Re: Mind's Eye Ways Forward

Whoa, coops are a great idea, but you have to solve very basic problem.  Now lets start at the beginning not at the end..

One basic need we have is a place to live aka housing. All of us need housing. We all pay rent in one way or another. My initial idea to start the Coop would be buy a small apartment complex.
Funding has several possibilities, a coop can be a legal entity, making it eligible for bank loans, or today maybe crowd funded.
Say the starting objective would be say a simple unit apartment complex. The gate comes from "gating" or selecting the renter or people to be renting members of the coop. Requirements being able to pay rent, agreeing to live to. And commit a minimum of 10 hours of unpaid coop or community service.. Do things from painting, repair, generally upkeep as well as being social with your neighbors, no retreating and hiding in your apartment. Everyone living there needs to be an active part of the Coop.

Funding comes from renting the apartments. It probably would take less that 10 years to pay off the entire debt. It is a freebie project. It is meant to help people create a better community.  By covering it own expenses you avoid the you owe us..  No one is required to be there or be a member of the Coop. Because of its ability to make money it has a civic responsibility to pay taxes and  create employment for the greater community.
There will never be one Coop, but because they are not owned they have the ability accumulate large sums.  You do not want it owned with the Coop membership deciding how to their own pockets.
  Starting it you do not want it complex.. Over time it can evolve. Initially housing would be good..  BUT that setting it up to really work correctly take careful thought and planning to pull it off. Maybe the church of cooperation.

All an
~~
do not murder, rape, enslave or harm others

-----Original Message-----
From: archytas <nwterry@gmail.com>
To: minds-eye@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sat, 01 Nov 2014 1:38 PM
Subject: Re: Mind's Eye Ways Forward

"We" (I mean they) seem to end up in rocket science over much that is really simple and unable to work with obvious evidence.  Let's say we form a coop to deal with child sexual exploitation or to fund art.  In the latter case, saleable products might make the coop self-sustaining.  One can think here about the Zuni tribe flogging such rather than farming (not necessarily a good thing).  But the products of prosecuting offenders and preventing CSE are difficult to define in money, even if we want the products.  Indeed, in any full approach to this the costs spiral - this is why our agencies and governments do the cover up stuff in the first place.  Their first inclinations to hire our coop would be to cut costs.  Indeed, we already have non-profits doing victim support - as a result victims get almost none.

One can try to get better partnership working within existing budgets as Molly suggests - often a tough ask - sometimes one finds 17 agencies doing sod-all of a job for the victims.  And one still has to use very expensive lawyers, courts and so on.  Spend on a troubled family easily reaches, say, £250,000 - making one think it could be better to try just giving them the money directly.  We've had pilots like this - but how do we scale down the costs to go mainstream?  The usual answer is to mainstream so little money the job can't be done and appoint bent project managers who report success for political reasons like cops on crime statistics.

Current economic 'thinking' is at the bottom of our failures to develop socially.  Our anti-CSE coop could not borrow money from banks unless the government forks out for our efforts.  I take the view we should come up with new ideas on money.  The start in this is surely how we have got into the position where doing the right things is always a "cost" that has to be borne by the "healthy" plastic-crap-burn-the-planet economy.  Just how could this ever work?  It's in the same league as 'mustard is hot, spread it on your frozen pipes'.

I'd say economics is more backward than science at 1300 AD.  It's scholastic drivel.  There is no need to overthrow the system with 'Soviet Paradise' thinking.  The problem is they won't even let us start small for fear even this would expose the control fraud.  The answer is controlled debt free money to fund projects that obviously need doing such as ridding ourselves of CSE or funding social space with some of Tony's sculptures in a quiet bit for adults where kids can engage in free fun.

Positive money and Modern Monetary Theory form an economic outline but we probably need science fiction profiling to imagine the society not constrained by current insanestream economics.  The cry against PM and MMT is that the sky will fall if we try them - yet we could clearly try them in small projects.

On Saturday, November 1, 2014 10:46:01 AM UTC, Molly wrote:

I like Allan's coop idea, it reminds me of 70s hippy communes here in the states, but I never new one that was actually functional for the residents. Because of the limits of social program funding that you site, Neil, I found my best approach to be coalitions or collaborations of agencies to serve a particular population through the grant money they were already receiving or apply for new.  The best example is a IL state program in the 90s - the Teen Parent Program, where we were given a list of all parents under 19 who were on welfare, and given money to case manage them, making sure they live up to the new conditions of that money, getting through school, job training, health care for the baby.  With what little money we were getting to run it being eaten up by, as you say, administrative costs, we took the approach of contacting every agency in the county that had ongoing grants to serve that population, and delivering it to them, as their biggest problem was accessing the population. We began each semester at the community college where the kids showed up and were assessed for need by the case managers.  The agencies were on site to speak to each girl as the case managers determined the need.  The girls were then required to follow up with them also, as part of the requirement to get their weekly welfare check. The synergy met the needs of the teen parents to a much higher degree that we alone could have as one agency.  All agencies met the requirements of their grants.

