Andersen Design Economic Evolution Discourse

The Difference Between Writing for Substack and Writing For Medium

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 16:38:00 +0000

Substack is evolving as the medium where the writer has the freedom to evolve new forms as Medium shows indications of becoming more regulated.

Shubham Dhage Unsplash

I published a story on Substack less than 24 hours since I began composing this post. It had already exceeded by more than double my average number of reads two posts ago. The previous post exceeded the same average by 50% and that was over a few days and so I must be doing something right, which is just granting myself permission to be me.

There are no editors on Substack.

There are no rules- You are in charge of instructing yourself on how to be you.

Films that I find engaging, do not necessarily have storylines that follow a straight line. Sometimes it’s a mystery of complexities that draws one in — or not.

Shubham Dhage Unsplash

I have always been the kind of person who thinks in circles or better-said spirals.

When I was in high school I dreamed I was walking across the footbridge in the small coastal town of Boothbay Harbor, Maine, with spirals of alternate beingness expanding into greater spirals and coming out the back of my head, commanding me- sort of. The strange being didn’t quite feel like me but it was me because, well, everything is everything, as was commonly said in the 1960s.

Do you see how I just switched the focus there? That is what I mean. My mind does that on its own as in very well-constructed films. Films that I find engaging, do not necessarily have storylines that follow a straight line. Sometimes it's a mystery of complexities that draws one in - or not.

I have always had a stream of consciousness flowing through my head that comes from all directions. When I spoke it out loud people would say “Well how does this relate to that?”

Isn’t it obvious?

Finding a subject matter to write about isn’t difficult. Just let the stream of consciousness loose onto the page. The hard part isn’t editing the sentence structure and the words, the hard part is structuring the stream into a sequence with each idea placed so that it accentuates the others. I move blocks of paragraphs around. Sometimes the idea I started with ends up at the bottom of the page and I have to bring it back up.

This is my writing process. It emerges from who I am.

Nadine Shaabana Unsplash

If I were writing for Medium. I could stop right there, according to instructions, but that is not the end of this thought. I am not writing for Medium. I am writing for the world, the times, and for me. I know the formula. I like Tim Denning. He says bloggers can’t write long paragraphs. Yes, they can! And I like to read those writers.

A big difference between Medium and Substack is that the Substack writers that I follow write very long posts weaving ideas together in a way that is unique to themselves. They write in long paragraphs.

Long melodic form-smashing writing can also be found on Medium but I did not start having access to the writers that I find most interesting on Medium until I started radically applying the “Show less of these stories” function to all the stories that instruct on how to go viral and make a boatload of money.

Everything is changing, changing, changing. It's so changing at a faster pace than ever before, so don’t believe “them” when they tell you there is a set template and try to mold yourself to it. The world itself is changing, and along with that, I believe there is a human evolutionary process underway, that is evolving the way that our minds work. In our lives, we have to be increasingly aware of greater layers of complex relationships and so we must adapt as a species. The new human evolution will be mental and spiritual. Our minds evolve. We do not have to think in short straight lines. We can flow in long winding loops and take quantum leaps of faith.

Shubham Dehage Unsplash

By social media standards, I do not have a large Substack following but it is large enough and growing. It started with importing my email list for Andersen Design. For an inexplicable reason, I instantly had hundreds of reads more on Substack than I did on MailChimp.

The number of readers hovered around a certain level until my last two posts when suddenly the momentum has been escalating and I have more than doubled the former norm in my last two posts. The number of reads by subscribers and non-subscribers has increased dramatically, edging toward 150% above the former norm. This with a post that begins with a run-on sentence.

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At the same time that my readership started expanding, I started receiving criticism for not conforming to a theme that the critic identified as the theme of the post. These two thoughts do not belong together. You should separate them.

I did not see it that way and felt that my critics want me to conform to an established norm of what they think a post should be, she said switching her paragraph structure to conform with conventional blog writing format, before adding a third-person voice to mess it all up again.

Birmingham Museums Trust Unsplash

The latest critique occurred when I posted on Medium in a publication that I liked in no small part because I liked the editor of the publication and the positive support that he gave to the writers. I identified the publication with the editor and as a place where one can find offbeat writers.

However, the last time I published, a different editor corrected my comma placement, which had already been corrected once by Grammarly. OK, there are different schools of thought on comma placement. I think it only matters to be consistent, but, whatever.

This time a new editor left a note that my first paragraph (below) should be broken up into shorter sentences.

This weekend we participated in the first annual Boothbay Winter Faire on the Commons, like pagans and gypsies emerging from the mists of history, taking back the town, giving new life to a long tradition that is the milieu of the designer craftsmen movement going back to Medieval times when the first Town Fairs were filled with makers before the emergence of merchant importers.

I disagreed. Like music writing can use different beats and rhythms. I think that paragraph has the right melodic form the way it is and would not be improved by turning it into a series of short sentences. — or consistent with correct content provider format- short sentences as paragraphs with a lot of white space around each sentence. yeah! I know the format!

Other advice broke up other sentences. I saw no point to it. I consider the rhythm of a piece intuitively — by what feels right to me, and that includes sentence structure.

Finally, the editor wanted me to eliminate a section where I describe the stories I read while sitting in my booth on a slow Sunday:

This seems like the start of the third or fourth essay in this piece, not sure how it relates to itinerant Bronze Age Crafters or your experiences with Boards. I think you would keep your reader more effectively if you would develop one theme fully in one five minute piece, maybe do a short series on the parts of your broader thesis.

I have been writing in my own style on Substack, weaving together many apparently separate themes. This story is part of an ongoing series of my broader theme. To the point of keeping my readers attention, I am keeping it and expanding my readership so there are obviously people who do follow my thought. We can’t please everyone.

The reads on my Substack post have continued to tick up as I have been composing this piece.

Meanwhile, on Medium, my story has only one read, but it has only 9 views so one read is slightly better than 10% of reads to views, and who or what decides the views that our stories receive? Would it be the omnipotent algorithm?

Substack does not have an algorithm. I can’t say why my readership is expanding on Substack. Maybe it’s because people are craving those run-on sentences. The list is ordered by who has the most number of subscribers and there is not an option to reverse that order, rewarding those who are already the most successful.

Nonetheless, both my subscriber and nonsubscriber readers on Sunstack are increasing, while my views on Medium have consistently remained on the edge of nowhere, even as my followers have increased. Substack is treating me better. It must be due to my own promotional efforts as there is no other explanation. I have been prioritizing Substack in my promotional efforts.

Claude Peladeau Unsplash

I responded to the editor’s note about the first sentence with “I disagree”. And the editor said it is the policy of the publication to let the reader decide. He hoped that I would get views, by which he mean the hoped that I would get views without adapting my writing style to what the algorithm is pushing in all the stories I am using to see less of.

I thought that I am not writing for the reader who cannot read a sentence longer than short. I told the editor that I had to radically apply “Show less of these kinds of stories” before I was able to find stories that I want to read in my stream.

He said that he likes to write in longer sentences also but he shortens them to get readership on Medium. I checked out his profile and started reading one of his stories, an interesting and informative story about a subject that I am less informed about than he, but if the key to the readership is very short sentences, he would get more readership by eliminating the “and” in the first sentence and starting a new one.

Really??? If a reader stops reading a story because the author used an “and” instead of a period, what is that reader worth to the greater cause of why we write? What kind of reader cannot understand a sentence if it is long? If a reader cannot understand or gets bored by a long sentence, how is that reader supposed to understand what is going on in our rapidly changing complex world? We have to be intuitively processing several levels at once, even as we consciously focus on a particular task.

Szabo Viktor Unsplash

The fact that Medium provides a platform where even people with broken English can publish is a good thing. I want to hear from those people, but it is true that they are unlikely to go viral, but what is the importance of going viral, other than the measure in money?

I started to see the onslaught of articles that the algorithm was pushing in our faces as mass programming. Thankfully Medium has given us a way to alter that with the “Show Less of the stories” option. Now please bring back ”Dismiss”.

Mackenzie Andersen's" The Individual vs The Empire! is a reader-supported Substack publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Decentralized Opportunity Zones is the Future of Work-Life Balance

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Sat, 13 Nov 2021 14:33:00 +0000

In the Portland, Maine industrial opportunity zone, a homeless shelter is planned as a residence in a business but businesses in residence are not permitted.

Stephanie Klepacki Unsplash

Homelessness is not an isolated social status. It is the extremity of continuous social-economic fabric, with each thread interwoven to create the whole.

The Homeless Tax Shelter

The homeless shelter proposed by the Portland, Maine city council is advanced by developers taking advantage of 2017 opportunity zone tax advantages. There are multiple social issues entangled in the political web of the proposed homeless shelter, starting with why is a homeless shelter being proposed in an industrial zone?

To all appearances, the Portland, Maine homeless shelter will be financed using opportunity zone tax advantages for investors. an assumption based on the location of the planned homeless shelter in an opportunity zone and that the developers charged with the financing are intimately connected with the CEI-Boulos Opportunity Fund, an award-winning social impact leader in opportunity zone financing that weaves non-profit and for-profit streams of concentrated wealth into a greater concentration of wealth.

Sergio Gonzalez Unsplash

As part of the home business culture, my question is “why is a homeless shelter located in an industrial zone, while ordinances designed to limit the growth of businesses in a home, such as those put into place in Boothbay, Maine, encourage the pecuniary activity of a resident home business to relocate to a designated industrial zone where residency is prohibited?

Paragraphs in Boothbay Town Report of 2015, are copied word for word, from the 2013 Act, Industrial Partnerships.

Chapter 39: MAINE INDUSTRY PARTNERSHIPS
[ 2013, c. 368, Pt. FFFFF, §1 (NEW) .]
Action B.2-4. Explore creating a small business assistance program that would help growing businesses, including home businesses and home occupations, with financing and with locating in appropriate commercial/industrial districts when appropriate.

The people involved in the work have no say in a fundamental decision affecting their working environment. A location decision is made by the government as though the government knows best where a business should be located, although the government has no knowledge whatsoever about the why and wherefore of an optimal working environment for the diversity of business types, most especially small business types that co-exist with residential living.

The only explanation that I have been given for ordinances designed to relocate home-businesses away from the home, is that if one has a business in the home, cars related to the business activity will park in the driveway. When this explanation is given, it is stated, in a manner of gaslighting, as if a car parked in a driveway for a business purpose rather than any other purpose is commonly accepted as an anti-social act.

As one who was raised in a business in the home in East Boothbay, cars parked in the driveway and identifying signage were the only external effect related to our business that differentiated our home from others in the neighborhood, and even that isn’t entirely true as large families and property owners that hire maintenance help, at times have as many cars parked in their driveways as we did.

If cars parked in a driveway are the problem, the ordinance should limit the number of cars permitted to be parked on any location for any reason but instead, the ordinances limit the growth of businesses in a home, lest they become too successful, causing cars to park in their driveways, unlike large businesses that are permitted to build large parking lots in the local watershed.

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For much of the year, during the off-season, the cars parked in the driveway belonged to employees working for our business, but since our business is small, there were not enough employees in number to qualify as “job creation” to local economic development leaders, and so employees were counted as cars. not a workforce, but as cars that needed to be regulated.

Today such local ordinances are rapidly becoming out of sync with the times in reverse proportion to the rapid growth of the Great Resignation and remote working.

By reading many articles written to explain the Great Resignation, it is apparent that they fall into two categories, those written with reliance on data-driven reports and those written by individual voices within the workforce. The primary difference between the two approaches is the recognition that the Great Resignation is a response to a hierarchical corporate culture that is detrimental to the human spirit, self-esteem, and well-being.

On the individual scale, the cause is seen that is apparently invisible to corporate management and data analysts. It’s about humanism. It’s about how people treat people as conditioned by the fabric of culture in which many individuals are entwined with each other.

In the Portland, Maine homeless solution, homeless people have no say in what and where a shelter should be because the shelter isn’t about helping the homeless. It is about real estate, gentrification, and tax shelters. Those are the forces that won the vote.

A homeless person can live in an industrial zone but a home business cannot be located in an industrial zone, without losing the home, since only homeless people can live in industrial zones in the social order created by and for what I call the public-private for-profit nonprofit industrial complex.

How are the homeless and home businesses related? They have in common that both exist outside the system, the homeless because they do not have the wealth to buy a voting voice, and businesses in a home because they are alternative and independent cultural organizations, remnants of a former time before the complex took over everything.

Yuyeung Lau Unsplash

The complex exists for the singular purpose of concentrating wealth. Concentrated wealth creates all-encompassing corporate networks and hierarchical social organization as seen in the consortium of corporations planning the homeless shelter situated in an industrial opportunity zone in Portland, Maine where a public-private relationship branches into a non-profit for-profit relationship, mainstreaming diverse sources of wealth to create the greatest possible concentration of wealth and power.

The homeless have no monetary value to barter for their interests with looming centralized financial powers.

Home businesses are decentralized cultures existing outside of the managed grid. By definition, centralized power believes that it should control all and acts like an organism biologically obsessed with eliminating all it does not control.

The coveted control is an illusion dissolving into the conflation of events set into motion by coronavirus - remote working, the Great Resignation, and disruptions clogging the infrastructure global product delivery. The world is suddenly changing in hitherto unexpected ways.

Nikolay Vorobyev Unsplash

The reason for forming a public-private relationship to build a homeless solution for Portland, Maine, is that the city does not have the funds to build a large structure to deal with its homeless problem, which is a real-world regional homeless problem as the homeless flock to Portland because Portland has at least has some available resources for the homeless, despite many reasons why the homeless should remain in their own communities, but the homeless do not have a voice in the public-private for-profit non-profit relationship that is solving the problem of the homeless in its own interests.

The complex will get its investors and the investors will get their tax shelters and the homeless shelter will be built, providing jobs for the construction industry and 200 cots will be packed into a room to help the homeless people. When all else has failed, sleeping in mega-shelter beats sleeping outside in the freezing weather.

But better solutions can still be developed by other resources.

The housing shortage is increasing everywhere including all the communities surrounding Portland. A young woman I know thinks she is very lucky to have found an apartment to rent, but it is only for the winter. When the warmer weather comes, she will have to find another place to live so that the landlord can rent the place as an Airbnb. If the communities surrounding Portland are going to allow the unregulated proliferation of Airbnb’s, they should at least provide humanistic homeless shelters for those seasonally displaced by Airbnb renters, rather than relying on Portland to solve their homeless problems.

The realtor’s and developers’ solution is to build smaller housing units on smaller plots of land, back to back, wall to wall, if they can get the zoning changes. In the new developer’s utopia, communal public spaces will take the place of spaces for individual use. In Santa Barbara California the University is moving ahead with the draconian dormitory, designed by the 97-year-old billionaire who gifted two million dollars for the project, with the caveat that he gets to design the dorm, and so concentrated wealth buys tiny rooms for students, about the size of a prison cell, with no windows or natural ventilation in a town where there is a student housing shortage and short term rentals just won in court in May. Since there are housing shortages everywhere, it is an excuse advanced by developers and realtors to lower the standard of living everywhere.

And so we need a humanistic resurgence which is already evident and stirring in the Great Resignation.

The humanistic solution to homelessness is to help the homeless person to become a self-sufficient and functioning member of society. That begins with recognizing the homeless person as a human being, not just a unit.

Factories but not cottage industries are allowed in industrial zones with the current reigning culture weaving a dismal dystopian tapestry. When the homeless shelter is inevitably transformed into something else will it become the new workforce housing? Or just another type of industrial warehouse? What sort of industry will choose to move to the neighborhood where a mega-homeless shelter is located?

Jeremiah Bartlett Unsplash

Is a homeless shelter not a residence? In the Portland, Maine opportunity zone, a homeless shelter is a residence in a business, and it is the business aspect that qualifies it to be located in the industrial opportunity zone.

Imagine smaller shelters in an industrial zone for businesses in residence, which first requires imagining neighborhoods that allow businesses in residence, but with the momentum with which remote working move

Portland has a large homeless population because it offers some homeless resources which are scarce in surrounding communities. If every community provided solutions for their homeless, smaller shelters would fill the need. Karmic social justice would be if the Portland shelter found it difficult to fill a higher number of beds than fifty- the limit that Portland for Smaller Shelters wanted.

Imagine if businesses in residence were statutorily formulated as new decentralized opportunity zones.

What if instead of lowering living conditions expectations, we stepped them up a notch and made the working workforce housing model on Martha’s Vineyard a working model for homeless shelters in Maine, utilizing some of the same financial tools put in place by the Island Trust Fund, particularly the short term loans provided by a foundation that allows the Island Trust Fund to readily snap up property when it appears on the market. This is not a government solution. It requires a 501(3)(C) Humanistic Homeless Shelter Housing Trust.

…………………….Continued in Part Two………………….

Nature vs Machine: Will Human Evolution Bifurcate?

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 12:31:00 +0000

As one stream flows deeper into an artificial world, an alternate current follows the way of nature. How will this play out in human evolution?

Michael Dziedzic Unsplash

I wish I could remember what the crystal clear logic of the dream I was waking up out of this morning, was about. It was an epiphany occurring in the realms of consciousness to which my present point of focus has no access, and yet can feel its effects, bubbling up from the depths as momentum transporting crystal clarity, and eluding objectivity.

The previous day I read a marketing article about data analysis. The author portrayed data marketing experts as having the ability to determine with utmost certainty how customers view a company. The companies themselves merely hold beliefs and have no access to the realms of knowledge that data experts will deliver with their algorithm artistry.

