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My best story so far, in my own opinion, was picked up by Twin Cities Daily Planet:
The Seward Café, which turns 40 years old some time this year, is a study in contradictions. Although it’s known for its longevity, laying claim to being both the oldest collectively-managed business in the Twin Cities and the oldest collectively-managed restaurant/-café in the U.S., its actual collectives seem to turn over completely about every seven years. Although the café has never been totally vegetarian (the principle is even enshrined in its charter), it has always remained a favorite among vegans and vegetarians. This is probably due to its great range of vegan baked goods and its adherence to an ethos of care with its veg customers by assuring careful separation in the kitchen and full disclosure of ingredients. And further, although it looks small and scruffy and like anything but a gourmet haven, some of its food items are nearly legendary in their greatness. And its amazing survival attests to its success with the public.
The current collective has an average age somewhere in the mid to late 20s, and an average time as collective member of just a few years. Benjamin Acaso, 32, who joined the collective in 2008, is one of the senior members. The hiring process is still the same as it’s been since the early 1980s: A prospective member is hired under what is called “intake,” and after a probationary period, they may choose to join the collective and become an owner-manager. Some choose to remain on as shift-workers, but most choose the path of workplace democracy. Benjamin admits it’s not easy going to long, frequent collective meetings and making decisions by consensus, but he and the other members believe strongly that they make better decisions because of it. “And I don’t ever want to have a boss,” he says.
The decisions are working, so he must be right. One decision that was struggled over for a long time was whether or not to accept credit cards. The anti-corporate, slightly Luddite gene is very dominant in the counterculture even now in the iPod generation. But in 2012, they finally decided to do it, and this was a transformative decision that immediately increased business and allowed new directions to open up. Some of these new directions were actually a return to the roots. In March 2013, the Café switched from closing at 3 p.m. to closing at 11 p.m., also adding (back) beer and wine sales and live music. The collective expected to lose money at first when they switched hours and added new, unfamiliar dinner items. But to their delight, they actually increased profits almost immediately. With no cover charge, musicians are paid 15% of bar sales plus tips, drink tickets and meals if they’re touring.
There are a lot of parallels between Benjamin’s take on the Seward Café and that of Barbara Jensen (or Barb as she was known at the time) one of the founding collective members. Barb said not all of the founders and early collective members were counter-culture, “some were musicians,” for instance. And Benjamin, in talking about the current collective’s desire to bring back live music, mentioned that many of the collective are also in bands of their own.
In 1974, Barb Jensen was one of four full-time employees at the Seward Co-op, then located where Welna II hardware store is now. The space where the café now sits was a 3-2 bar called the Fireside Inn which had recently closed. A group comprising Barb and two other co-op employees, Mike Bird and Lori Zuidema, and Howard Hickman, who was a co-op volunteer, schemed to buy the Fireside Inn and found the Seward Café, a worker-owned and run café that would continue to serve the neighborhood, but serve it better. They each contributed what money they could for the purchase, and in the first years, worked essentially as volunteers. Barb remembers those early collective meetings starting out with the question, OK, who needs what? Who needs rent, who’s having their electricity shut off, whose car just died? Like that. It was pure primitive communism, but the spirit was utopian anarchism.
And then, barely a year after the café opened, the Twin Cities was embroiled in the Co-op Wars. Along with the Seward Co-op across the street, the café in the years 1975 and 1976 was a haven for the resistance against the Co-operative Organization, or CO, which was seeking to “take over” co-ops across the Twin Cities, often violently. But ironically, and here those contradictions are again, even though the Seward Café was stalwartly anti-CO, they had already institutionalized some of the better ideas the CO was trying to push onto all co-ops dogmatically—they were open late, they kept prices low, they served hamburgers and Pabst Blue Ribbon.
One thing Barb says that came out of the Co-op Wars was an increasing “legalization” of the co-ops, both worker-owned and the new model for food co-ops, consumer-owned. This was a good thing in the end, and the legal, in-the-system framework—putting the land in a trust, having a charter and rules to govern the collective, using proper accounting procedures—all manage to contain the anarchist heart of the Seward Café and enable it to live on through all the changes, whether economic or ideological. Barb went on to help found DANCE Warehouse, to be a major participant in the All Co-ops Assembly (ACA—which no longer exists) and the Peoples Center on the West Bank (which still does.) She went back to school, got a masters degree, taught at Metro State, and is now a community and counseling psychologist. A working-class girl who became radicalized in her late teens, she is also the author of a book, “Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America” (Cornell Press, 2012).