I called the Covey (Stephen) institute to get a recommendation of a planning process for the agency heads to look at future collaborations for this population.  Called out of desperation because my first attempt turned into a shouting match as I discovered the long standing rivalry of many of these agencies.  Stephen Covey himself called me back and talked me through a process that left them no time to squabble and kept them focused on the planning. We were able to bring in several million more dollars of needed service for the population by applying as collaborations for grants. After the first year our success rate in the program shot up 70% but more importantly, I think, it set the tone for cooperation among agencies that was not there prior.

If there are solutions, they will be new ones, as the old stuff just doesn't work anymore.

On Saturday, November 1, 2014 5:46:03 AM UTC-4, archytas wrote:

There's still a money issue concerning 'self-supporting'.  I'll get back later but the essence is we still have the idea that what we want to do has to be paid for by the wider economy - that we somehow have export cars or plastic crap to  fund the public sector.  This isn't true.

On Saturday, November 1, 2014 8:37:43 AM UTC, Allan Heretic wrote:

Thanks so true, personally I think change is going to have to start small ,,,  and it seems chorus of the day is from te opera of "Today" with the chorus that goes "Me, Me, Me, Me" ..President Kennedy once said "Ask not what your country can do you, but what you can do for your country."

To many people are only asking what they can get and are living in a fantasy of their value to society. The idea of a coop can start with housing. A small apartment complex can be a simple start with people committing to moral standards. A cooperative owned by no one will make money. The trick is to keep that money out of politicians hands.

Oddly that is the biggest problem I see is it can make a lot of money. Once started the project can be self supporting.




-----Original Message-----
From: archytas <nwterry@gmail.com>
To: minds-eye@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sat, 01 Nov 2014 8:08 AM
Subject: Mind's Eye Ways Forward

I've been lucky enough to be involved in a number of projects to bring about social change.  These vary from attempts to improve employment through education and training, innovation and business incubation, technical improvements in CCTV, street theatre and space design to reduce crime, targeted policing to improve estates, the employment of jailbirds to improve recidivism rates, special courts and procedures on domestic violence, various dying industry area support efforts - I'd guess Molly and I could easily fill a page.  I raised somewhere between £5 and £15 million in European funding for such - nearly all misspent because of the bureaucratic system.

Australia currently has a Royal Commission into child sexual exploitation.  In all the press hype on the UK situation I have seen no mention of this.  We have an inquiry into institutional abuse here - so far the two Establishment women put up to head this have (eventually) been rejected by victims' groups as connected with probable perpetrators of the cover up.  The UK inquiry is already incredibly limited.  Any way forward, whether in areas like this or producing a reinvigorated economy (think Detroit or my local town) and on to world peace, seems limited to pilot projects that somehow, even when successful, never mainstream.  Across many issues, we are told we are doing everything possible - from child protection to producing a super economy and ensuring we keep the terrorists under control.  The weird thing is the same problems never go away and in many respects get worse.  We have a niche media telling us this - think Naomi Klein, Chomsky and so on.  Meanwhile, the human population has tripled, pollution and planet burning gain pace and international finance is in a state of farce.  But a cup of coffee in UK main street from Starfruckers and they steal the tax you pay through accounting.

I might get £1 million from an EU 'community safeguarding initiative'.  Forgetting the political-economic mainstream problems, I might get on spending this money doing good.  It just ain't that simple.  I'll probably need academics to work on my programme and will have to ask them to work for free.  They don't like this.  Any work they do is credited in my project at £85 an hour of which they get zilch.  Any capital equipment I buy has to be bought through an approved supplier - these suppliers give a discount of 40% at the end of the year to the university central accounts and I also have to pay 50% to them as overhead.  I really want to spend the money on people with problems, but this is nearly impossible.  The only justification I can come up with is that the 10% I manage to spend on the real issue is 'better than nothing'.  These projects never mainstream and in effect are subsidies to bureaucracy and sometimes criminal graft.  Money paid to my project will always be late and I will have to pretend spending money before I get it in submitting to get the money (technically a crime).

Don't worry though folks - the way forward is to wait for the private sector cavalry to ride in and fix everything through market forces.  Like they always have for abused kids and in providing well paid jawbs, protecting the environment ...

I would say the ways forward are all blocked - but it's realising this that we need to actually move forward.  This 'negative force' is key in real change.  EU funding typically runs at 50% of total project spend - so it would seem taking on a project dooms the host institution to a loss equal to the grant.  In fact, one engages in dodgy accounting to make some profit from the 'half-money'.  No one with any sense could invent such a system.  The actual way forward would be to fund these projects with positive money using block chain technology to control the accounting.

But who knows what positive money is and what blockchain technology is?  The complaint I hear all the time on any social initiative is that we can't resource it.  We have to wait until the groaf-jawbs-burn-the-planet economy has grown enough for us to be able to afford it.  This is actually an economy of Monopoly money created by bank debt loan money, but we don't realise that either.  Spending money on social problems is always a cost in this system.  All the projects I have done were doomed to failure because of this system.  Once the grant runs out there is no project.  The way forward would be to find a new way for funding and control of funding.

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