I thought of the many questionnaires I have filled out delimited by pre-formatted choices, none capturing what I really feel about the subject, the questions directing the answers.

Next, I started watching a South Korean drama about the executive corporate culture of a search engine company. The main characters were as cold as the drama was boring and I switched to watching something else.

After failing to find anything that retained my interest, I returned to the drama and realized that the cold corporate character was a subject of the story, and the drama became somewhat interesting. Korean dramas often delve into the innermost workings of corporate culture ending with the lead characters running off to the land by the sea to start a small business.

I grew up in a small business in a home, by the sea. It’s a culture hidden in the shadows thrown across the landscape by overreaching corporate power.

Inspired by the Sea, The classic Turned Gull, slip-cast ceramic gull designed by Weston and Brenda Andersen in the 1960s has retained its marketability ever since. Photo by Mackenzie Andersen

I follow the author of the data marketing story on Medium. The author alternatively comes across as a cold corporate executive or an Indie writer screaming to be let out. As interestingly as she screams, she doesn’t act and so the data analysis story is a return to the fold, marketing her skills to the corporate world for the corporate world. She can’t escape. She is at the top of her field. Her skills are impressive but her story reinforced my appreciation that my background, working for a family business, Andersen Design, designing, and crafting hand-made ceramics, is a world where marketing is people to people or business to business and not based on calculated algorithms.

The classic Andersen Design Standing Chipmunk. Everything is made from raw materials and original recipes. Photo by Mackenzie Andersen\

In a world dominated by large global corporate culture, the small enterprise sector often feels like an underground alternate culture, existing outside the metaverse, a secret society, inhabiting an alternate dimension known to the cognoscenti as the natural world.In a world dominated by large global corporate culture, the small enterprise sector often feels like an underground alternate culture, existing outside the metaverse, a secret society, inhabiting an alternate dimension known to the cognoscenti as the natural world.

Inspired by the natural world, Stoneware Puffin by Weston and Brenda Andersen / Photo by Mackenzie Andersen

In my dream, I didn’t need data analysis, because with quantum-clear fuzzy logic I knew that all one needs is the freezing temperature of something or other. I say “something or other” because whatever it was didn’t make it across the bridge to my conscious mind. All I retained was crystal clear stellar clarity about what I cannot recall. It was as simple as Elizabeth Holmes's single drop of blood. Knowing the freezing temperature of whatever it was would bypass the need for extensive and expensive data analysis. Why can’t I remember it now that I am wide-awake? Being that this state of consciousness is called “wide awake” shouldn’t the clarity be greater? Maybe it is the temperature of a single drop of blood, frozen cold, that I need to get superstar board members as Elizabeth Holmes did, for my cause. No need to drain all the blood out of a system. One simple frozen drop of blood will do. Maybe I can find that in a stone, or stoneware- or is it water that one squeezes from a stone? “Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink”- back to that single drop again! One doesn’t need the entire lake, just enough will satisfy one’s needs!

Stoneware Baby Gull is one of the many ceramic birds by Weston and Brenda Andersen / Photo by Mackenzie Andersen.

My parents did not analyze market trends to figure out what to design.
Product development came about as an artistic stream of consciousness, and the results resonated with an audience. It wasn’t a mass global audience but it was a national and international niche market. The production process was used as an art form in which every product was nonfungible-or as we said before cryptology, no two alike, manifesting many variations within a similar spectrum as art imitating the natural world.

That works in a small business environment because the people to people connection in a small business context is human. As an artist one listens to one’s own artistic process to create a product. The end result is classic because the artist channels the collective unconscious that connects humanity.

A one of a kind bowl, slip-cast extra thick by Weston so that he could hand carve into the form to create this modern- primitive design glazed in white and coral glazes by Weston, for Andersen Design, Photography by Mackenzie.

So here we are entering the age of the Metaverse. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is investing its hopes and dreams of staying relevant in virtual reality. The metaverse is interactive entertainment but it is a corporate-controlled environment with speculations that META will sell us digital simulations of things we need or use in the real world to our avatar selves living in virtual reality. That assumes that we can afford a home in the physical world for all the equipment needed to engage in the virtual world. With living spaces becoming smaller and smaller, the metaverse will make cramped living spaces more tolerable. In the metaverse, anyone can experience what it is like to live in an environment with adequate to optimal living space, in their own minds. Will that become the will to make it real in the material world, as coronavirus enlightened and emboldened workers to?

Work is a beautiful thing when it’s purposefully calibrated. We n value their autonomy, self-direction, and worth. We need work for our souls.

In one cultural stream, creativity takes place in the digital dimension, as creating something physical requires space in the physical dimension. In that stream, digital artwork of a one-of-a-kind art object could be documented as an NFT and have more financial value than the physical work…but that observation doesn’t inspire me and so that theory is not likely to be tested.

Tumbler designed by Weston in the 1950s, slip-cast, and decorated by Mackenzie in the 2120s. Slip casting body, glazes, and colors designed by Weston in midcentury made by Mackenzie from raw materials, recalibrated to changing availabilities in the 2120s. Photography by Mackenzie Andersen

Meanwhile, back in the underground alternate reality, aka, the natural world, a hidden society prevails and carries on the traditions of yore. Today the past traditions are being rediscovered. The concept of working at home got its foot in the door as remote working for the large corporate culture, but the transition is only at the beginning of a cultural awakening. The motivating forces of the Great Resignation are potentialities moving in streams of their own making.

Historical alternate cultural movements are being talked about in a new light. Clive Thompson is a writer for NYT mag/Wired; author of “Coders” and “Smarter Than You Think”. He recently wrote about the Luddites. While the Luddites are popularly known for smashing factory machines after trying and failing at dialogue, at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, now, more than two hundred years since, the reason and rationale for their passionate protests are being heard across time in a momentous wave activating the great resignation from the centralized workplace. Luddites are being rebranded!

The Luddites Loved Remote Work
They knew “working from home” meant controlling your hours, the pace of work, and your quality of life

Meanwhile, Inside the metaverse, philosophers pontificate ” What is a human being?”, and, one says, ”A human being is the antithesis of artificial intelligence. A human being is outside of and beyond the digitized world”, and the philosopher coins the word “ether” for human consciousness, an indefinable medium, given a name, to lend it the appearance of a thing, which in the metaverse is a digital thing. A new cutting-edge field emerges dedicated to creating the code that operates the ether.

In my last post as I was composing a story of facts, I was listening to “that music” in the background. “That music” has a name too- it is called Liquid Mind IV by Chuck Wild. The music is aptly named as it does seem to throw one into a liquid mind state, something only known to humans, with the possible exception of quantum computers, but I do not think quantum computers can truly capture a liquid mind state. Humans are to the computer mind as God is to the human mind. Perhaps as the automated mind tries to imitate the human mind, the human mind evolves other dimensions to remain inaccessible to attempts by the data processors to capture it. The human mind becomes more fluid, impossible to pinpoint.

So suddenly while I was listening to Liquid Mind, I veered off into another passing stream and I wrote:

We are living in a remarkable moment, when suddenly those at the roots of society are taking the reigns, without a centralized organizational agent. This cultural awakening can be likened to an emergent evolutionary process that I once read about many years ago. I do not recall the scientific term for it, but it is a form of evolutionary adaptation that spontaneously emerges around the same time in remote locations that apparently have no connection to each other. It is not a case of cause and effect, it is emergence, and as the effect emerges in remote locations as if synchronized, it suggests a state of wholeness is in the works.

And my mind dwelled on the concept of humanity, biological, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, creative beings, How can a machine mind compete with that!

Most talk of evolution focuses on biological evolution but there can be evolutions of the mind and spirit as well. Will human evolution bifurcate into those who evolve by merging with the machine, and an alternate culture that evolves by merging with nature?

If one stream of humanity increasingly relies on external artifice for every aspect of the living experience. while another stream relies on the human mind, spirit, and physical being will two or more variations of the species emerge?

We live in interesting times and it’s not always a curse.

Originally published at https://mackenzieandersen.substack.com on November 2, 2021.

Why are social impact investors trying so hard to defeat smaller shelters for the homeless?

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 18:50:00 +0000

"Social Impact” developers in Portland, Maine seek to squelch a referendum for smaller shelters called for by qualified practitioners with concrete experience in the field.

A large sign says Vote C to support the Homeless, small handmade sign next to it says Untrue! That sign is paid for by developers who want/ Photo by Jess Falero

In the 1970s under Governor Longley, Maine became a centrally managed economy that expanded Maine’s wealth gap and merged, almost seamlessly, the public and private and the non-profit and for-profit economic sectors into one mutually beneficial wealth-concentration & distribution system.

Currently, mutually benefitting factions are coming together once again in hopes of building a mega-shelter for the homeless in a Portland, Maine industrial development district.

In addition to beds for the homeless, the project will include, dining, and locker facilities, as well as offices and an attached health clinic.

The promotion describes the facility as “a new state-of-the-art, one-story, adult Homeless Service Center Project to replace the Oxford Street Shelter.” While the plan offers many beneficial services such as “on-site meals and a wide range of services including health and mental health care, substance abuse treatment, housing assistance, peer support, case management, employment, and more”, it raises the question of why the state of the art for sheltering the homeless, planned during a pandemic, is a sleeping environment consisting of cots lined up in close proximity in two single large rooms, one for men and one for women, situated in an industrial zone next to heavy traffic. Is this really what Portland City Council considers to be “the state of the art” in homeless sheltering?

A bearded homeless man holds up a sign saying "seeking human kindness"Matt Collamer / Unsplash

Nov 2nd- The people decide. What's it gonna be?

On November 2nd, Portland residents will vote for one of three options, The primary consideration is the number of beds that are allowed in an individual shelter. It is not about the number of beds available, it is about how many beds can be crowded together in a single room.

A citizen’s coalition, Smaller Shelters For Portland wants the number of beds to be limited to fifty and rallied to get Option A on the ballot.

The City Councilors led by Belinda Ray added the competing Option B and Option C, as allowed by the city charter, at an August City Council meeting

The City Council Council wants the number of beds to be limited to 150.

The developers want no limitations on the number of beds in a room.

According to Justin Beth of the Maine Greens Poor and Working People’s Caucus, “ There have been contradictory comments from Corporate Counsel, who first stated we could win on a plurality during a City Council Meeting. Corporate Counsel has since stated the Option A will need to win on a majority vote by participating voters.

”Option C is no change to the existing ordinance which would allow for the 200+ shelter that they want to build. We are suggesting they build a similar shelter with the same land footprint, just make it for 50 beds, rather than 200+ beds. They want to move everyone from the homeless shelter on Oxford Street (the Oxford Street Shelter), so they can re-develop the Oxford street neighborhood known as Bayside. There is a lot of profit to be made from other developers in this area and is possibly even a greater driving factor.

If Option A must have a majority to win, is the same true for Option B & C in a three-option vote?

Justin Beth said:

I've heard two different things: If none get 50%, it will go to a run-off voteIf none get 50%, things move forward as the City Council and Developers planned.

However, Since Option C is on the ballot as "Neither of the two (2) proposed Amendments to the Portland City Code above" It is the same as "no change to the existing ordinance" and should be subject to the same bar to win as the other two options.

Ballot Question:

Do you favor one of the two (2) city ordinances summarized below: ‘A’ as proposed by citizen petition; ‘B’ as enacted by the city council; or should both be rejected as provided in ‘C’?

A: This proposed amendment requires all new emergency shelters to be opened 24 hours per day and, except for family and domestic violence shelters, provide shelter to no more than 50 individuals at a time. It adds a requirement for shelter management plans to include a Criminal Trespass Order policy and appeals process for residents. It also removes the requirements for shelters to: provide adequate space for security searches and other assessments; include plans for on-site surveillance and controls for resident behavior and noise levels; provide adequate access to and from METRO service; implement strategies to help guests utilize transit.

B: This proposed amendment requires all new emergency shelters to be opened 24 hours per day and to have adequate indoor space to provide day shelter for all guests. It adds a requirement for shelter management plans to include a clear policy regarding Criminal Trespass Orders. It requires all emergency shelters to provide access to and from METRO service and to implement strategies to help guests use public transit. It requires individual emergency shelters to be located at least 1000 feet from one another, limits the size of individual shelters to a maximum of 150 beds except in situations when a shelter capacity emergency is declared, and limits the total number of individual shelter beds within a 1 mile radius to a maximum of 300. Domestic violence shelters which don’t disclose their locations for safety reasons are exempt from both provisions. The proposed consolidation of the Joe Kreisler Teen Shelter and the Preble Street Teen Center into one facility at 343 Cumberland Avenue is also exempt from the buffer and density provisions.

C: Neither of the two (2) proposed Amendments to the Portland City Code above,

Health care begins with an ability to experience restful sleep. The more strangers sleeping in a room together in close proximity to one another the greater the probability that some among them will disturb the sleep of everyone in the room.

Option B allows three times the number of beds in a room as Option A.

Option C allows an unlimited number of beds in a room.

The relationship of restful sleep to well-being is so elemental that a facility that fails to provide an environment for restful sleep while investing in mental and physical health care services throws into question the sanity of the systemic cultural context.

Another candidate for the State of the Art in Homeless Sheltering Award

There is another solution advocated by Smaller Shelters for Portland, a coalition committed to advancing positive solutions for addressing homelessness in Portland.

The coalition is made up of an assortment of people, most of whom either work with homeless people or have been homeless themselves. They are qualified practitioners with concrete experience in the field.

I endorse smaller shelters solution as the real state-of-the-art solution because it is premised on humanism.- author.

The Real State of the Art Solution presented by the Coalition for Smaller Shelters for the Homeless:

ALTERNATIVES: Everyone agrees that the City’s Oxford Street Shelter is overcrowded and inadequate. But that doesn’t mean we should settle for replacing it with another mega-shelter in a different location. Better options are available. We need our City leaders to explore them

To replace the 150 bed Oxford Street Shelter (OSS) plus overflow for 50 people (200 beds):
40 beds: Preble Street’s new 40-bed Wellness Shelter is scheduled to open this winter in Bayside.
30 beds: Preble Street’s planned new women’s shelter. Preble Street is currently in the final push to raise the needed funds to move forward with a new women’s shelter in the Greater Portland area.
50 beds: proposed new city shelter on Riverside Street.
40–50 beds at OSS or other suitable property OR 40–50 hotel vouchers.
40+ beds: Institute a robust diversion & prevention program. (Cumberland County Regional Hub is currently being implemented; plus, a City program is underway) City staff predicts they will divert 20% of people from needing shelter; the State Plan predicts preventing 40% of people from needing shelter. (40–80 beds not needed)

You can read in-depth about this solution on the Smaller Shelters for Portland website.

Humanism is a very old idea

Humanism is surging today in the phenomena branded as The Great Resignation, a rising protest by the workforces against the hierarchical order of corporate culture. As U-Ming Lee put it succinctly in The Great Resignation: Why Millions Are Now Fed Up of Corporate Bullshit

If you’re a leader of a company and want to prevent your employees from joining the Great Resignation, here’s a simple piece of advice for you. Stop treating your people like shit!

In a truly humanistic society, humanism extends to every person, most especially the most forlorn. In reading impact investment talking points on the websites of the networked developers against smaller shelters, “stakeholders” are delimited by the workforces and “affordable housing”, excluding low-income housing and shelters for the homeless.

Come on guys, this is humanity! Can we agree that everybody is a stakeholder! Aren’t we all our brother’s keeper?

We are living in a remarkable moment, when suddenly those at the roots of society are taking the reigns, without a centralized organizational agent. This cultural awakening can be likened to an emergent evolutionary process that I once read about many years ago. I do not recall the scientific term for it, but it is a form of evolutionary adaptation that spontaneously emerges around the same time in remote locations that have no connection to each other. It is not a case of cause and effect, it is emergence, and as the effect emerges in remote locations as if synchronized, it suggests a state of wholeness is in the works.

A hand reaching up meets and connects with a hand reaching down./ Austin Kehmeier / Unsplash

Ok, that was strange! As I was writing that previous thought I was listening to that hypnotic music again, that music that sounds like the tides of the universe rolling onto the shore. Its effect on the listener is to temporarily lapse into a state of mind that we once called “trippy”.

The Developers

The developers Andrew Sigfridson SIOR, Managing Director The Boulos Company, and Developers Collaborative Predevelopment LLC have donated $20000.00 each (totaling $40,000) in the Portland Cares-Vote C, Political Action Committee. It buys advertising in the Portland Press Herald.

The Portland Cares-Vote C political action committee was formed to promote unlimited beds in a single room.

The developer’s role is to finance and build the facility, not to operate it. One might ask, why do developers care how many beds are in a room? If one believed that social impact rhetoric that comes with the territory, one would say because they care about bettering the human condition, but they are on the wrong side to apply that explanation when the human condition is extended to include the most forlorn, which is exactly the case in the issue of homeless warehouses versus smaller shelters. The answer lies in profit and Oxford Street, ripe for gentrification and the location of the present homeless facility.

Kevin Bunker is a long-standing principle in Developers Collaborative Predevelopment LLC.

In its proposal for developing the homeless shelter, Developers Collaborative Predevelopment LLC (“Developer”) describes itself as a “Financial Tool Expertise for Public-Private Partnerships (PPP)” possessing an encyclopedic and nuanced understanding of the specific financial tools”,” a leader in the use of tax credits, TIFs, and layering capital from a myriad of sources to achieve public and private development goals”.

The Developers Collaborative features social impact Kumbaiyah rhetoric on its website but its actions tell a story of profits over people.