Benjamin believes the Seward Café will survive at least another 40 years. So many people love the righteous pancakes, the CP Iced Coffee, the vegan cookies and muffins, the Earth Breakfast. And now they are coming in for local food like Tempeh Tantrum, LaPerla tortillas and craft beers. The Seward Café is successful enough to be a help to other collective businesses, such as Hard Times Café. And ultimately, as Benjamin says, “the community won’t let us die.” A 40th anniversary celebration is being planned for some time in the late fall.
© 2014 Southside Pride
I was watching a comedy (show or film, don't remember, probably British rather than American) where a comedy bigoted character said about immigrants (paraphrase) : they are lazy, they don't want to work and they come over here and take our jobs. He said this all in one sentence, oblivious to the irony (or something) of what he was saying, and even when a more level-headed character pointed out that they were either lazy OR job-stealing, but obviously not both, he didn't get it. So this was comedy, right? A few days later, today, I was watching a supposedly serious show about "benefit fraud" on a supposedly serious BBC channel. They featured a story about a woman who came from Ghana to the UK, illegally forged a new identity based on a stolen British passport with her photo substituted and a faked birth certificate and faked educational credentials. she then got a job with the NHS which she had for several years (I am guessing from the earnings cited below seven to ten years.) Most of the fraud involved here was pretty ham-fisted; her birth certificate said Lutterworth, which is in Leicestershire, but then said County of Surrey (hundreds of miles away.) (For Americans, this is sort of like saying Sacramento, Illinois, only even more impossible.) Also, some documents implied she had never left the UK after being born here, but her fake diplomas were from Ghana. And implausibly had a photo on them. The same photo as on her stolen passport. So, look here, I am not saying she is a hero, or not a fraudster, or not a criminal. I am not defending her. But this is how the BBC summed up the story. This woman was said to have earned £230,000 plus a £40,000 "bursary" (not sure what that is, but I am guessing some kind of grant for either work or education.) So they claimed her fraud had COST British taxpayers (which includes me) £270,000, or "over a quarter of a million". But wait a minute, this woman was also a British taxpayer. And she didn't COST the country £230K of that, since presumably they got at least nearly that much value from her in service to the NHS. Oh, but here's the real kicker, just as ignorant in its way as that "lazy and steal our jobs" line: the woman is now in prison for many years! So she is "paying back that debt to society." No, she is now costing the British taxpayers (including me) probably about 10 times as much per annum to support in a prison, doing nothing of worth, as she was paying in taxes while committing her crime. Is it just me, or is this FREAKING INSANE?
This Huffington Post article by George Lazoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics, is very long and a hard read, but worth it. Although he is focusing on a scathing critique of, and offering a cogent alternative to, the way the Obama administration has failed to sell health care reform, along the way he makes some really razor-sharp points about what is wrong with the current system. I think everyone in favour of health care reform (or insurance reform if you prefer) should read this article as a guide in how to discuss it, not just with those who agree, but especially with those who disagree.
The Guardian's Michael Tomasky is getting really frustrated trying to be fair and balanced about those nasty Republicans. But seriously, it is hard to find fault with what he says. And it is impossible to fight a clean and principled election against people who make lying both a virtue and an art form. Check his points against the Truth-o-meter and see what he means.
Deborama's Wednesday Website of the Week returns for a one-off engagement.
An online friend who is almost diametrically opposed to me politically (but a decent guy) (I could say the same about my sister except for the guy part, obviously) sent me this link : Politifact.com. It includes the invaluable Flip-o-meter and also the Truth-o-meter. It also includes the Attack files and the special Chain E-mails files, with truthometer readings for each item. I am very impressed! How on earth did we do anything before the internet? (We didn't have chain e-mails influencing elections, true enough.)
- The Wall Street Journal has an article about the sociopolitical ripples of Obama's candidacy in the black American community. It reminded me of an article praising Michelle Obama I read recently in The Root.
- The Washington Post is doing an in-depth biography of Obama. This segment, quite long and full of information, covers his childhood and the life story of his parents. I found it very absorbing, the sort of thing you would find interesting for the characters even if Obama himself were a relative nobody.
- Darling Hubby and I just finished watching the BBC/HBO production House of Saddam. It's worth a watch.
- I am thinking of downloading iPlayer to fill in the gaps created by my crazy schedule vs. the restrictions on recording Freeview (basically the same as SkyPlus, in that you can only do two or three shows that overlap, and since the channels tend to schedule all the good stuff at once, this is a problem.)
George Carlin died yesterday (Sunday, 22 June). Sadly, he was scheduled to receive a prestigious award. the Mark Twain Award for Comedy, in November. He will be remembered for a number of things, but probably most for "The Seven Things You Can't Say on Television" which led to a landmark obscenity case in the US Supreme Court. The tributes are pouring in already, including this good one in WaPo, about "angry George" and "gentle George".
