If you like this podcast, please consider rating and reviewing it on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.
                      Stacy Mitchell:
                      This show is edited by Lisa Gonzalez and produced by Lisa, Hibba Meraay, and Zach Fried. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction Al. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Stacy Mitchell. We’ll see you again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

                       

                       

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                      Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

                      Photo Credit: AFGE via Flickr

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                      48 min

                    About Building Local Power

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                    Building Local Power brings you thought-provoking stories and new ideas for breaking the hold of corporate monopolies and expanding the power of communities to chart their own futures. We deliver insights from trailblazing lawmakers, scholars, business leaders, and advocates. Plus, conversations with in-house experts at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance help reveal the patterns and policies that shape our economy and communities. These stories and conversations help map solutions that distribute power to everyday people.

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