In 2013, the City of Portland sold a historic three-story school for $1 to Bunker to develop the school into apartments.

Coastal Enterprises, Inc, a non-profit community “social impact” development organization helped Developers Collaborative finance the project. The Developers Collaborative was awarded federal tax credits to reduce the expense of the renovation, reportedly costing $7 million

On Jan. 17, 2020, amid the covid crisis, all tenants of the former Nathan Clifford School, mostly Seniors and working-class families, were notified that their leases would not be renewed. Today the former Nathan Clifford School is a condominium complex called Nathan Clifford Residences with price tags for the largest units priced at over half a million dollars.

When asked to comment on this turn of events, city officials were nowhere to be found until the next year when the city awarded the Developers Collaborative with the contract to build the homeless warehouse.

When the city gave Bunker’s team the property in 2013, there was little public discussion about the apartments becoming condos. John Egan, the chief investment officer for Coastal Enterprises Inc, said he’s “pretty sure there was always a plan for [the units] to be sold eventually.”

Egan added, “I’m not sure who might have been in on those conversations, but it wasn’t any kind of a secret.” According to Egan, the use of federal tax credits required Bunker’s company to wait five years before the apartments could be sold. “I’m not surprised that at this point they’re starting to sell units,” Egan said. High-Profile Portland Developer Evicting Renters During Crisis to Sell Condos

Coastal Enterprise Inc was fully cognizant of the future plans to boot out the apartment dwellers and make a profit in the condominium market as it assisted the Developers Collaborative in procuring federal tax incentives. Furthermore, CEI’s chief investment officer speculated that everybody involved knew of the eventual plan to sell the development as condominiums.

A tent on the side of the street with an elegant building in the background.Gustavo Sanchez / Unsplash

Andrew Sigfridson is a Partner and the Managing Director of the Boulos Company, a commercial real estate brokerage and consulting firm with offices in Portland, ME, and Portsmouth, NH. He is also Managing Director of CEI-Boulos Capital Management and a Principal and Partner with Kevin Bunker at Developers Collaborative on the proposed Homeless Service Center Project.

Andrew Sigfridson also donated $20,000.00 to The Portland Cares-Vote C political action committee in the interest of stopping the small shelters effort from winning a majority.

Coastal Enterprises' reputation is built on a storied commitment to sustainable communities and social justice. In 1997, CEI was still perceived to be the social justice poster child.

Sustainable Development in Practice: A Case Study Analysis of Coastal Enterprises, Inc.’s Experience

Carla Dickstein, Diane Branscom, John Piotti, and Elizabeth Sheehan

This paper argues that CED practitioners have a great deal to share in the current sustainability dialogue because of CED’s historic commitment to social justice and equity and practitioners’ concrete experience in the field.
This paper examines sustainable development from the specific experience of Coastal Enterprises, Inc. (CEI), a CED practitioner.

CED’s primary contribution to sustainable development is its historic emphasis on practitioners playing a key role in building economically sustainable communities and acting as the conscience for social justice and equity for marginalized groups (Phillips 1993; Shaffer 1994; Harrison and Vietorisz 1970). CED emerged from racial and economic inequality in both urban and rural areas. It focuses on economic opportunities for low-income communities and individuals. It puts the values of equity, social justice, and grassroots empowerment squarely on the table as part of any sustainable development effort. In CED, equity and social justice must be included in the underlying values of sustainable development. Without them, there can be neither political nor community sustainability. JSTOR Sustainable Development in Practice: A Case Study Analysis of Coastal Enterprises, Inc.’s Experience

Well, you know things change, incrementally, by design, over time, as the working-class apartments were planned all along to become condominiums with a little help from networked interests, so did CEI change from being an organization supporting the grassroots to being a charter member of the public-private-for-profit-non-profit wealth concentration industry.

The non-transparent non-profit for-profit relationship.

Most people understand that a nonprofit is limited to non-commercial proposes as stated below by the Foundation Group:

A nonprofit corporation is formed to carry out a non-commercial purpose, whether that be religious, educational, charitable, scientific or other qualifying purpose. It is prohibited from acting in a manner that results in private inurement (profit) to individuals. Who Really Owns a Nonprofit?

However, somewhere in time, while sliding down on the slippery slope, it came to be that non-profits can have for-profit subsidiaries, structured as separate entities operating by a different set of rules. Around the time that the 2017 opportunity zones were enacted, the Boulbos Company formed a non-profit-for-profit relationship with CEI, which is listed on its website as CEI-Bulbos Capital Management, but little more can be publicly known about what goes on in CEI-Boulbos Company interactions.

As the name suggests it is a merging of non-profit and for-profit capital. I downloaded the annual report from the state but the only additional information to be learned, which is already obvious from the website, is that CEI-Boulbos Company is a foreign corporation, meaning it can invest outside the state of Maine, and indeed it does, following the trail of the national 2017 opportunity zones.

In its annual report, CEI makes no mention of its subsidiaries. Subsidiaries of other nonprofits, if the parent group files, do not have to file a 990 report. Whatever takes place behind the for-profit subsidiary name is a black hole in the information field perceptible to the public. This is legal with the IRS as explained on the American Bar Association website, which describes the many advantages of the non-profit for-profit relationship:

Public Disclosure and Perception

While the existence of a controlled subsidiary and certain transactions with that subsidiary will be disclosed on the nonprofit organization’s publicly available annual Form 990, the subsidiary’s activities will not be subject to the same level of disclosure as it would if the activity was conducted directly by the nonprofit organization (for instance, with respect to the subsidiary’s income and expenditures and possibly the compensation it pays individuals, depending on what other roles the recipients have with respect to the nonprofit organization.) The nonprofit also may prefer a clear separation between its charitable activities and any for-profit endeavors, to avoid mission drift or a perception that its charitable work has been tainted or overshadowed by profit-making objectives. American Bar Association

It is possible to download the last three years of a non-profit’s 990 filings, available on Guidestar, but it is a very complicated filing. I searched online for information identifying where the subsidiary information is to be found but very little information is available. There is barely a mention of it as if the subsidiary exists in name only, but if that were true in practice there would be no point in forming such a subsidiary.

According to the CEI-Boulos Capital Management website, the company is “a boutique real estate investment fund management company focused on delivering both competitive financial returns and social impact. The company serves banks, family offices, and other institutional investors, and has a national scope. Areas of the company’s specialization include Opportunity Zones and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). CEI-Boulos Capital Management”

Developers Collaborative is the company assigned with developing the financing for the homeless warehouse (shelter). It is connected to Boulbos company through the principal Andrew Sigfridson, a Partner and the Managing Director of The Boulos Company, specializing in opportunity zones.

The planned homeless shelter is in an opportunity zone. Cato Institute calls the 2017 Opportunity Zones “Welfare for the Wealthy”

The “opportunity” in the opportunity zones are reserved for investors, as explained on sites such as 1031 Crowdfunding with its byline “ A Qualified Opportunity Fund involves investing in an IRS-identified Opportunity Zone, an economically disadvantaged or distressed area.” This sort of announcement is typically followed by a celebration of investor benefits with a nod to economically disadvantaged communities sandwiched in between investor benefits and presented in generalized terms compared to the very specific terms detailing investor benefits, as in the example from 1031 Crowdfunding below:

Potential Investor Benefits

Sizable tax advantage For those who invest in Opportunity Zones, they will be eligible for a 10% step-up in basis after holding the investment for over 5 years.

Benefits communities This option delivers invaluable resources to economically struggling communities that need it most, contributing to the area’s growth.

Broad investment criteria You can defer taxes on capital gains from several asset classes such as: multifamily, self-storage, hospitality, diversified portfolios + more.

Developers Collaborative Predevelopment Inc says “We’re not like most developers”

At Developers Collaborative our core values are based on the belief that a developer has great responsibility. The ways that we intervene in the build environment will affect peoples’ lives for a long time. We feel all developers owe it to their respective communities to do more than just make a piece of land or building generate the highest short term financial return possible.

We make an extra effort to listen to neighbors and employ creative solutions in order to make successful places, employ a community-based approach to planning and building our projects, and frequently participate in public-private partnerships to achieve public goals. Developers Collaborative About Page (emphasis by author)

But Developers Collaborative draws the line of the communities it serves and hears at affordable housing, and senior housing, excluding tenants of low-income housing and usually excluding the homeless, but, in this case, the tenants to be housed by the city are the homeless with the city being the direct tenant of the private developers. Are the tenants of the tenant also stakeholders? As an opportunity for economic development, what is the first thing a person needs to pursue better economic status if not a restful night’s sleep?

Neither the city nor its private partner is listening to the grassroots community directly involved with and addressing homelessness. The public-private partnership stands in opposition to what is proposed by those who are directly interfacing with the homeless population and advocating the proposal that is the real state-of-the-art solution in a humane society.

This is a classic example of how top-down central management works, classically failing to connect to the core of humanity. (author)

So it's up to the people of Portland. Do they want to be the city that warehouses its homeless or do they want to be a city of humanism, developing new models of care that treat every life with kindness and consideration?

A small boy looks at the camera with stress on his face./ Haithem Ferd / Unsplash

The Future of Work is Remote So What Then is the Future of Housing and Community Development?

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 14:31:00 +0000

Reality check on the rush to develop large-scale workforce housing on the Boothbay Peninsula and Beyond!

Hongkong version of the coveted large-scale workforce housing for the coveted large-scale employers. Skull Kat / Unsplash

There is a rather strange write-up by Joseph Carpentier in the local Maine paper, the Boothbay Register, Local utilities say large-scale housing development a non-issue. Strange because the story does not identify half the parties involved. It seems uncharacteristic of Joseph Carpentier, a factual and informative reporter, to arbitrarily take up the cause of large scale workforce housing and put together a story identifying players in the Region Water District and the Boothbay Region Refuse Disposal District and announcing that there is no overload threat to the sewage systems from “large scale workforce housing developments” without so much as identifying what “large scale” entails, where it is intended to be located, or the identity of housing groups that are “looking for paths to homeownership and rentals for the Boothbay peninsula’s workforce “

The absence of identity for any organizations, on the peninsula, calling for “large scale workforce housing”, hints at intentional concealment, and begs the question: Why?

The article also does not identify a “large scale peninsula workforce employer” that is suffering due to a lack of “large scale workforce housing”, on the peninsula.

Given the symbiotic relationship of the large scale employer to large scale workforce housing, it is inadequate to measure water and sewage needs of large scale workforce housing while not including the requirements of the large scale employer, which cannot be known if said employer does not currently exist.

If such a largescale workforce employer exists, It is commonplace that the employer’s voice is part of the conversation. There have been rumblings from the dining and accommodation industries, but not for lack of housing. Even Paul LePage complained about Trump restricting the J-1 Visas needed by the immigrants that work in the dining and accommodation industries where the LePage family enjoys summer employment in one of the most popular and well-paying restaurants in town, that closes two days a week for lack of a cook.

The dining and accommodation industry has worked out its own workforce housing arrangements long ago, otherwise, the system would not be working as well as it once did before Trump restricted the visas, so the dining and accommodations industry cannot account for a “large scale workforce” that needs the “large scale workforce housing”.

The absence of an identifiable large scale employer leads to the conclusion that the call for building large-scale workforce housing is driven not by the need for large-scale workforce housing, but by the desire of realtors and developers to build production housing in response to a current boom in real estate sales whereby the industry wants to make as much money per square foot as it can. The industry wants to change the town ordinances by radically reducing the land plot size that a building occupies, even reducing the plot size to the point that townhouses can be built wall to wall like city blocks dropped into a rural surrounding on land maintained by central management.

It is because realtors and developers want to build production housing to increase profits from the real estate boom, that the narrative is spun as a need for large scale workforce housing, which subsequently calls for large scale employers, and then “incentives” enter the public dialogue, putting the region in competition with large scale communities- and the answer to that, in this train of thought, is to fund the beginning stage of a fifty million dollar school system, which under Industrial Partnerships is one and the same thing as workforce training, starting in elementary school and continuing on up the career climbing ladder. Given the number of subsidies that an educational system, which is at once an industrial training center for state-favored industries, can bring in, there is a lot of competition among communities for the location of such centers. Is the thinking behind the fifty million dollar school that by having the plan already in the works, and more importantly, partially paid for, will give the Boothbay Peninsula the competitive edge for government educational subsidies, and if so, is that fair to the rest of the state?

On the Boothbay Peninsula, prior to the real estate boom, caused by the urban to rural migration, the year-round employees were not given consideration in an ordinance structure that gives away affordable year-round housing to the AirBnB’s. Regional developer, Paul Coulombe lead the way in escalating the costs per night to stay in an AirBnB on the Boothbay peninsula. With AirBmB’s totally unregulated, it is nearly impossible to find year-round rentals on the peninsula, other than in housing developments designed for specific social-economic strata.

Missing from the housing and economic development discussion is an awareness of fundamental transformations undergoing within large-scale workforces, which is the rapidly evolving shift away from large office headquarters to remote working. In central management, workforces are treated en masse as negotiable instruments of trade. Until coronavirus put remote working on the fast track, the individual voices of the workers were not part of the public deal-making that takes place between partners in public-private relationships. Now change is well underway. Much of the workforce does not want to return to headquarters.

The Atlantic on Medium: Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future by Ed Zitron

Last fall, 94 percent of employees surveyed in a Mercer study reported that remote work was either business as usual or better than working in the office, likely because it lacks the distractions, annoyances, and soft abuses that come with co-workers and middle managers. Workers are happier because they don’t have to commute and can be evaluated mostly on their actual work rather than on the optics-driven albatross of “office culture,” which is largely based on either the HR handbook or the pieces of the HR handbook your boss chooses to ignore.

Taking the transformation within the workforces into consideration, for a small rural peninsula, there is no need for “large scale employees” or “large scale workforce housing”. There is instead a need for single-family homes with enough space to have an office or other type of business in a home, where a creative and productive lifestyle with a healthy work-life balance has room to grow. The same sentiment that is driving the workforce to want to work in the privacy of their own homes will lead them to prefer a home NOT situated in a centrally managed housing project with smaller and smaller spaces in the interest of real estate profits.

The workforce is voicing its will to move away from the centrally managed corporate culture which is reinforced by “workforce” housing projects. The workforce wants to move away from distractions and to be in an environment where the individual has control over their own work-life balance. Contrary to central management negotiating jobs for workforce blocks, the new workforce is becoming empowered to make its own individualized choices about where it works and it lives. Housing developments are not in tune with the emergent paradigm They are a fit to the paradigm of large-scale workforces confined in corporate headquarters with many desks all lined up without walls, an albatross from the era of central management, both public and private which is thankfully receding into the past. The silver lining of the corona cloud is that virus hibernation has proven that remote working works!

Boothbay is heralding itself as a leader in municipal corporatism by entering into a public-private relationship with Spectrum so that the town, which was rated as “overserved” in its broadband capabilities by the state, can gain greater internet service.

For years, Boothbay leadership has been pushing for installing tax-payer-funded fiber optics cable. The new public-private relationship between the town of Boothbay and Spectrum will provide a hybrid coaxial and fiber broadband. Super-fast fiber broadband means that any desk job can be done remotely. So why does Boothbay need twentieth-century “large scale workforce housing” if it is pushing for twenty-first-century fiber-optics cable that changes the future of work?

The announcement by the Water and Refuse experts in the Boothbay Register article is followed by this cryptic statement:

local utilities are just waiting for the word. Boothbay Harbor Sewer District Superintendent Chris Higgins, Boothbay Region Water District General Manager Jon Ziegra and Boothbay Region Refuse Disposal District Manager Steve Lewis all said residential expansion would have little to no effect on daily operations. ( emphasis by author)

What is “the word” that the local utilities await and from whom is “the word” coming? Does the follow-up sentence offer a clue? Is the answer found in another recent article in the Boothbay Register, also by Joseph Carpentier, in which evaluation authority over Boothbay Harbor ordinance planning is being granted to the Lincoln County Planning Commission?

LCRPC to spearhead Boothbay Harbor housing, ordinance review

Boothbay Harbor enlisted Lincoln County Regional Planning Commission May 3 for an ordinance review and socioeconomic evaluation relating mainly to housing. The town issued a request for proposals March 6 and LCRPC responded April 2. The two parties discussed a reorganization of priorities April 27 and a revision was presented May 3. Lincoln County commissioners approved the contract May 18.

The town leaders generally hire outside authorities bypassing community involvement in decisive processes, all legal in Maine, The only way for the residences of a community to protect their own decision-making authority is to form a town charter that requires town planners to be residences of the community and/or to require the hiring of outside consultants to be approved by a municipal referendum.

An examination of the language used to assert the housing needs, of a particular character, uses the circular method of reasoning, which appears to be what is at work here. The reasoning goes: “We need large scale workforce housing to attract large scale corporations who will hire large scale workforces who want to live on this peninsula so that they will shop and wine and dine in our own community.”

The community leaders make much to do about the fact that those employed by one of the Peninsula’s prized employers, Bigelow Labs, do not live on the peninsula but instead commute from other areas where it is more affordable to live in a rural quality single-family home, surrounded by one’s own plot of nature. Why would employees want that when they can live in city block-styled urban living, designed by central management, on the peninsula? Is living a more gracious and individual lifestyle off the peninsula worth the commute? Not according to the world view of Boothbay’s current leading classes, who base their pressing need for “large scale workforce housing” on the concept that Boothbay will attract large corporate headquarters. However, speculatively, plan B is if the large scale employers do not show up, the “large scale workforce housing” might make a boon town of “short-term rentals” aka Air B&B’s, but that will only work if the Trump-era restrictions on J-1 Visas are reversed so that the there can continue to be a seasonal workforce of immigrants for the region to import to provide the wining and dining services to attract the tourist set.