Reuters on the web has a really good blog tracking the US elections - Tales from the Trail. Check it out.
They hope it's all over. Super-delegates are deciding for, and in some cases switching to, Barack Obama in droves in the last few days. Not surprisingly, it may have been Clinton's latest rather desperate attempt to "play the race card" that decided it for some of them. Amongst Clinton's supporters, too, there is a note of desperation in the pronouncements. (Thirty points in Puerto Rico? In your dreams!)
There are various predictors in US electoral folklore. One of my favourites is the "democrat dark horse on the cover of Time" although in this case, the candidate, though of middling dark complexion, was far beyond the dark horse stage when he was graced with it this week. (I have heard that there has never been a Democratic candidate for nomination who was on the cover of Time magazine before the primary, who didn't go on to be nominated and elected. But I am having no luck Googling this, so maybe I imagined it.) By my count, Obama has been on the cover of Time at least four times now: November 2006, October 2007, March 2008 and May 2008. That's pretty excessive, even though he is my man. And in November 2006 he was a horse of the deepest black.
As the government here is in minor turmoil over the "Northern Rock crisis" and the company I used to work for (on whose premises I still work as a contractor) just made 500 people around the country redundant, I just happened upon a really brilliant op-ed piece by Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post (or WaPo as most typing-shy bloggers call it). Now this article is over a year old, even though it is more relevant now than when it was written (which we word-infatuated bloggers call "prescient") so you may need to register with WaPo to read it, but you can opt out of getting any of their friendly and well-meaning spam and it is free. But knowing my readership as I do, I decided to revert to my old habit (avoided lately for IP reasons) of long quotes, because I sense that you won't register, and this is just so good:
In a normal recession, the to-do list is clear. Copies of Keynes are dusted off, the Fed lowers interest rates, the president and Congress cut taxes and hike spending. In time, purchasing, production and loans perk up, and Keynes is placed back on the shelf. No larger alterations to the economy are made, because our economy, but for the occasional bump in the road, is fundamentally sound.
This has been the drill in every recession since World War II.
Republicans and Democrats argue over whose taxes should be cut the most and which projects should be funded, but, under public pressure to do something, they usually find some mutually acceptable midpoint and enact a stimulus package. Even in today's hyperpartisan Washington, the odds still favor such a deal.
This time, though, don't expect that to be the end of the story -- because the coming recession will not be normal, and our economy is not fundamentally sound. This time around, the nation will have to craft new versions of some of the reforms that Franklin Roosevelt created to steer the nation out of the Great Depression -- not because anything like a major depression looms but because we face an economy that's been warped by two developments we've not seen since FDR's time.
The first of these is the stagnation of ordinary Americans' incomes, a phenomenon that began back in the 1970s and that American families have offset by having both spouses work and by drawing on the rising value of their homes. With housing values toppling, no more spouses to send into the workplace, and prices of gas, college and health care continuing to rise, consumers are played out. December was the cruelest month that American retailers have seen in many years, and, as Michael Barbaro and Louis Uchitelle reported in Monday's New York Times, delinquency rates on credit cards, auto loans and mortgages have all been rising steeply for the past year. So, I hope that was good enough to entice you to read the entire article. He goes on to offer real, serious and radical ideas about "what is to be done".
While the 15 sailors and marines were in the custody of the Iranians, the British media reported all their staged press conferences at face-value.As soon as they were released, the British media began speculating on whether they would or should be reprimanded for "cooperating" too much.Simultaneously they began "approaching" (that is, swarming all over) their friends and families clamouring for stories and "reactions".As soon as they had access to the released servicemen and woman, they began to pester them for their stories and "reactions", saying "if you don't tell us we won't be able to tell 'your side'" and "if you don't take the money your friends will."Then, they began to assail the MoD demanding to be allowed to purchase the "hostages' stories".No sooner was permission granted to the servicemen and woman to sell their stories than the media began to question the integrity of the MoD decision.Also at the same time, the surviving relatives of the service men and women killed in Iraq during the "hostage crisis" were harrassed and manipulated into saying resentful things about the relative sufferings of the hostages and hostages' families vs. their own losses.The controversy was further charged with irrational emotion by playing up this contrast in experience and manufacturing alternating sympathy and disdain for the freed hostages.My conclusion? The British media is an evil nest of vipers. They are worse than the UK government and the Iranian government combined and I am sick to death of them.
I tell you what, in this fast-paced multi-media plexiverse we inhabit, you have to move fast. I announced last week that I was going to start a run of radio-themed WWWs, and at the time, I was planning to save This American Life for a couple of weeks. But I went to the website, and darn me if it hasn't morphed itself into a TV show! It has not emerged for its close-up yet but is just a month and a bit away from a debut on American public television. I will definitely have to catch it when I am over there.
