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Title: Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age by Michael H. Shuman ISBN: 0-415-92768-4 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: September, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Highly Important Book for Any Concerned Citizen
Comment: This book cuts through all of the conventional public discussions on the economy and society to make a clear, convincing case for reviving local communities. Pundits, politicians, and intellectuals are always bemoaning the collapse of "community," but their analyses are usually coiled around morality, or the need for "better education," or some equally superficial issue. But as Shuman points out, all the civic involvement and moral uprightness in the world is useless if our towns and cities are being held hostage by globe-trotting corporations and ultra-mobile capital. "Community" is only possible if people control their own lives; and this is possible only when there are thriving, viable local economies. This is not a book that calls for a complete retreat from the global forces that are shaping our world -- that option is impossible with the current levels of technology. But what Shuman does outline is a way for communities to reestablish a balance between the local and the national/global, in the areas of production, finance, and government. And unlike many other books, which never get past the critique to make any positive prescriptions, this one is brimming with concrete proposals. It also has the most extensive list of groups, organizations, and resources that I have seen in the area of decentralized economics and community self-reliance. This is a must-read.
Rating: 5
Summary: Food for thought for economic development folks
Comment: Every year on the anniversary of Walt Disney Worlds settling in Orlando, Fla., its a sure bet some newspaper will carry a story about my late uncle, Paul Pickett, and his opposition to the project. As a county commissioner when Disney first proposed bringing its giant entertainment complex to the city, he argued that the project would unleash a monster that would forever change the quality of life for residents. Tell the mouse to stay in California, he snapped.
As a person who embraces -- make that relishes -- change, Im not sure I fully agree with his assessment. But as a person who has lived for most of my adult life in an area that was decimated in the 1980s when the all-important steel industry fell on hard times and today struggles with the threat of losing still another industry on which we have become economically dependent -- car production at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio -- I understand the point my uncle was trying to make.
So does Michael H. Shuman, attorney and author of Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age. In his book, he advocates that local communities must regain control over their own economies by a variety of means including investing not in outsiders, but in locally owned businesses like credit unions, municipally owned utilities and community development corporations and focusing on import-replacing rather than export-led development. Doing so, he maintains, will reduce or eliminate the need to offer excessive tax abatements and other incentives to entice huge corporations upon which the communities stand to become dependent. The growing power and will of corporations to move without notice or warning has presented many communities with a terrible dilemma: Either cut wages and benefits, gut environmental standards and offer tax breaks to attract and retain corporations or become a ghost town, Shuman writes. Almost every U.S. town or city has learned that capital flight is not just a hypothetical danger.
Urging cities to be just as friendly with rootless corporations as with its home-grown businesses, Shuman says, is like telling a loyal wife to accept the inevitability of philandering by her husband and to appease him by buying more sexy lingerie and cooking nicer dinners. If a community is reduced to a link in a global chain, it will be dragged wherever the corporation controlling the chain wants.
As long as corporations are free to move from place to place, the author argues, No jurisdictions efforts to target production toward basic needs, or protect its work force or environment, can succeed. Once regulations become onerous, a profit-maximizing firm will move on.
This does not mean, however, that communities should circle the wagons and lock the gates. It means nurturing locally owned businesses which use local resources sustainably, employ local workers at decent wages and serve primarily local consumers, Shuman writes. It means becoming more self-sufficient and less dependent on imports. Control moves from the boardrooms of distant corporations and back to the community where it belongs.
All things considered, Shuman offers a point of view thats worth considering by government and economic development leaders throughout the country.
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Title: Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets by John P. Kretzmann, John L. McKnight ISBN: 087946108X Publisher: ACTA Publications Pub. Date: March, 1997 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World by Joanna R. Macy ISBN: 086571391X Publisher: New Society Pub Pub. Date: October, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect by David W. Orr ISBN: 155963295X Publisher: Island Press Pub. Date: September, 1994 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Profit Beyond Measure: Extraordinary Results Through Attention to Work and People by H. Thomas Johnson, Anders Broms, Peter M. Senge ISBN: 068483667X Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: November, 2000 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: Performance Measurement and Control Systems for Implementing Strategy by Robert Simons ISBN: 0130219452 Publisher: Prentice Hall Pub. Date: 04 June, 1999 List Price(USD): $80.00 |
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