There is room for hope in interpreting the tone of the article about “a reorganization of our priorities” in words spoken by LCRPC’s county planner Emily Rabbe:

LCRPC’s county planner Emily Rabbe

Whether or not the 2015 goals and town code match may be irrelevant since the COVID-19 pandemic has caused people to reevaluate their housing desires, said by LCRPC’s county planner Emily Rabbe in LCRPC to spearhead Boothbay Harbor housing, ordinance review

We hope to see that conversation broaden before the target date for the reorganization of existing resident’s priorities to be considered by the Town of Boothbay Harbor in May 2022,

Originally published at https://www.newsbreak.com.

No Plan? Or Just Not Saying? Boothbay's Unfunded Fifty-Million-Dollar School. Time to Visualize An Alternative Way.

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 22:12:00 +0000

Comparing Centralized and Decentralized Development Strategies for Future Culture and Economies.

Hannah Joshua Unsplash

In the recent Boothbay Register write-up about Boothbay's fifty-million-dollar school project, school board member Bruce MacDonald commented on the missing discussion pertaining to education.

In a Nov 2020 article in the Boothbay Register, a discussion about education was initiated by Lance Whitehead, of Lavallee Brensinger Architects, the same architects who were recently selected to design the master plan.

Quoting – Lance Whitehead, of Lavallee Brensinger Architects from that article:

“We wanted to create some sort of biophilic design as part of any solution ... Future driven school with guiding principles that are community based education, economically viable, social-emotional learning environments for multi-age groups, future-proofing as much as possible ... and really making it unique for your local resources”

So let's talk about the future and let's include the alternate paths that Boothbay, and beyond, might take going forward. Let's think carefully about the choices we make now and act with our eyes wide open. The mystery of how an unfunded fifty million dollar project can be so aggressively advanced is fair game for speculation, as money doesn't magically materialize out of thin air and so it is reasonable to suspect a plan exists that isn't being shared with the public. Why would Boothbay leaders just blindly take on a fifty-million-dollar project with no plans to fund it?

The proposed fifty-million-dollar school is the singular option under consideration in the public forum. Alternate views do not get a hearing as the forces behind the unfunded project are pushing a massive cultural transformation on the community. as if it is the only possible option.

Museums are also institutions serving educational and economic development functions. Museums were recommended for the region in the Camoin Report, the seventy-nine-thousand dollar plan contracted from remote New York consultants as a design for the future of the Boothbay Region by the Joint Economic Development Council of Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor- NOT "making it unique for your local resources". The Camoin Report recommends that the region highlight its history, a proposal that actually DOES make it unique to local resources!

I have a vision. The words above by Mr, Whitehead could be describing it. Every word in the quoted paragraph fits like a glove.

Once I tried to present a museum concept to the so-called economic development council but I might as well have been talking to a brick wall. In command economies, the people serve as instruments of the state and not the other way around. In command economies, the public does not initiate ideas unless they are designated private partners of the centrally managed state. "Do not speak unless spoken to!". I was once told, by one of Boothbay's "public service organizations". that I should not speak to the Joint Economic Development Council of Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor until I had attended their meetings, silently, for a year, to show my respect. What country am I in, I wondered.

I submit that the fifty million dollar school, should it ever materialize, will serve as an instrument of Maine's command economy. The words "making it unique for your local resources", do not apply to a command economy. A command economy is about top-down control. Herein I will present that case and introduce my alternative educational and economic development community concept, which has the advantage of not being funded on the public dime but does require accommodating ordinances, and community collaboration in bringing together a board.

I nicknamed my alternative plan "Learn Farm" because, in a dream, I passed by a sign that said "Learn Farm", as my car was headed toward Boothbays newly constructed political roundabout blocking passage on the main throughway. The only way to get through the obstruction, I mused was to scale up into another orbit and land on the ground on the other side.

The school board considered plans presented by five architects, competing to design for the only option on the table, and then selected the architectural firm that had been working on a master plan since 2019, as documented in previous write-ups in the Boothbay Register. The strange timeline in which the winner of the competition had been working on the master plan all along suggests that the contest was only a formality.

Developer Paul Coulombe pledged to pay for the design but failed to materialize the two and a half million dollars on schedule. It seems that phase of the funding plan was not "future proofed".

In my alternate vision, Instead of a fifty-million-dollar school, there is a 501(3)(c) non-profit Andersen Design Museum of American Designer-Craftsmen, set up as a fiscal sponsor for independently owned designer craftsmen studios, of any discipline, that can be attached to or in a home. Fiscal sponsorship would allow the independent studios, anywhere in the USA, to apply for non-profit funding opportunities as free enterprise entities. Zoning laws would have to be changed to permit growth potential for businesses in the home. Current Boothbay ordinances restrict home businesses to a very small size limiting their growth. Establishing home-business-friendly ordinances would also encourage all types of remote working which is a growing trend in coronavirus times, "Future-protecting" is what it is called in Mr; Whitehead's words. That requires listening to the sounds of many voices. Hear! Hear! The workforce is mad and doesn't want to take it anymore!

Museums have traditionally served educational and economic development functions, very similar to what Mr. Whitehead describes.

There are non-profit foundations that exist just to fund real estate for museum purposes.

My family business, Andersen Design, is a designer-craftsmen business established in 1952, and recognized in our industry for creating its own identity in the craft and design world. We are, definitively, a local resource. Museums love history, so Andersen Design's name recognition and long roots are assets when applying for funding opportunities. First, we must formulate aboard, the hard part in a closed community. but a closed community would greatly benefit by opening itself up. "Open for business" is more than a slogan. Take it literally. Try it on for size!

I have a lawyer who will help with the legal process of creating the nonprofit but I need to find three persons to serve on the board and as directors in order to be ready to move ahead with forming the non-profit.

The main reason, why I would like to locate at least part of the network on the peninsula, is because I grew up here and it is my home, and it is also where Andersen Design was born and so there is that historical connection. I believe my vision is the more sensible vision for the Boothbay peninsula with its irreplaceable historical culture and its fragile water supplies than is the vision centered around the fifty million dollar school system, with no apparent plan to pay for it, and which might require a radical increase in population density to justify its expenditure, a population expansion beyond what our local water supplies can sustain. I lack a conventional local resource wherein I can present my vision, but Newsbreak, coming in on another orbit. is an option, where, from time to time, my vision can incrementally unfold.

In this post. I am letting the world know who I am in this community and that I have an alternate vision that serves the same function as described by Mr. Whitehead's words. My vision is not intended to be a solution to everything. However, it is compatible with the new remote working movement and the workers who are protesting returning to an unproductive office environment after having experienced what it is like to work from home. Mr. Whitehead speaks of "social-emotional learning environments for multi-age groups", which describes a business in a home and includes the emotions currently being expressed by corporate workers who are being told they must return to the office. Are emotions processed better in small groups of closely related people- or by central management in large institutional settings? On blogging portals, remote workers are writing about discovering that they are more productive in less time when working at home which allows more time for the work/life balance.

Remote work is the wave of the future and one that could work very well on the peninsula if the peninsula would stop trying to stop the growth of home businesses and open up the growth-restrictive ordinances to allow home businesses, the mainstay of a traditional "quality" rural lifestyle, to realize their own growth potential.

Read Mr. Whithead's words again and visualize as you read that Mr. Whitehead is not talking about a fifty-million-dollar public institution but a community of home businesses of various types and you will see that Mr. Whitehead's words fit a community of home businesses perfectly, each one representing a "team", and conceptualize that having a business in a home, not just a rental apartment, but a productive business, makes the home more affordable while creating opportunities for others, and making communities more inter-relatable.

A community of small home-based enterprises and a fifty-million-dollar school represent diametrically opposed political philosophies. One takes us further down the road of a centrally managed society. The other decentralizes. One system is managed from the top-down and the other grows from the roots upward- or outward to fill the middle space.

Whether it will ever be possible to have a middle economy on the Boothbay Peninsula, or anywhere, is the question of the times, but allowing for businesses in a home gives the middle class a better chance, not as "the workforce", which sounds like a collective pawn in the game, a term connoting an instrument of a state-driven agenda, but as grassroots entrepreneurs who also employ workers. The new opportunity zone of the future is the business in a home.

Now consider that If one applies the above description of the future of education to a centrally managed school system, it describes a public training program for large corporations, as is provided in the Maine Industrial partnerships Act of 2014 in which public education is co-ordinated with the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, Public Law 113-128, and is repurposed as workforce training.

The Federal Law Summary

An act to amend the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 to strengthen the United States workforce development system through innovation in, and alignment and improvement of, employment, training, and education programs in the United States, and to promote individual and national economic growth, and for other purposes.

These words express the intention to align the interests of business with public education, using the public education system as industrial training. Instead of educating individuals, the school is training a workforce for industries that the state picks as the winners for public subsidization. It means that the people serve the government rather than the government serving the people.

When one reads some of the many blog posts protesting the call by large corporations for remote workers to return to the office, one can see that the workers are very much aware of being the instruments of the companies and emotionally do not like it! They are stirred by the experience of remote working to live their lives in a manner more aligned with serving purposes of their own.

The Maine Industrial Partnerships Act established that workforce training will be implemented at the level of secondary education

§3304. Industry partnerships

1. Objectives. The objectives of an industry partnership are to:

D. Help educational and training institutions align curricula and programs to industry demand, particularly for high-skill occupations; [PL 2013, c. 368, Pt. FFFFF, §1 (NEW).]

E. Foster and strengthen relationships between and among education programs working to address the needs of related industry sectors; [PL 2013, c. 368, Pt. FFFFF, §1 (NEW).]

F. Facilitate relationships, remove barriers and leverage and align resources between participating departments and agencies of State Government and employers working to address the needs of related industry sectors; [PL 2013, c. 368, Pt. FFFFF, §1 (NEW).]

G. Inform and collaborate with the career and technical education centers, the boards of the local workforce investment areas designated pursuant to the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, Public Law 113-128, youth councils, business-education partnerships, secondary and postsecondary educational institutions, parents and career counselors for the purpose of addressing the challenges of connecting disadvantaged adults and youth to careers; [PL 2017, c. 110, §31 (AMD).] ( emphasis mine)

The Industrial Partnerships Act was passed under Governor Paul LePage, who just took out his papers to run as Maine's first third-term governor. LePage also sponsored and signed the Major Business Headquarters Expansion Act which is like the Pine Tree Zone on steroids and only available to businesses that have national and global locations. A business that is only located in Maine need not apply. Mr. Lepage embraces the global world order. Paul LePage and Paul Coulombe are long-time friends.

It is a given that the secondary school system serves multi-ages and so it is curious why Mr. Whitehead needed to say so. Considering that technology is moving so fast that one can train for a career today and that career may become obsolete in a decade or two, workers need retraining at any age. The manner in which public education has been incrementally transformed to serve as workforce training, for the public-private state's "targeted sector", extends the age limit of public education, which is becoming increasingly undifferentiated from workforce training.

It is important to be aware that the University of Maine is at the center of the state's educational system and that the University claims ownership of intellectual property rights of even uncompensated individuals who use the publicly financed University of Maine facilities or receive services, even paid services from the University. The concept that intellectual property rights can be claimed based on ownership of facilities or providing a service is a tenant of communist philosophy. The University of Maine has entrenched a minor in Marxist and Socialist Studies since at least 2004 and in 2013 sold a piece of its self to the Confucious Institute, while nowhere in the entirety of the Maine public school system is the Maine Constitution being taught.

The University of Maine officially closed its Confucious Institute in June of 2021 but retains a relationship with the Dongbei University of Finance and Economics in Dalian, China, The Confucius Institute is reputed to have ties to the Chinese Communist Party. The same is not said about the Dongbei University, but China is all about central management. It is unclear how much has actually changed with the announced closing of the Confucius Institute:

SM will continue to offer Chinese language courses and plans to keep a connection with the Dongbei University of Finance and Economics in Dalian, China, through a direct partnership, said Dan Demeritt, spokesperson for the University of Maine System. USM had partnered with Dongbei to establish the institute. USM closing institute funded by Chinese government

If Boothbay works with Industrial partnerships, is the plan to have the price tag capitalized by the state to function as the next state "development authority" via the fifty-million dollar secondary school-workforce-training center? Other state development authorities, such as the three former military bases, are chartered as municipalities serving as "instruments of the state". If a fifty-million-dollar school on the Boothbay Peninsula, were to be financed by the state, and/or become a secondary school extension of the University of Maine, what will the terms be, and what will the small print say?

It is speculation on my part that this is the gamble being taken. I have nothing to support it except that there is a fifty-million-dollar school being pushed on the peninsula with no apparent way to fund it. There must be a backstory or else local leadership has surely gone mad!.

Where is the "future proofing"?

Is Newsbreak Just Mainstream Central or is my local community too small for them?

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Fri, 28 May 2021 15:11:00 +0000

Funny, I thought Newsbreak and Substack Local would be the voices of the people!

photo-1610527976250-b55b10541342 by Jorge Maya Unsplash

I started blogging around 2007 because I was tired of the one-dimensional mainstream news in my state and local community and of not having a voice anywhere in anything. My local newspaper, The Boothbay Register features blog columns but I do not approach them, knowing that I am too off-the-grid for publication in any local mainstream media, and I like my freedom to tell it as I see it.

To begin with, I read the bills and the statutes. There seems to be an unwritten law that mandates that one is only permitted to read bills and statutes if one is certified by the authorities to do so. That is an effect of living in a centrally managed state. We all have our assigned spots on the grid, whether the cell fits us or not, we are assigned to it and are expected to stay with its boundaries, but I do not do that, in part because I was born and raised off the grid in a business in a home that designed and handcrafted ceramics.

An independent lifestyle, producing a line of ceramics as a business in a home. The Salad Bowl with the natural brown tree pattern is a classic. Photo by author.

So I have gone through a long tug of war, which I appeared to have won, with my local newspaper, just to NOT have my comments deleted and otherwise messed around with. No one from the grid understands why anyone, not authorized by the grid, would be reading the statutes. At one point the editor of my local newspaper asked me who I was, implying that I did not live in the region where I was born and raised and my family started a well-known, but off-the-grid business, Andersen Design of Maine. Andersen Design is known nationally and internationally, but I do not know if the extent of our business is known in my local community, where we are just a business in a home, or were once before we lost our historic Mansard style home and it was bulldozed over and replaced with what appears to be a city apartment building without any front doors. One must enter the replacement structure through garage doors and a long tunnel to get to the “master suite” as the real estate agent called it, as the structure also contains two studio apartments for the “workforce”, another popular real estate term, these days. The contemporary marketing language is indeed very telling.

I started studying the Maine economic development statutes around 2009 after encountering central management in the course of conducting our business. I uncovered a history that begins in 1968 with an act passed by the federal government of the United States, The United States Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1968, Public Law 90–577i, a design to centrally manage the entire economy of the United States through wealth redistribution. The federal government met its co-ordinating partner in Maine in Governor Longley, who centralized Maine’s economy in 1976, following the federal lead, and so began the long transformation of a wide middle class into the ever-expanding wealth divide.

In 2019, I made a simple addition to Governor James B Longley’s biography on Wikipedia, to include what I consider to be the most impactful and long-lasting effect of his administration, that of instituting the centralized economy of Maine. As my “reliable source” I used a document of record obtained from the Maine Legislative Library, Legislative Recommendations of the Governor’s Task Force on Economic Development of 1976. This I was told by the Wikipedia MaineTeam does not pass muster as a reliable source, a case in point that one must be certified by the appropriate authorities before one can read the statutes and other historical documents and use them to substantiate facts.

Hello, I’m 331dot. I noticed that you added or changed content in an article, James B. Longley, but you didn’t provide a reliable source. It’s been removed and archived in the page history for now, but if you’d like to include a citation and re-add it, please do so. You can have a look at the tutorial on citing sources, or if you think I made a mistake, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. 331dot (talk) 21:16, 11 December 2019 (UTC)
I would also add that the passage seems to be your personal commentary or research; original research is not permitted on Wikipedia. If your research is published in a peer reviewed scholarly journal, or reported on in independent reliable sources, please bring up these sources on the article talk page. 331dot (talk) 21:17, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

After submitting, once again, that my “reliable source” is the Maine Legislative Library, I received this further confirmation that one must be properly certified by the authorities to read historical documents and use them as a basis for factual substantiation:

Please read Verifiabilty, not Truth. Wikipedia does not claim to offer what is true, only what can be verified in independent reliable sources. Original research is not permitted. As I indicated, if your research is discussed in such sources, it can be mentioned here, but otherwise, no. You may want to find an alternative forum where what you want to do is permitted. 331dot (talk) 00:42, 12 December 2019 (U

My Dad always told me that if I ever needed anything, to start at the top. I have found this advice to be wise. Doors that are slammed in one’s face at the local level, open effortlessly at the top. As it happened, out of the blue in 2020 I was recruited by Palgraves Journal, now called Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, a subsidiary of Nature.com, which partners with international academic institutions. I was recruited by said international academic journal to do reviews and as a result, I now have my Orcid(research)ID- and rated as a “preferred source”/

Mackenzie Andersen’s Orcid ID

Recently I was reading the Wikipedia page on midcentury design, where I found mention of all my parents friends, and colleagues, ceramic companies that existed alongside Andersen Design, stores we sold to, and so forth, but Andersen Design has no mention.