Oh, and by the way, I have to thank my son Carey for introducing me to TAL; he is a massive fan as evidenced by this old blog post. He says it might make you feel sad, but it made me weep and haunted me for days. Unfortunately, the link to the audio of the episode, "Other People's Mail" from 25 July 1997, does not work, but check out Carey's profile for a permanent link to TAL and you can find it in the archive. Or not. They're all good.)
With number 12, Deborama's Wednesday Website of the Week is going to enter into a series of radio-themed website links. Since moving to the UK, I have listened to far more radio than at any time in my life. I came over here just before the explosion of digital radio and many new stations coming online so that is part of it. But another part is that DH loves Radio 4; in fact, it's one of the reasons he refuses to leave the country! And one of our favourite programmes on Radio 4 is the News Quiz. Well, apparently while I was away, NPR (almost the only network I used to listen to) has launched a similar American version, called "Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me!". I am sure it must be good because it has Paula Poundstone on the panel.
Of course, I had to buy the new Guardian today. Britannia has been all abuzz about the new "Berliner" format, quite like a tabloid but more serious and attractive. (I also had to buy an Independent, but that was because it had a banner that said "Life Without Sex" by Belle du Jour, which turned out to be a bit of a bait-and-switch. When will I ever learn?) The Guardian had this story, that everyone has, no exclusives, about the NHS recently discovering that - shock, horror - depression is rampant in the UK and the handing out of anti-depressants like candy is having almost no positive effect. A few skillion pounds is about to be invested in more cognitive-behavioural therapists. I could have told them this years ago. I first suspected the problem because almost everyone I know is clinically depressed, and almost all of them have tried drugs, and I don't know a single person who has "recovered" or even been helped. Oh, they sometimes say they are helped; they say they would be much worse without the drugs. But I wondered. So, after over 20 years as a diagnosed but unmedicated depressive myself, I gave two anti-depressants a try (not at once, obviously). The first made me want to die with almost the first dose so I quit it immediately. After a six month hiatus I tried again. The second one, I could tolerate and took for a few months. I noticed no improvement and stopped it on my own without consulting the GP. The only possible lingering side effect of this ignoble experiment is possibly a few (well more than a few) extra pounds I could ill afford. Grr. Bring on the CBT on the NHS, I say.
Focus: Zero to hero in today's Sunday Times attempts to put George Galloway into context and answer the question is he a friend or a foe of Saddam Hussein? The answer they come up with is a little bit of both, and is best summed up by GG's own statement during an earlier phase of his besiegement by press and less radical lefties: “My opposition to American imperialism is greater than my opposition to this or that tinpot dictator with whom American imperialism from time to time falls out.”
While it is true that Galloway visited Saddam in 1994 and again in 1998, and that he made a sycophantic speech to him in 1994 and that he refused to condemn him in the harsh tones demanded by the establishment, but instead praised him with faint damns, it also true that he marched, demonstrated and spoke out harshly against Saddam from 1980 to 1993 (even though he also opposed the 1991 Gulf War.) In fact, in his own ultra-leftist way, Galloway has been quite consistent. The one thing the American people (including especially the Senate) will never understand is that there other standards of ethical public behaviour than their own, and there is a long and not yet defeated (despite what all the uber-patriots may wish) tradition of international anti-imperialist socialism which stands unashamedly in opposition to them. The British Labour party knows all about this tendency, but has no truck with it; but New Labour has no consistency or principles at all. If Galloway's actions in 1994 were so repellent, why did they wait until 2003 to expel him? I think we all know why: he has a following and he wins elections.
Here is a nice thought-y piece about the shifting relationship between journalism and the internet, specifically that microcosm of the internet we know as "blogging". This was written as an address to a conference held last week in Cambridge MA called Blogging, Journalism and Credibility, and is by media critic Jay Rosen of NYU, who also runs a blog called PressThink.
Julie Burchill on her (and my) former feminist hero, GG, on the occasion of GG leaving the CBB (Celebrity Big Brother) house in a huff. Wonderfully bitchy, as expected from the fabulous Julie. (I know this is way out of date, but I couldn't let it slip away.)
This website was included in an official Oregon pamphlet to help voters consider the issues on the ballot. It is unclear whether election officials knew that it was satire.
Tonight's headlines on UK Google News have not one US story amongst them. You may not think that's remarkable, but it's the first time I've seen that in about two years of reading it. You usually find one or two sneaking in with the World or Entertainment or at least Sci/Tech.
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