I knew that Wikipedia has a policy about entries NOT being made by principals, but I thought it was a preference, not a mandate. I have been waiting years for a third party to write a profile of our company and no one has and so I decided to add a simple two-sentence edit to include Andersen Design in the Wikipedia midcentury design history, of which Andersen Design is very much a part, but that too was deleted. I need someone else to write a profile on Andersen Design. I can be their reliable source since I understand what our company was and is about like no other can. You can also find our company highly recommended in the Collectors Eye, by Christine Churchill, but that is not a journal. There are also other articles that have been written, and most significantly, our work has been collected and handed down through the generations of many families across America and the world because it was started with the intention to create a handmade product affordable to the middle class, during an era when there was a thriving middle class.

However, this recent incident reminded me of the earlier rejection and I connected the dots to my new status as a preferred researcher for Humanities and SocialSciences Communications. I negotiated a waiver of the fee for publishing a paper months ago but had not acted on it.

Now I have acted. Yesterday I submitted my paper. I had to acknowledge that a version of it is already published as a blog post. I hope that will not be an issue because the academic journal world is a different one than the blogging world, and it is the academic journal world that I need to validate my authority to report the facts of history. and my associated insights.

Wikipedia is important because it is mainstream. It's usually at the top of any Google search and is the easiest source to reference.

Local news is also very important. Online venues could be a real voice of the people challenging the mainstream media hegemony, but so far I am not seeing that yet.

Meanwhile, my substack newsletter is all about local news, and I am getting read the most there. My publication is called Butterflies and Rocketships.

Originally published in Medium's Age of Awareness May 27 2021

The LifeStyle Approach To Economic Development Makes An Environmentally Sustainable Paradigm

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 22:38:00 +0000

I find support for home businesses in unexpected places

The Happy Face, a one of a kind painting by Brenda Andersen in the 1950s on mug by WestonAndersen produced in a categorically new type of production- the production as an art form located on Southport Island Maine, the home of original Andersen Design, Image by Mackenzie Andersen

I have been trying to read the Camoin Report- a development plan for the Boothbay Peninsula in Maine.

A local public-private group calling itself the Joint Economic Community Development council for Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor (JECD) spent 79000.00 of taxpayers’ money to hire New York consultants to prepare a plan for our community.

My initial reaction was that a remote consultant firm cannot create as relevant a development plan as someone who knows the community well, but in all fairness, the report does a decent job of representing all views in the community, more so than we usually get from our community leaders. That scores a point for using remote consultants to develop a plan for a local region- as a first step.

However, it is not actually a plan, more like an assessment with recommendations and in that category it is successful but for the fact that it does not transparently state that the Boothbay water supplies are endangered by development. Such is the nature of political speech, especially that kind of speech that attempts not to take sides. Though it does not seem there should be two sides to the sustainability of our water supply- there are. One side, the loudest says, ignore this non-issue!!!. The other side holds that sustaining the water supply is the starting point for developing a plan for the future.

Most PDF files are easy to read, navigate and search but the Camoin Report layout seems designed to frustrate the casual would-be reader.

Some sections use the standard page view and others are formatted in the landscape view. I have tried, without success, to transpose the report into a readable format until I gave up but in the process, I read bits and pieces of the report.

The Camoin Report is fair in that it legitimizes every point of view. Just about anybody can use the report to support any policy. Therefore it has planning value only if it is considered comprehensively by Town leadership but Town Leadership chose only three areas to work on out of sixty-three identified in the Camoin Report, the same areas they would likely have chosen had the Camoin Report never been written.

Like any political document, the Camoin Report states matters in language that can be interpreted to mean many different things. The Camoin report does not say that the population density on the peninsula should be quadrupled, but there are certainly many parts of the report that can be quoted to support that the population on the peninsula needs to be quadrupled. Likewise, there are many parts of the report that can be quoted in support of limiting development in the interest of sustaining the viability of Adams Pond and Knickerbocker Lake as well as the peninsula’s historical identity in the tradition of a Garden City and a New England village that intentionally avoided overcrowding, the opposite philosophy of Boothbay’s new developer’s plans for the peninsula’s future.

Scoring a point for inclusion of The LifeStyle Factor

Credit is due to the Camoin Report, for including under “Objective Three Target and reinvigorate existing commercial areas for economic growth”,

“small businesses and entrepreneurs seeking high-quality village lifestyle with home occupations”.

It is rare to find a mention of home businesses, let alone acknowledgment of the value of the businesses in a home sector measured as a quality lifestyle choice. It is in the Camoin Report that I have first seen home businesses included in the local economic discussion. The authors voicing that recognition are from out-of-state and the words have not been noted by our local community leaders.

The Camoin Report scores a second point as a remote consultant who will speak for the whole fabric of a community rather than merely a targeted sector.

The targeted sector mentality still rules the day!

Three years after the report was completed, the town selectmen got together to select three priorities from the 63 priorities that the Camoin Report identified, the three issues were “broadband, housing diversity and availability, and downtown development and waterfront management.”

Broadband is being pushed on this community by a small group formed as a “public-private relationship” that aims to form a public-privately owned broadband corporation just for the peninsula. It has been an uphill road for them since our community is rated as over-served by the state, but there is no limit to how much other people’s money this group is willing to spend to get its way. I suggest waving a meme of Elon Musk and asking why the public should take on the risk.

The Starlink 3 train rides across the early morning sky, accompanied by a handful of other satellites. Photo by forest-katsch-unsplash

“Housing diversity and availability” and “waterfront management” are examples of political language that can be interpreted in a multitude of ways. One can say that “housing diversity” includes business in a home- but that wasn't actually said. One can also interpret “housing diversity and availability” to mean, we need a plan to increase population density on the peninsula, which is being said over and over again. Why?

Why:
Why must the population be expanded? So that we can build housing developments and a school. Why must we build housing developments and a school? The school is to attract a population to the peninsula, needed to attract corporate jobs requiring large workforces to the peninsula, to occupy the housing developments, which will bring in lots of taxes! It's about the taxes! Why do we need more taxes? To spend on new development!

What Boothbay has now is irreplaceable!

The actual JECD group called it quits when coronavirus hit. It was a public-private organization that enabled its members to access community funds to spend on extra-curricula agendas primarily in support of the dining and entertainment businesses in downtown Boothbay Harbor, operating like a taxpayer-financed Chamber of Commerce, paying for advertising campaigns for a “targeted sector” industry.

The JECD Party Policy Paradigm

In recent weeks, the JECD has, for all practical purposes, re-emerged as several united factions whose agendas are so well coordinated in purpose and the announcement of each project is so strategically timed to be released in succession, like clockwork, one right after the other, that they might as well be a political party.

The JECD party has a spending agenda that makes the former JECD look like a nickel and dime operation.

First, to be announced is a fifty-million-dollar school system, declared to be needed to attract families to the region. It is estimated that the school investment will generate a 14% and 23 % hike in property taxes in Boothbay Harbor and Boothbay, respectively.

A School System Should Not Be Approached as an Instrument of Gentrification
Especially Not with a Looming Confucious Institute in the Picture!medium.com

That is followed by the announcement of a newly formed non-profit, the Boothbay Region Housing Trust, which is promoting a repeal of the ordinances protecting the working waterfront and for a re-write of other ordinances to reduce the land plot sizes by half so that houses can be built more closely together.

Did I Fall Down The Rabbit Hole Into A Dystopian World Or Is This Really Real?
Greed and the real estate boom in Boothbay Mainemedium.com

Next, Kenneth Rayle announces his unopposed candidacy for Boothbay Harbor selectman. Rayle was on the board of the JECD and currently serves on the broadband committee that is pushing for a public-private broadband company for the Boothbay Region, estimated cost is six million.

Rayle says that we can’t wait on the affordable workforce housing,

One critical issue for Boothbay Harbor is housing or more accurately a shortage of affordable housing for working families who, if they could get a good job here, would traditionally live here. …..so we must determine what step(s) can be instituted first and take those steps which may involve zoning changes, incentives, or other practical ideas…. Doing nothing is an option, but an option that is, in my opinion, not in the best interests of the town.

Like a polished politician, Rayle brings up “incentives”, without explaining what he means. My guess is the incentives are needed as corporate welfare to attract “targeted sector” companies to employ a large enough workforce to radically increase the population density on the peninsula. So old school!

Next Rayle says the driver of our economy is the tourist industry, not making any connection between the need for “affordable housing for working families who, if they could get a good job here, would live here as working families did once traditionally live here when they had traditional New England style homes, and the fact that the tourist industry, exacerbated by the Air BnB, and Paul Coulombe's intention to transform a once middle-class vacationland into the gardens of the super-rich has been driving affordable housing off the peninsula. Forget about that! Just concentrate on the bouncing ball and absorb what I say!

The JECD party wants to build development housing very close together as “workforce housing”. The choice for the workers in the “quality job” workforce would be to live in a row house in Boothbay or commute off the peninsula to more natural spacious settings in a community that is not aiming to be a tourist destination for the wealthy.

According to Rayle ”Our economy became stagnant in the 80s, through the 2000s and there has been a distinct uptick in the last 10 years.”

I could hardly believe I was reading such revisionist history of the local economy in the eighties and nineties, an abundant time, when the peninsula was still a middle-class vacationland, up until 2002 when there was a sudden and dramatic drop in retail activity. The next year. in 2003, Amazon started making a profit.

Rayle’s reference to a “distinct uptick” is not supported in the word around Main Street. Main Streets across the world have seen income decline with the rise of the internet. If there is a “distinct uptick” it is in gentrification as the lower end of the economy can no longer afford Boothbay. As property taxes rise, the lower end of the economy leaves and is replaced with a higher income class that can afford the higher taxes to pay for higher levels of spending led by public-private relationships, the factions that compose the JECD party.

All of the factions that compose the JECD party are making proposals that will increase property taxes, including “affordable” workforce housing, smaller units packed more closely together on smaller plots of land. The developer who advocated quadrupling the population density and breaking the old summer homes up into smaller units, added to his recommendation that “taxes will have to be raised”, offering no explanation as to why.

A Distinct Uptick (in gentrification)

Latest Boothbay Harbor Statistics From City-Data.com

Population in 2010: 1,086. Population change since 2000: -12.2%

Estimated median household income in 2019: $49,667 (it was $31,201 in 2000) Estimated per capita income in 2019: $30,338 (it was $18,133 in 2000)

Those hobnobbing at the country club and other new wealth culture venues are probably seeing a distinct uptick in the numbers in their peer group, as the wealth divide widens on the peninsula. Perhaps as they gather around their new social centers, they coordinate their political platform and its timed release in the local media.

The wealth divide is an issue for the younger generation that Boothbay needs to attract

Another need that Boothbay has, almost as important as protecting the water supply is to attract young people to the Peninsula. We are the grayest town in the grayest county in the grayest state. It is a serious need to attract more young people, not just a political talking point, but as Boothbay moves demographically toward the upper end of the wealth divide, it is becoming a symbol of why many young people feel they will never own a home. and resent the baby boomers for it. Let them build row houses!

NO! Let them build businesses in a home!

An affordable spacious living style that doesn’t threaten the water supply.

Remote work is on the rise! Thinking about economic development in terms of incentives to attract large corporations with large workforces is receding, especially for a peninsula with an endangered water supply. Boothbay can develop more incrementally, consistent with its historical rate of development by branding itself as a smaller and attractive remote working, business in the home community. It suits the peninsula's environmental needs while preserving our uniqueness and is consistent with our history and is tuned to the beat of the remote working revolution.

Green Party Paradigm:
Don't rewrite the ordinances to decrease lot sizes, rewrite the ordinances to encourage a business in a home lifestyle.

As classic as a Campbell's Soup Can. A chowder bowl and saucer designed and produced in and hand made slip-cast production on Southport Island Maine where Andersen Design was first located in the 1950s Photo by Mackenzie Andersen

Support from an unexpected place, the VC community

Lately, distant rumblings are audible from entrepreneurial conceptualists considering working from home as a rising movement about to unfold as categorically new business models.

Working from home now has its own initials: WFH !!!

Nicolas Cole is a high-profile content provider and influencer, in Campbell’s Soup & How To Design A Category Breakthrough In The Roaring 2020s, Cole explains breakthrough concepts for a venture capitalist audience, making the point that a breakthrough can’t be researched because it is new, there is nothing established before it to research. For example, Campbell’s soup did something no one had done before when it sold the soup as a condensed product. A condensed soup lowered the shipping cost and therefore the price of the soup. Cole defines this invention of Campbell’s as creating a new category of product — the condensed soup category and uses it to advocate thinking in terms of new business categories. Cole then spins his own version of a potential new business category. a merging of the home business and the Air B&B.

“What new category could we create that would inherently leave the old category to die?”

Work From Home + Native Digitals + Rent, Don’t Buy = Tons Of New Category Opportunities — Nicolas Cole

The stigma around working from home is gone.

It is not clear what old category is left to die, but considering the wider context of Cole’s presentation, I think he means homeownership. That is because the younger generation largely disbelieves that they will ever be able to afford a home. Cole takes that belief and spins it into a choice of preference by the new normal in a rootless society, populations forever on the move, global citizens roaming around the world from Air B&B to Air B&B, appearing and disappearing from any location as if in a constant state of evolving superimposition, never taking a permanent form anywhere, like fireflies sparkling on a midsummer night. Here one moment and gone the next.

The idea of business facilities as Air B&B's seems a bit wonky to me but if it should become an actuality, it would attract a wandering creative independent workforce, probably looking for a more permanent place to settle down. A natural garden city with an existing business in the home community could attract this type of workforce and their families to the Boothbay Peninsula.

I am familiar with how it feels to live in a fleeting community. On the peninsula in Maine, where I spent my early years, there was a rooted community and a transient community, seasonally re-appearing and disappearing, producing a great sense of here today but gone tomorrow. Since my family was new to the area, we were outsiders in the local community and so there was a more keenly felt connection to the transient community and a feeling of being left behind when they vanished.

As a teenage outsider, I existed as if in a state of superimposition, I did not neatly fit into either the transient or rooted community. I was both and neither, the observer who didn’t open the box to find out what is really real.

Outside the box, all is real and reality takes on the form of potentiality. That makes an intriguing adventure but the human spirit longs for a home that becomes actual when possibilities collapse into commitment.

Many who seemed like transients to my perception, had actually been summer residents for generations so that they too had strong roots in the area. They built spacious summer homes for gathering the family together.

Ocean Point Home -Mackenzie Andersen- Unsplash

The Ocean Point community was one such place and Andersen Studio was a favorite “first destination” when the returning families hit town. The Ocean Point community collected our work of stoneware functional forms and wildlife sculptures prolifically, recognizing it as something unique, and handed our work down through the generations. Enfolded within those collections are the memories of generations who gathered together in the Boothbay Region as their own family tradition. Perhaps part of the attraction of Andersen Design to the Ocean Point community is because it was a family business with a production connected to a home.

If one knows of the deep connection between Andersen Studio and the Ocean Point community, it is all the more symbolic that our family homestead was the first in East Boothbay to be transformed into subdivided units for the purpose of pecuniary gain, as proposed for East Boothbay by the Developer I have nicknamed “Howard”, in my post “ Did I Fall Down The Rabbit Hole into a Dystopian World Or is This Really Real?

Did I Fall Down The Rabbit Hole Into A Dystopian World Or Is This Really Real?
Greed and the real estate boom in Boothbay Mainemedium.com

Like Campbell’s Soup, Andersen Design also created a new category of business, the production as an art form. Andy Warhol, who became famous by producing silkscreen prints that used Campbell's Soup cans as a subject matter, is given credit by the art world for creating the category that uses production as an art form, but in fact, Andersen Design predates Andy Warhol’s “factory”, which was also famous as a home to a family of misfits transformed into celebrities by Warhol branding, a precursor to today’s “influencers”.

Hand Making Ceramics in the USA, The Medium is Still the Message
I was raised in a ceramic business in the home, which was different from its surroundings, making myself and my…medium.com

Creating a new category gives the Andersen Design brand historical provenance, which confers staying power, even when we no longer have a production, which I hope will not always be the case, and that the new business in the home culture will be a contributing factor in bringing about the actualization of that hope.

Join our Kickstarter support group here!

Boothbay is becoming an Air BnB town that captures the wanderer but many a wanderer is looking for a community in which they can take root.

The business-in-a-home lifestyle is a perpetual learning environment. To learn is to survive, or as 1960’s poet rock musician, Bob Dylan said “He not busy being born is busy dying”, the mantra of living on the edge.

The permanent business in a home has many advantages over the air B&B version proposed by Nicolas Cole. Its not the billionaire-maker that would attract the VC community, but it should be considered as a new opportunity zone by government policy-makers, particularly in places where environmental sustainability places a natural limit on population growth. In the meantime, it takes a leap of faith.

Running one’s own business is like unfolding a potential and giving it form. The business grows or not and that‘s up to you and God’s mysterious will, a factor I came to understand early since my family lived, during the offseason, on the edge of check to check, events arriving in the mail at un-pre-determined intervals. It is the lifestyle accessible to those who have the guts to start on a wing and a prayer and without a windfall investment.

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The term windfall means “an apple or other fruit blown down from a tree or bush by the wind.” Perhaps God forbid Eve to pick the apple from the tree so that she would know the wind. The wind is within and without. If you listen, you can hear the wind everywhere and glide within it effortlessly

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Originally published on Medium's Woodworkers of the World Unite! April 20 2021 3:PM

Did I Fall Down The Rabbit Hole Into A Dystopian World Or Is This Really Real?

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Sat, 10 Apr 2021 18:50:00 +0000

Greed and the real estate boom in Boothbay Maine

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I was recently in an online dialogue in my local community where I encountered a developer willfully oblivious to the warnings from the state and the town water department concerning the danger posed by further development to Boothbay’s two water supplies.

The warnings came in five years ago when the development on the peninsula was already occurring at a faster than average pace and before the Botanical Gardens built a parking lot in the watershed and the Country Club developer finagled a dysfunctional rearrangement of roads in the center of town to his advantage.

The developer whom I shall call Howard, though it is not his name, expressed his vision for quadrupling the density of the village of East Boothbay, where Andersen Design’s production and home were located from 1958 to 2017.

Said by “Howard”: Low income housing should focus on rental units and cluster units like townhouses. Another approach would be to convert large summer homes to multi unit apartments. Easy to quadruple densities by doing that in East Boothbay. Of course all this will require substantial hikes in the property taxes.

Why substantial hikes in taxes? Why is Howard, the agent who is telling us so? Have we slid into the next phase of public-private relationships wherein special private interests openly dictate the rate of taxation?

Today every player in the power elite, be they public or private, for-profit or non-profit, talks as if they design the grand plan, for the public good of course. Remember what the Purpose Statement of the Financial Authority of Maine says. FAME inc set the tone for government by public-private relationships back in the 1980s:

Chapter 110: FINANCE AUTHORITY OF MAINE §962. Purpose: The authority will serve a public purpose and perform an essential governmental function in the exercise of the powers and duties conferred upon it by this chapter. Any benefits accruing to private individuals or associations, as a result of the activities of the authority, are deemed by the Legislature to be incidental to the public purposes to be achieved by the implementation of this chapter. [1985, c. 344, §5 (AMD).] [PL 1985, c. 344, §5 (AMD).]

Much to its credit, even local low-income-affordable housing provides more space and privacy than Howard envisions for East Boothbay. Is Howard thinking air b&b which provides the most profit per square inch and visitors do not need as much living space as residents need? Maybe it should be called East Air B&B in the future, instead of East Boothbay.

My former family business in a home was one of the first in East Boothbay to suffer at the hands of Howard-styled plans to realize the highest profit per inch by subdividing spacious homes into cubby hole living accommodations.

Our former home was once reconstructed during a more humanistic era when, contrary to being subdivided for profit into two one-room studio apartments and a “master suite” as it is now, two houses were put together into one home with two front doors and two porches.

The historic mansard style home was bulldozed over and replaced with the new-style architecture that does not waste money on a front door, let alone a front porch, and instead has three black garage doors lined up where there should be a welcoming entrance, shouting of the importance of automobiles over humans, and yet, whenever I drive by the automobiles are parked outside in front of the house.

Where once there were kitchen windows that took advantage of the splendor of southern light that streamed in at low angles during the winter, now there is a built-in overhang to an outdoor balcony reminiscent of balconies on city skyscrapers, that substitutes for a porch, allowing the space above the overhang to be used for valuable real estate footage. This design sets the windows back out of the sun’s direct reach. The only way to reclaim the glorious sunlight streaming into the living space is to eliminate any semblance of a porch on a building situated in the center of a New England town surrounded by homes with front doors and front porches.

One could take away the garages and transform the studio apartment into a more spacious and gracious living space but since the building is sub-divided with the entrance to the “master suite” being through a long hall that opens on the garage as if entering a city apartment building, or else entering by a difficult to access back door, one would have the problem of how to climb into the master suite. The only front-style door is recessed and hidden on the upstairs balcony, which does not have access from the ground. Maybe one could breakthrough into the long hallway to create a new entrance to the “master suite” (Even the language the realtor used to sell this construct has subversive implications)

Taxes did not increase when the old was destroyed and replaced with the new. Property taxes dropped by half of what we paid.

The home of Andersen Design from 1958–2017was historical when we moved in. My Dad added the triple windows to advantage of the exquisite sunlight provided by the location. Photo by Mackenzie Andersen

East Boothbay is a beautiful New England Village still preserved in the tradition of New England wisdom that Lewis Mumford writes about in the Culture of the Cities (and I discussed further inWhat Do Lessons from the Industrial Revolution Have to Tell Us Today? )

..the New England town during this period ceased to grow beyond the possibility of socializing and assimilating its members : when near crowding, a new congregation would move off under a special pastor, erect a new meeting house, form a new village, lay out fresh fields. Hiving off to new centers discouraged congestion in the old ones ; and the further act of dividing the land among the members of the community in terms of family need, as well as wealth and rank, gave a rough equality to the members, or at least guaranteed them a basic minimum of existence….A democratic polity-and the most healthy and comely of urban environments : a typical contrast to the despotic order of the dominant baroque city. To describe it is almost to define everything that the absolute order was not.Lewis Mumford The Culture of the Cities

East Boothbay. by Mackenzie Andersen

That attitude prevailed for centuries. Until very recently the community was economically balanced including a wealthy sector that historically kept a low profile.

Once the Boothbay Peninsula was a place where families had summer homes, where generations gathered during the summer months. Howard would like to see these former homes broken up into subdivisions to serve the developer’s goal of a four-fold population expansion in East Boothbay. Just call it couch-potato town designed for lifestyles that do not require space or sun. Apparently, this is the citizenry type that Howard thinks is ideal for the Boothbay Region.

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A few years ago a developer Paul Coulombe came to town with intentions to radically transform our peninsula into a luxury tourist destination. Since coronavirus hit, the vision held by developers has transformed into one part Hamptons, one part Silicone Valley, and one part Levittown.

NO PART- businesses in or attached to a home. Developers seem occluded to the fact of a new remote worker's evolution afoot or that job development through businesses in or attached to the home does not require overcrowding the peninsula by building workforce housing to attract jobs from companies that require large workforces and mucho corporate welfare (could this be why Howard thinks taxes will have to be raised ?). The micro economy, including businesses in a home, whether workers for remote corporations, handcrafted makers, researchers. designers, mechanics, shipbuilders, cooks, tinkers, or tailors, create a community connected through work and grows at a pace that does not threaten our fragile water system, and does not aggressively increase the population but over time can shift the demographic balance, to include more young people, which is actually a need on the peninsula.

The micro economy does not, on the surface, promise to be a gold mine for venture capitalists and the like. On the surface, there are no ready-made billions on the horizon in such a community design, so who would be interested? Maybe the younger generation?

I have seen young people on Medium express great resentment toward the Baby Boomer generation, feeling that the older generation is keeping opportunities away from the younger generation and that they would just like to be able to live a middle-class lifestyle. Since Boothbay's water supply does not support the population explosion targeted by the new developers, we could instead nurture the type of middle-class community that many of the younger generations yearn for, through small businesses, including home businesses which can be a new decentralized designated “opportunity zone” combining economic development with an affordable housing lifestyle, which is not “affordable” because it cramped, but because it incorporates individualized economic opportunity and space need to realize it.

Edgecomb, bordering on Boothbay permits businesses in the home and has an independent water supply. Perhaps the Boothbay wealth culture can provide a market for products and services made by the productive culture located in neighboring municipalities.

The New England village is already the desired garden city that post-Industrial Revolution urban planners sought to create. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, a group of visionaries emerged including Ebenezer Howard, about whom Lewis Mumford says, “Ebenezer Howard may be said to be the first modern thinker about cities who had a sound sociological conception of the dynamics of rational urban growth,…because of its success in incorporating industries and in building workers’ houses, the garden city became a focal point in the mind of social-minded planners and administrators throughout the world.”.The founders of the Arts and Crafts Movement during the same era, John Ruskin and William Morris. led a handmade craft migration from urban to rural when most of humanity was moving in the other direction. Andersen Design was a new generation in that tradition in 1952 when my parents moved to the Boothbay Peninsula, where they could set up a business in a home to “create a hand-made product affordable to the middle classes”.

The Pre-Raphaelites believed the medieval world was purer in form than the post-Renaissance world because it was more closely tied to nature Roots of Arts and Crafts- University of Toledo

Boothbay is already a garden city but Boothbay’s new developers do not appreciate what Boothbay is. They want to make hay while the sun shines on Maine’s booming real estate market by building for a projected rapidly expanding population to justify changing ordinances, cramping living quarters, and squeezing houses together on small plots to make a profit while the market is hot, and they are pushing ahead aggressively.

Recently, Mr. Coulombe came out in support of a new forty-nine million dollar school for our peninsula, with no clear plan to finance it. According to Mr. Coulombe, the forty-nine million dollar school will solve the shortage of young persons on the peninsula. He is promoting a non-profit fundraiser with a goal of two-and-a-half million dollars to pay for the architects to design the school before the community has agreed that it is a reasonable idea.

And who wouldn’t support a school?

And thus a massive plan for population crowding is packaged as a school, and not as a plan to aggressively accelerate growth on the peninsula. The reason we need a school is to attract families to the area and so we also need a development project to build many new homes.

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Voila- Enter a new non-profit organization called The Boothbay Region Housing Trust with the purpose ”to find some traction in securing projects leading to significant development in affordable workforce housing.” The reason we need affordable workforce housing is to attract businesses to the region, which will then attract the people to occupy housing developments.

Housing affordable to the working classes is few and far between on a peninsula reinventing itself as a high-end vacation destination, accelerated by the one type of business in a home that is permitted to proliferate without limit- the Air B&B.

Neither developers nor the new “affordable workforce housing” non-profit mentions the Air B&B’s, although if you need to increase taxes that is a good place to start since Air B&B’s are a direct cause of the shortage in housing affordable to a year-round population.

An article in the Boothbay Register is the only information currently available about The Boothbay Region Housing Trust. The article is written as if it is reporting minutes for a meeting without placing the subject under discussion in a larger context. At one point in the article, the leader of the non-profit, a realtor and developer activist, Debrah Yale is quoted as saying: “The towns recognize the need for affordable housing, but Boothbay Harbor has its hands tied by outdated and super restrictive ordinances, they said; no one has addressed the “archaic code from 1986” Yale said was a knee-jerk reaction to the Signal Point development and other condominium developments shortly before the change”

The Register article offers no explanation about the “archaic code from 1986” and so I asked, “What is the archaic code from 1986?”.

Receiving no answer, I researched it myself and found a report from 1986 that states the issue quite clearly in its findings: It is not archaic. It is current since we still have a working waterfront and a group working to preserve it.

Working waterfront in Rockland, Maine

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The 1986 Ordinances

WATERFRONT DEVELOPMENT AND REVITALIZATION PROJECT

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY (1986)

Findings

1. Boothbay Harbor is the center of a $12-million-a-year Lincoln County fishing, industry, This industry generates $36 million dollars of additional revenues for the area and state. A commercial fish pier on the east side of the harbor is economically viable if the volume of landings can be maintained;

2. Condominiums and other land uses are severely reducing the number and quality of landing facilities available for commercial fish landing and processing. Current land use regulations are not adequate to resist development pressures over the long term;

The realtor and developer activist, of the non-profit organization, Deborah Yale, makes such a to-do about the “archaic” ordinances of 1986 that she inadvertently revealed that the “workforce housing” being targeted by the new non-profit Boothbay Region Housing Trust are luxury waterfront condominiums, apparently already constructed but which cannot be inhabited because they violate the working waterfront ordinances.

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Yale continues as if were an unassuming truth, requiring no debate, that waterfront condominium located in prime real estate settings are needed for “affordable workforce housing”, implying that the working waterfront should be sacrificed for condominiums, seemingly oblivious to the fact that a working waterfront employs a workforce. This attitude typifies the way that the developers are removed from the very realities that they claim to be serving. They want workforce housing but actual working people are mere abstractions to them used to justify their real estate expansions.

Yale continues with, “The knee-jerk might have been OK as a moratorium, but they never lifted those restrictions. now, if we lifted those restrictions, we could get into some of these developments which are already approved, hooked up to water and sewer, and they just sit there. There could be 44 homes built in the next two years for families if we could shrink the lot size … Just think of the tax implications of having all these vacant and vagrant houses and land without things being built on them and what it costs the town. They’re always trying to balance the budget, but if we had taxes coming in, we wouldn’t have to worry about all of that.”

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And just think of all that money you could make if you could sell those condominiums and build houses on tiny lots in this hot market. Have pity on a poor realtor.

Much to its credit, even local low-income-affordable housing provides more space and privacy than Boothbay Region Housing Trust envisions for “affordable workforce housing” for the common class of workers.

Helping the poor by investing in the rich

It's a historical tradition in Maine to pass legislation to help the disadvantaged and soon thereafter use it to benefit the wealthiest. The Washington County Development Authority and The Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority are both former military bases returned to civilian use and chartered by the Maine Legislature as “municipalities serving as an instrument of the state”, but WCDA is in Maine’s poorest county and MRRA is in Maine’s wealthiest country.

MRRA is a state-favored corporate welfare city. designated as a Pine Tree Zone, an act first passed for low-income high unemployment areas and four years later expanded to “statewide” as it “moved silently through the Legislature”, to quote exact words once found on the State Republican website. MRRA is also a designated Opportunity Zone enacted by the federal government in 2017 and described by the IRS as “Opportunity Zones are an economic development tool that allows people to invest in distressed areas in the United States.” When I checked a number of years ago reported income at MRRA was already three times higher than average for Maine.

WCDA is in a distressed area and is awarded an annual budget of zero dollars a year by the Maine Legislature and is not a designated zone for anything.

The idea that prime waterfront real estate should be used for “affordable workforce housing”, begs the question, what workforce is Ms. Yale anticipating? Perhaps Telsa will decide to locate on the Boothbay Peninsula if only we would build up with every square inch of open land with “affordable workforce housing”. Then perhaps the Telsa middle executive layer would pay market value for “affordable workforce housing” as luxury condominiums in prime oceanfront real estate in a town that doubles for a luxury tourist resort.

I pointed out that the 1986 ordinance was not intended as a temporary moratorium on condominiums on the harbor waterfront, the language used in the report is “permanent” and I suggested that if the realtors have condominiums they can’t use because of the ordinances why don’t they move them to areas more appropriate to “affordable workforce housing”?

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I can only imagine how tiny our working waterfront would be if it weren’t for those ordinances, especially with Coulombe showing up and buying up properties across the peninsula to turn them into luxury accommodations, using any financial means possible, including turning a historic lighthouse into a modernized bed and breakfast under the front of a non-profit.

These developers, with gold dust in their eyes, are out of touch with reality. Much of the new migration from urban to rural is likely accountable to the remote worker’s movement, which are businesses in a home and which engage a different kind of lifestyle and philosophy than that of a company man in the gray flannel suit or whatever is today’s contemporary corporate uniform.

By my definition of twenty-first-century economic development, these developers are backward-looking to the Industrial Revolution, to what Lewis Mumford called the ‘Insensate Industrial Town”, except that industry is only an abstract talking point for them, one that justifies more building. They never actually have anything to say about industry beyond its function in justifying the overcrowding of the peninsula. They are out of touch with the issues of concern to younger generations, whom they want to attract to the area.

The culture that the new inhabitants might bring to a community has no interest for the do-gooding developers. When I commented that the boom in real estate sales was a “mystery demographics”. Howard responded that we should raise property taxes. No interest in the human side of the story, but economic development is a human story, not just a money story.

Lewis Mumford’s Insensate Industrial Town

In this passage from the chapter The Insensate Industrial Town. Lewis Mumford describes the common process through which cities become ghettos throughout the centuries and during the Industrial Revolution:

The system of construction was used to squeeze the last drop of rent out of a site by overcrowding the land, putting a thousand people on a spot that had hitherto accommodated but a hundred. Result: intensified land speculation, site-crowding, increased traffic congestion frequently lack of daylight and decent working space within the new buildings. Likewise a constant tendency to pyramid land values and structures, recapitalizing the original values on the basis of prospective congestion, and using the advance in values as an excuse for perpetrating further congestion. Finally, an urban form, towering against the skies, in which the actual living demands of men and women were subordinated at every step to pecuniary considerations. The Culture of the Cities by Lewis Mumford in chapyer titled THE INSENSATE INDUSTRIAL TOWN.

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It recently occurred to me that the reason the developers show a remarkable lack of concern for the Boothbay Peninsula’s endangered water supply is that they project a population expansion so large it will serve as a tax base to finance pumping water into the peninsula from a remote source. I can only imagine that is a very large expense and also very political but developers base outcomes on future projections that are certain to work out exactly as they say, so that endangering the water supply is a justifiable risk in their minds, assuming that the water supply occupies space in their minds. The rapid growth that threatens to destroy the water supply will also pay for a new water supply, problem solved, no need to discuss it. Drop it! You are spoiling the party!

However, there is no reason to suddenly expand the population on the peninsula, other than making developers and other people invested in real estate richer. It is reasonable to attribute the current real estate boon to Maine’s low incidence of coronavirus and to attribute our low incidence to the fact that we are not an overcrowded state. It's like killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

Coronavirus aside, Boothbay has its own unique appeal as it is because it is open and gracious and relaxed and a historical place but Coulombe and friends want to change that. They want Boothbay to be a luxury resort and its population to expand exponentially. Do the developers really believe that building “affordable workforce housing” will eventually be used for that purpose? Are they expecting major corporations to chose Boothbay as their headquarters over the nearby Midcoast Regional Development Authority with its full menu of tax exemptions, refundable tax credits, and subsidies, or do they privately project that they are creating an Air B&B city with cubbyhole size accommodations to increase the value per square foot?

Both towns have spent a lot of money and time over 35 years trying to get businesses to move to a region that cannot support the necessary workforce, Yale said. Watson added that among the issues which have gone unaddressed are the general recommendations as illustrated in the regional economic master plan presented in February 2018, and the need to reduce density requirements from 10,000 square feet per residential use to 5,000 square feet. Boothbay Region Housing Trust enters fold

The “Regional Economic Development Master Plan of 2018”

Watson and Kale are referencing the Camoin Report produced at distance by a New York consulting group, for a small fee of 79000.00 in taxpayer funding, contracted by the JECD Group, a special interest group masquerading as a community economic development organization.

I thank Watson and Kale for bringing it to our attention that the Camoin Report failed to address the most elemental challenge facing this peninsula, the sustainability of our water supply.

The 2018 “Town Plan” fails to mention the 2015 report from the water district that cites the danger posed by development to Adams Pond and Knickerbocker Lake. In the list of challenges we face, the Camoin Report mentions “Environmental effects on the Harbor (Effects on working waterfront, future of aquaculture, rising waters”) and “Waterfront zoning restrictions”, which would be the 1986 ordinances restricting condominiums and other commercial developments from infringing on the space needed by the working waterfront. A search for “Adams Pond” and another for “Knickerbocker lake” comes up empty.

The JECD paid the consultants. Consultants work for whoever pays them. The JECD got what it paid for, and now we can ignore it, as it fails to address a most crucial challenge facing this community- our fragile water supply. A report that does not begin with the right starting point, which in the 21st century includes limitations imposed by our natural environment, is good for nothing.

“trying to get businesses to move to a region that cannot support the necessary workforce”

To anyone taking a reasonable account of the entire region, the peninsula cannot compete with the MRRA, a business development city chartered by the Maine Legislature and situated within commuting distance to the peninsula. If Boothbay developers imagine that the peninsula will attract corporations, they are deluding themselves, unless it is a corporation that chooses Boothbay because of our unique natural resources, such in January of 2013 when we almost had a state of the art floating windmill project through the Norwegian company Statoil, when the Maine Public Utility Commission approved a project to build a $120 million deepwater wind turbine demonstration project off the coast of Boothbay Harbor.

Although everyone involved including the team at the University of Maine, the Wind Industry Initiative, Reed and Reed, a manufacturing company, and various member of the Legislature was thrilled with the project and with working with Statoil, Governor LePage opposed it, claiming the company had shown no commitment to working with local resources.

Statoil pledged to award contracts that represent 10 percent of capital spending — amounting to $100 million — for qualified Maine suppliers and contractors. LePage continued to object claiming the deal would be expensive for the taxpayers by raising the cost of energy but others said the increase was slight at only a few cents.

LePage held the signing of the Omnibus Bill hostage to force the legislature to pass LD 1472 changing the status that PUC had already granted to Statoil. The act re-opened the bidding process. Statoil pulled out citing uncertainty in regulations and the University of Maine formed a new public-private relationship named Aqua Ventus which submitted a proposal and was granted PUC approval, but that did not go to Boothbay Harbor.

In May 2014 the University of Maine received a federal grant for offshore wind project, but the three million dollar award is far less than $47 million that was anticipated to be granted to Statoil.

Statoil is now called Equinor- which built the first floating windmills off the coast of Scotland in 2017)

No one knows why LePage killed a project that had a global corporation, exactly the sort Lepage wants for Maine, in the hand. My completely unsubstantiated speculation connects LePage to his childhood friend Paul Coulombe who wanted to dredge the harbor and make it into a deep water port for very large cruise boats. Mr. Coulombe acts like the peninsula is his to design. Perhaps Statoili was stepping on Coulombe’s toes just as Coulombe would step on the toes of the fishing industry if he could. I am not knowledgeable enough to speculate on the effect of floating windmills on the feasibility of bringing large ocean liners to port in Boothbay Harbor, or of either project on the fishing industry but Governor LePage never said the floating windmills would threaten the fishing industry and so it is safe to assume that was not his motivation for killing the Statoil project and the many well-paid year-round jobs it would have brought to the peninsula.

Lack of affordable housing did not deter Statoil. Changing the PUC approval after the fact drove them away, like a Banana Republic.

The real deterrent to affordable living on the Boothbay Peninsula

The problem with affordable housing for year-round jobs is caused by the luxury tourism industry and the Air B&B's but the other reality that no one talks about is that Boothbay cannot support another development-sized corporation that would require the kind of mass building of “workforce housing’ that developers are calling for. The idea that such mass building is being sold as required to create jobs tells us that those selling this idea intend corporations that equal or surpass the scale of the Botanical Gardens and the Country Club, which were cited, five years ago, as exacerbating the pressure on the water supply caused by an unusually rapid development on the peninsula. More likely the jobs are just another abstract talking point that developers use to sell their schemes to overcrowd the peninsula if they can get away with it.

Reality calls for a different working paradigm

If the leaders and people of the peninsula accept the consensus of the water department then the population on this peninsula has reached the limit that the water supply can reasonably sustain, it will require a different development paradigm than the one being pushed by the current developers cult. We need a more modest humanistic approach to development, consistent with Maine’s history when New England intentionally was part of a counter-culture to the overcrowding that reduced cities to ghettos. The developers love to hold up their “experts” like appeals to authority, so why aren’t they, and we, listening to the experts who tell us that our water supply is endangered?

The peninsula was never meant to grow at the pace that is currently being accelerated by the current real estate boom. It is great that our new Senator Chloe Maxmin, wants to add an amendment prioritizing the environment to the Constitution, but with the aggressiveness that developers are trying to accelerate building and aiming to decrease lots and living space sizes, we need to act sooner than an amendment can come about, lest our town leaders are as easily swayed by pressure from the real estate industry as they were swayed into agreeing that it was needed for “public safety” to plant a tree in the middle of our most traveled road and to construct a mini-roundabout around it, conveniently situated where a road leading to country club aggressively encroaches upon the road that once was a round-about the Commons.

Call Me David, Cause I have a vision too!

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The Insensate Baroque Industrial Vacationland Levittown by the Sea

The Goliaths of Boothbay are drowning the airwaves with their unsustainable backward-thinking development nonsense!

A novel idea: Let's open up the conversation to include reason!

published on Medium's Age of Awareness on April 11

What Ceramic Casting Slip Can Tell About The Effects of Development On The Water Supply, That Our Political Leaders Won’t Say

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Sat, 03 Apr 2021 20:13:00 +0000

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Today there is a cloud of topics floating around in my head and I am wondering which is the starting point of this story and so I begin in the present where I am pondering how to begin.

I started writing on Medium because I have a mission to preserve my family's historical hand-crafted ceramic art and design business into the future. My motivation for doing so is simple, or at least it was in the beginning. My mission began with a love for the work process for which I am very grateful for having been given such a life but such a life also makes me an outsider and so I understand the need for places in society where the outsider finds a home. Our business has provided that to more than a few outsiders throughout its history which began in 1952.

Right now the business does not have a physical form and so it has receded into its primordial beginnings where its philosophical content and meaning are its form. The material forms that the business produces can readily be created anew because the body of molds exists.

In its present incarnation our business has become a spiritual manifestation, as in the Mists of Avalon, a book I should reread to find out if it has the same metaphysical effect on me the second time around as it did the first time. I can’t adequately put into words what happened the first time I read The Mists of Avalon. The effect can only be described as occurring on another plane of reality. The Mists of Avalon is written from the perspective of a pagan culture during the days of King Author’s Court. The pagan culture is receding into the mists of civilization where it no longer has a physical manifestation and has devolved into a pure spiritual manifestation as Christianity takes root in the material world.

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If Andersen Design still had a physical presence, I would not be writing as much as I do now. Writing is non-material in comparison to making ceramics from the raw materials of the earth and mixing those materials, using our own original recipes into casting slips, glazes, and decorating colors. Ceramics is of the earth and writing is of the air. Writing is thought, the root origin of everything. To be or not to be is the question to apply to my original life mission- to preserve a unique business that truly took a different path, and marched to the beat of a different drummer, into the future.

Beginning with the earth Photo by francois-olwage-unsplash

So here I am in the material world, writing beingness into being. I have my voice. How effective can a voice be in affecting events in the world of things? My hometown rulers must think a voice can be very effective since my comments in my local newspaper are frequently deleted or messed with in some other way. I described one such incident in this post. Local interference has slowed a bit since I openly comment in the newspaper about its occurrence, to which the moderator perpetually blames Disqus.

Comment interference in my hometown newspaper is just one event in a series that takes place on and offline, starting with the first blog post that I posted many years ago in which I reviewed an act recently passed by the Maine Legislature. I am a free voice in a centrally controlled state wherein those who fancy themselves to be the ruling classes believe that they control everyone and everything that goes on within their domain of power and do not realize that there are boundaries to their own domain as if the entire state of Maine is one big corporation and everyone in Maine is subservient to the corporate hierarchy. Central management has convinced many that this is a condition of their survival, if not advancement, and quite frankly has created a culture of subtle subservience.

Here is how I feel when I am approached by one of the state speech supervisors, telling me such things as “You have to stop writing about the JECD!”, a local spending organization with pretenses of being an economic development organization, that quickly shut down at the onset of coronavirus. What nerve! I think — who does she think she is to tell me what I can write about! She is not my editor or my supervisor! The fact that she steps in, uninvited, to represent the interests of a local so-called economic development organization, testifies to the case that the local organization is not really a local organization.

Slip-cast ceramic sugar and creamer in hand-painted blue-green striped by Andersen Design. Photo by Mackenzie Andersen

But today things have evolved and I, as a representative of Andersen Design, have more than one special role to play in representing a locally generated community of the people and by the people, but also in representing the state of the local water supply.

Water is an issue that should come first and foremost. I am glad to say that our new State Senator is advocating for a constitutional amendment that makes it a priority to protect our environment, but that is just a step that needs other levels of support. It is a legislative tradition in Maine to ignore the Constitution at will until they suddenly support it as a matter of political convenience. It takes a village, as they say. Voices are needed to stand up and speak for environmental concerns at crucial moments such as the case today as my home town is entertaining an economic development proposal cloaked as a school, The forty-nine million dollar school system proposed for a peninsula which has neither the youth population nor the financial resources to support it, would require increasing the population on the peninsula, with a water supply that is qualified as “most at risk for new development” by state water quality standards.

The Falcon sculpted by Ian Peter Andersen in a white glaze falling over the natural brown slip. Photo by Mackenzie Andersen

The reason that I have a special perspective on the state of the water on the Boothbay Peninsula directly relates to the fact that Andersen Design has always made its casting slip from raw materials. It was during 2016, the last summer that we occupied our old homestead when we were no longer able to mix casting slip using the local water supply, which we had been doing since 1958.

That summer when we tried to mix casting slip, during that time when the local water had gone from Adam's Pond to the usual summertime source, Knickerbocker Lake, our casting slip which should have a viscosity equivalent to chocolate syrup, had instead the viscosity of a cookie batter.

In ceramics, deflocculents are used to adjust the viscosity, and very little is needed to do so but that summer no amount of deflocculent would bring the viscosity of the slip to a measure where it could function as casting slip. It took us a while to arrive at the unprecedented thought that the cause of our problems could be the local water supply but once we tried mixing a small batch of identical materials with water from a different source, the problem was solved. The test batch of the slip made with a different water supply made a perfect casting slip.

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Flocculants are used in cleaning a water supply. The only explanation for the inability to mix a perfect casting slip using the local water supply is that there were massive amounts of cleanser being added to Knickerbocker Lake. Why???

Adams Pond and Knickerbocker Lake currently meet state water quality standards, but both are listed on Chapter 502 of the Maine Stormwater Law as “Most at Risk from New Development” and on Maine’s NPS Priority Watersheds List. Adams Pond and Knickerbocker Lake Water Shed Protection Plan published 2015

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That summer there were two major construction projects underway (at least). The Botanical Gardens was constructing a large parking lot in the local watershed and a tree was planted in the middle of our main throughway. A road that was perfectly fine where it was, was moved to create an intersection that could be fashioned into a mini-roundabout the tree, that happens to be situated across from a former one-way street going roundabout our local commons with the new country club expanding aggressively behind it, making inroads into the roadway that was once the Commons roundabout.

I am of the opinion that neither of these projects should have been built. The parking lot in the watershed had been rejected by the town planners until the Botanical Gardens sued the town. The town immediately caved as Boothbay is not a political climate where anything can beat money. The cost of contesting the lawsuit could not be justified by a potential threat to the watershed. The Garden hired experts who reported that with new technology there is no problem. This year the Botanical Gardens is lobbying for botanical gardens to be included as an approved use in the watershed district. Then all the public can do is hope that honor and ethics will prevail at the Gardens and that they actually know what they are doing and care more about the watershed than for the profits they make from big crowd events.

The tree that was planted in the middle of the road is surrounded by stonework which gradually levels out onto the road. The graduating steps of the stonework are so close in color to the road that one can easily drive over it as it thins to almost level with the road. This is a small blessing in the event that there is ever a traffic mishap on the single-lane roundabout. Otherwise, the roundabout is a dysfunctional in-elegant road design that does not get any better with time. The curves of the new infrastructure are cramped. One feels a sigh of relief once past the new section and back on the older section with its smoothly winding country curves.

There was no particular reason for installing the roundabout. Politicians made much to do about a four-way stop that was out of the traffic flow of the main throughway. They portrayed the four-way stop as very dangerous, “because some drivers speed through it”, but I rarely experienced traffic at that intersection. On the other side of the Commons, there is an intersection that is very busy at times but nothing was done to address that intersection. Instead, the roundabout was installed where the Commons road joined the main throughway and a road leading up to the country club. By placing a roundabout in the middle of the road, the traffic patterns were changed, as if as a grand entrance to the country club, the roundabout created a new traffic flow going to and fro in the direction of the Botanical Gardens to the country club, obstructing the traffic traveling on the main throughway, where there is the highest volume of traffic.

The redesign of the traffic patterns expresses a political message that underscores today's political wealth divide. The travel to and from the Botanical Gardens to the country club is granted status to interrupt everyone traveling on the main way. The message is that folks doing their daily business must wait for or else barge into a parade transversing between the dominant financial powers. But in the case of drivers, they aren’t so subservient.

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In fact, after declaring that the four-way stop was excessively dangerous and so it needed to be replaced with a merging roundabout in the middle of the main throughway, commenters in the local newspaper took the attitude that if anyone didn’t like the new obstacle in the roadway, it is because they are scardiecat drivers, unlike themselves, hotshots who dauntlessly speed in and merge anywhere, without hesitation, something to be aware of, when you are the driver already traveling on the tiny roundabout. It is no wonder that the cars going to and fro from the Harbor aggressively claim the right of way over traffic already on the roundabout since the main way has long been a straight unobstructed road, and that is the way it should be today, were it not for politics and money.

If some drivers treat the roundabout as if it were the main throughway, as it has always been, and do not stop or slow down for anyone traveling from the other direction, I treat the intersection of Corey Lane like what it ought to be, as well, and if I see a flow of traffic traveling toward the roundabout, I wait for them to pass before entering, indulging in my fantasy that I am traveling on a normal, sane, road. Of course, the hotshots would call me an old lady driver but I don’t care. I have nothing to prove to them. It is they who have something to prove to me.

The worst transition is in making what should be a normal left-hand turn from the newly rerouted Corey Lane. Traffic going towards the Harbor looks like it might be making a turn onto Corey Lane until it doesn't. The tiny curve around the roundabout is forced and uncomfortable to drive on while one has to determine whether the cars coming from the Harbor are going to drive onto the roundabout without waiting for the cars already on it, because, after all, it should be their right of way, as it would be with sane traffic planning. Insanity breeds insanity.

Although it would be difficult to establish that these two projects were directly responsible for the excessive amount of cleansing agents dumped into Knickerbocker Lake in the summer of 2016. the agents of each project were directly cited as increasing the threat to Adams Pond and Knickerbocker lake in the report published by the Boothbay Region Water District in 2015:

Two large developments in Boothbay could further stimulate Boothbay’s seasonal and year round population growth and increase development pressure on the watershed. The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, a 270-acre attraction established in 2007, located partially in the watershed, received over 100,000 visitors in 2014. The Gardens plan a doubling of facilities and estimate visitor numbers will increase to 160,000 yearly by 2024. The Boothbay Harbor Country Club, also partially located in the watershed, is undergoing a major renovation under new owner Paul Coulombe. Coulombe is investing $30 million to establish a PGA level course, new clubhouse, cottages, spa, tennis courts, swimming pools and other amenities. Development associated with these major attractions coupled with the already above average growth trend in Boothbay increases the likelihood of watershed development and the NPS threat to the Adams Pond and Knickerbocker Lake. Adams Pond and Knickerbocker Lake Water Shed Protection Plan published 2015

Our business was damaged in 2016 by one useless and one wreckless project. Had we had been able to stay on our former property, we may not have been able to mix ceramic casting slip for our business in the summer when the Town is on the Knickerbocker Lake water supply and the Town leaders would not care unless we sued them but it would be hard to establish the direct cause of the excessive flocculents dumped into the water supply.

The Maine Legislature is partly responsible for the obstruction constructed in the middle of the road at the Boothbay Town Center. The Maine Legislature, ever in love with the cash flow delivered by “public-private relationships” has set up funding for infrastructure projects as a public-private relationship on a first-come-with-the-most-money in hand basis. The private developer is granted authority to oversee the infrastructure design. That is how our town came to have a tiny cramped roundabout placed in the middle of a formerly unobstructed main throughway.

If one is serious about prioritizing environmental protection, it will take more than a constitutional amendment. It will require a systematic reorganization of Maine statutes to that priority. As long as any private developer can buy the right to redesign our road systems causing needless havoc on the water supply in the process, our environment will not be protected.

And so I am going to leave it at that today, except to say to the people of Boothbay, look before you leap, look a gift horse in his mouth, and remember that the big mouth promoting the forty-nine million dollar school is the guy who brought us the tree in the middle of the road and forced us all to drive around it.

Originally published on Medium April 3 2p21 11:00 am

Mackenzie Andersen

What Do Lessons from the Industrial Revolution Have to Tell Us Today?

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 19:02:00 +0000

A historical reversal of direction underway?

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The nineteenth-century influenced the social-political and economic development of human life on earth in vibrant living color. Not! The nineteenth-century industrial revolution produced dreary over-crowded unsanitary conditions for human life, at its best.

While eleventh-century walls raised humanity out of fighting for survival to living for prosperity, the nineteenth-century steam power saved hours in production labor and sank humanity into a dank swamp of pollution and over-population. Even the baroque city, which Lewis Mumford detested for its hollow core, had its saving graces. If most of the population in a baroque city lived in squalor, the wealthy still created a healthy balanced living style for themselves, not so in the industrial revolution. The idea of a healthy relationship between humanity and nature was erased in the cities during the industrial revolution.

There is no more horrifying depiction of living conditions and environmental destruction during peacetime than in the chapter of The Culture of the Cities that Lewis Mumford titled THE INSENSATE INDUSTRIAL TOWN. “ One might almost measure the “prosperity” of the paleotechnic community by the size of its scrapheaps and junkpiles”, writes Mumford and later quotes Sir Patrick Geddes by describing the cities of the Industrial Revolution as “Slum, semi-slum, and super-slum”, encompassing the conditions in which all classes lived. Mumford derides Frederick Engles for suggesting that the nineteenth-century social problems could be solved by seizing the property of the upper classes for use by the proletariat when he writes: “But above all the suggestion was extremely naive because it did not perceive that the standards embodied in the more pretentious residences were below those which were desirable for human life. In other words, even this revolutionary critic was apparently unaware of the fact that the upper-class quarters were, more often than not, intolerable super-slums.

Mumford tells the history of cities from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century in minute detail, bringing to life the conditions under which people lived in each era, including sanitation, privacy, and access to fresh air, clean water, sunlight, and open spaces. In a recurring pattern, the history of cities is determined by technological innovation, development, and exploitation by capitalism leading to overcrowded cities with decreased access to the benefits of nature and large disparities in wealth redistribution.

The Saving Grace of Nineteenth-Century Was Incomplete Central Management

In the nineteenth century, the government had not yet solidified into complete central management from the federal to the municipal, as is more often than not the case today as wealth redistribution is used to advance a singular vision and mission at every level of society.

And so, as Mumford tells the story of the cities across the century, along the way, he recognizes the exception to the ordinary.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries certain fresh city forms came into existence ; they were characteristic of neither medieval nor baroque civilization. And these types, which are not “transitional” since they led only in their own direction, have more significance for us today than do the classic specimens of the period.

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Amsterdam is one such example, cited by Munford, for its well-planned waterways and consciousness of sunlight in its architectural design. Mumford describes Amsterdam as “a unified organism, not an abstract geometrical figure. “

The New England Town

Mumford also noted the exception to limitless population growth in the seventeenth-century New England town with its community design organized around a commons where the town hall and other meeting houses were situated, surrounded by residential buildings that included back yards large enough to grow gardens and apple orchards, while in the front, Main Street was lined with trees. As the cities grew more and more crowded, The New England Town was prescient about limiting population growth:

..the New England town during this period ceased to grow beyond the possibility of socializing and assimilating its members : when near crowding, a new congregation would move off under a special pastor, erect a new meeting house, form a new village, lay out fresh fields. Hiving off to new centers discouraged congestion in the old ones ; and the further act of dividing the land among the members of the community in terms of family need, as well as wealth and rank, gave a rough equality to the members, or at least guaranteed them a basic minimum of existence….A democratic polity-and the most healthy and comely of urban environments : a typical contrast to the despotic order of the dominant baroque city. To describe it is almost to define everything that the absolute order was not.

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How the historical character of a New England town was destroyed by an ill-placed roundabout in Boothbay Maine in the 21st century.

Meanwhile, in Europe, as cities were becoming methodically mechanized, the countryside was rejuvenated. The rural landscape was becoming more harmonized as scattered strips of fields were brought together. Wild forests became parks and the hand-industries left over-regulated towns and moved to the open air and freedom of rural communities. It was during the baroque era that the stone villages in the Cotswolds in England-Burford and Bibury, were built. Architect and furniture designer Ernest Gimson (1864–1919), founded the Cotswolds School. The Cotswolds School gathered artists wanting to live a simpler life and used traditional furniture-making hand techniques in their workshops. During the second half of the 19th-century, John Ruskin, a writer and art expert, and William Morris, a designer, poet, and novelist gave birth to the Arts and Crafts movement.

The progressive ideas of the times anchored authority and economic power in big cities, but as Mumford notes “The ruin of the balanced region, with a multitude of small cities and villages connected by a network of canals and roads, and amply supplied with water and wind power, has been little noted in political history”

History is most often told as the tale of dominant cultural forces. Mumford doesn’t add a new classification for this type of autonomous development. Mumford’s categories are dominants, recessives, mutants, survivors, and I am adding the independents. It is worthwhile to consider the impact of Independents as a history of its own, existing in every era. Independents, by definition, do not have a noticeable effect on mainstream movements in their own time, but they have an effect, as Mumford opines, over time, their significance grows stronger.

The New Migration: Urban to Rural

In the twenty-first century, coronavirus is a harbinger of unexpected intervention bringing on a new migration from the cities to rural communities. Given the symbiotic relationship between big business and big government, as one changes so must the other. Remote work heralds a new and permanent change in a corporate culture that is decentralizing and means fewer jobs to concentrate en masse in corporate welfare trade-offs as well as the possibility of attracting a well-to-do class of independents creating a new horizon in economic and rural development. In the cities, a less populated landscape and more unoccupied spaces will define the future as society ‘returns to normal” after coronavirus. Such marked cultural change is both unnerving and exciting.

A Watershed Moment Underway?

Hywel Williams, writing in the introduction to The History of Capitalism (2015) refers to the “determinist approach (that)was part of a fashionable consensus in Western historiography during the mid to late twentieth century.”

The deterministic approach in the USA was enacted as The United States Intergovernmental Cooperation Act Public Law 90–577 in 1968, as a design to centrally manage the economy of the entire Union from the federal to the municipal level, using the lure of redistributed wealth as its instrument. This grew into a cultural gestalt that generated a universal sameness everywhere, with Silicone Valley as the model unit to be replicated across the developed world. Even rural politicians sought to imitate cities by building business parks as if city blocks were dropped from the sky into a disassociated rural landscape. Towns serve as business hubs with less traveling distance between home and work, and there are plenty of stand-alone locations in natural surroundings but the “forward-thinking” politicians sold the business parks to the taxpayers at the expense of the surrounding communities, often continuing to subsidize the parks for decades on end. For no particular reason, other than perhaps the creation of tax-subsidized zones, business parks were sold as an economic development asset, with an apparent plan to transform historical rural towns into suburban bedroom communities for commuting workers, despite growing concerns about the effect of carbon emissions on global warming.

In 2015 Hywel Williams projected that the era of central management was already devolving through the natural process of thought, which soon grows tired of worn concepts and yearns to evolve beyond them:

Ideas that once seemed original and daring have a habit of turning into orthodoxies. And orthodoxies breed, in turn, a counter-reaction. The attempt to reduce historical experience to a series of socio-economic laws can now be dismissed as a dingy little episode in the history of ideas. Historical writing in our time has re-embraced narrative and chronology, the biographies of individual personalities, the unpredictability of events, and speculative thought that is inspired by the imagination rather than being determined by its context The History of Capitalism

The old guard will surely try to maintain the centrally managed society and will use all the tools at its disposal to maintain it, but in these very changing times, there is reason to stop, pause, look, and listen to the beat of other drums. Imagine a tapestry of independent rhythms, responding to the multi-level changes occurring around the world. Everything is changing. It takes time to process the new day that is dawning. Breathe.

Originally published at https://www.datadriveninvestor.com on March 22, 2021.

What is the Meaning of “Capitalism” and Other Out-Moded Terms?

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 13:45:00 +0000

Time for a Language Upgrade?

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In the Beginning:

The true history of eleventh-century civilization is a source of inspiration for contemporary apocalypse dramas. After five centuries of living in danger and uncertainty, walls were built around the town, so that the populous could focus on living rather than surviving. The church was the center of the community, attracting fairs, incorporating a marketplace and theatre, into its orbit. Technology had not developed to the stage that it required concentrated capital beyond the means of the ordinary citizen or town, creating an egalitarian society with a locally based economy in which wealth was created through production. Artisans and tradespeople typically made up four-fifths of the town populace. In the beginning, the economy grew through the activity of industrious producers before merchants gained dominance. Barter was the currency of exchange.

And so I wondered, does the early medieval society qualify as a capitalist society? That question led to The History of Capitalism, (2014), published by THE LEGATUM INSTITUTE “an international think-tank and educational charity focussed on promoting prosperity.”

Reconsidering the entrenched concepts

Using Marx’s concept, feudalism precedes capitalism and so feudalism cannot be capitalism, but, says author David Abulafia, writing in the chapter titled A Global Transition: From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, with a refreshingly open approach, the problem lies in how one defines capitalism.

While the medieval manor was a feudalistic system, the culture within the walled city created an alternative to feudalism, providing a way for a serf to become a freeman, by residing within the town for a year and a day.

Post-war Marxist historians, notably Maurice Dobb, Paul Sweezy and Rodney Hilton (who was the only one with a strong medieval research interest), were keen to find out how well the performance of the western European economy matched the sequences set out by Marx, and to identify the “solvent” that transformed socalled feudal society into capitalist society. But the problem lay in defining what this capitalist society was. The History of Capitalism David Abulafia

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Abulafia echoes Mumford when he contemplates a transitional period between feudalism to capitalism. Mumford breaks down the transitional process into dominants, recessives, mutants, and survivors. In the following quote, the Church is used in the example but the transitions can manifest through any cultural form:

In Rome before Constantine the Christian Church was a mutation …. In the medieval city the Church was a dominant….. In the great seventeenth century capitals, the Church had become a recessive : still an imposing visible presence, hut no longer a unifying and dynamic social force. In the metropolis today the Church is a survival: its power rests upon numbers, wealth, material organization, not upon its capacity to give its stamp to the daily activities of men Lewis Munford , The Culture of the Cities

The Contemporary Definition- Static or Transformative?

I decided to consult the contemporary dictionary definitions, as that should best represent what the term “capitalism” connotes in contemporary times.

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The first definition by Dictionary.com and is disingenuously constructed:

cap·i·tal·ism

an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

If a definition assigns a motive to one, it should assign a motive to the other and read like this:

cap·i·tal·ism

an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state for profit.

Or some other motive. How about:

cap·i·tal·ism

an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state for the betterment of mankind.

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Most people will acknowledge that all states do not function for the betterment of mankind. It gets very complicated when one assigns motives. I prefer definitions that do not presuppose motives:

cap·i·tal·ism

an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners, rather than by the state.

That is much cleaner, avoiding the following questions:

Is it possible that private owners can have motivations besides profit?

Is it the intention of the state to run industry for no profit?

Do non-profit entities NOT make profits?

If non-profits do not make profits, why are laws created by the state to allow non-profits to establish for-profit subsidiaries?

The term “non-profit” is a misnomer.

Non-profits can conduct profit-making activities. They are regulated differently than other for-profit entities, required to either break-even or show a negative balance at accounting time, and for this reason alone are branded “non-profits” despite their for-profit activities. It is more accurate to call them “Roll Over Organizations” Or “Evergreen Funds”, or “Roll Over B Corporations” meaning that they are legally required to distribute profits into the organizational cause.

To avoid showing a year-end profit, the so-called non-profits can invest profits in property and equipment and executives and staff. The IRS requires compensation packages for nonprofit executives and other nonprofit employees, to be reasonable, but does not define reasonable. In exchange for complying with regulations, non-profits can raise debt-free funding, not generally available to the free-enterprise sector, and use volunteer labor as long as volunteer labor is not employed in commercial activity unrelated to their non-profit purpose.

States can also charter non-profit corporations for public purposes, though some State Constitutions, such as the Constitution of Maine, Article IV, Part Third, section 14, prohibit the Legislature from chartering corporations. That constitutional prohibition has been ignored by the Maine Legislature since 1976 when the Maine Legislature deemed centrally managing the economy to be an essential government function, and ever since the state-corporate network has expanded, effectively transforming the State of Maine into a public development corporation in partnership with private corporations, all operating for the betterment of mankind, or so they say.

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Merriam-Webster has a better definition.

Definition of capitalism

: an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market Merriam Webster Dictionary

That makes more sense in that it does not attach motivation to private ownership, but if the term capitalism refers to only privately-owned capital goods, (and what is a capital good?”), is it NOT capitalism if a capital good is owned by a state corporation? - or a so-called public entity such as a State University — or a non-profit organization? Is it NOT capitalism if the public entity or private non-profit organization makes a profit from publicly-funded capital goods?

Is there a different term for identical functions merely because the agency of ownership is different? What do we call state capitalism, if the word “capitalism” signifies the character of the agent conducting the functions, rather than the function itself?

Does state-capitalism have a definitive existence?

I decided to look up “state capitalism” to see if I could find a term to define it which does not use the term “capitalism” since capitalism is defined as
“industry controlled by private ownership” occluding it from control by public ownership.

There is no definition for “state capitalism” on Dictionary.com, which defines “capitalism” as “private ownership of trade and industry”, making “state capitalism an oxymoronic term. Dictionary.com is sticking to its guns.

Merriam Webster defines state capitalism

Definition of state capitalism: an economic system in which private capitalism is modified by a varying degree of government ownership and control

So how does Merriam Webster define ”private capitalism”?

Answer: It doesn’t:

“private capitalism”

The word you’ve entered isn’t in the dictionary. Click on a spelling suggestion below or try again using the search bar above.

https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/private%20capitalism

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Let's try Merriam Webster for “free enterprise”

Definition of free enterprise

freedom of private business to organize and operate for profit in a competitive system without interference by government beyond regulation necessary to protect public interest and keep the national economy in balance

I decided to look for another definition of “private capitalism”.

A general google search resulted in switching the search term to “capitalism”.

People also ask

What is private capitalism?

Capitalism is an economic system in which private individuals or businesses own capital goods. The production of goods and services is based on supply and demand in the general market — known as a market economy — rather than through central planning — known as a planned economy or command economy.Apr 6, 2020

Is there more than one type of capitalism?

Under “ People also ask” I found this, which is more interesting:

What are the three types of capitalism?

The three types of Capitalism are:

Pure Capitalism.

Laissez-faire Capitalism.

Right Wing Socialism.

The above question and answer is attributed to You Create Money, A Producer Rewarded Economic System

So we are back to where this story began in the medieval city wherein economic growth was the result of the productive activity of the populous, eighty percent of whom were producers. This site looks interesting to explore, but that is for another day.

Is there a new “radicalism” brewing that defines the function as the function rather than the agent of the function?

I am not yet ready to put forth a new definition of capitalism but my inquiry has produced two interesting resources that appear to be sharing my wavelength I have not attempted to examine the term” socialism” herein, an ever-popular buzz word in right-wing memes, and so I end this inquiry with the observation that the term “socialism” is a born of a time preceding the rise of fiat currency, calling for a reconsideration of everything.

Originally published at https://www.datadriveninvestor.com on March 19, 2021.

Lewis Mumford, A Thinker for the Ages Tells a Tale Of Cities Since the Middle Ages

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 16:15:00 +0000

In the beginning, the religiously centered city

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My Dad often spoke about his admiration for Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 — January 26, 1990) but I had never read Mumford and so when I saw a paper in my email on Lewis Mumford, I downloaded it, which only made me want to read Mumford in his own words.

Although Mumford was an influential inspiration in Europe after World War II, it was not easy to find works by Mumford online.

Finally, I found The Culture of the Cities by Lewis Mumford available in full on Monoskop.com, billed as a wiki for arts, media, and humanities.

Mumford describes The Culture of the Cities as a companion volume to Technics and Civilization saying in the introduction that “ each seeks to explore what the modern world may hold for mankind once men of goodwill have learned to subdue the barbarous mechanisms and the mechanized barbarisms that now threaten the very existence of civilization. “

Writing in a poetic voice and analytical mind, Mumford tells a tale of cities that spans centuries, condensing history into a time kaleidoscope that turns and the world transforms. Functionality and purpose are the rudiments cyclicly reinvented by and through one cultural modality, and then another, brought to life by Mumford’s insightful attention to detail as though it all exists simultaneously in a universally present moment.

Munford’s story takes off in the Middle Ages, covering the tenth to the sixteenth centuries when the medieval city flourished, enclosed within walls that provided the security needed to foster a peacetime existence. Mumford tells of Middle Age cities that were organically organized in a decentralized architectural design and political structure, spaces facing enclosed outdoor courts where gardens grew and nature intermingled in the crevices of urban life

In Mumford’s tale, the city is a stage for human drama, which in medieval times was organized around religious life. The church was the learning and spiritual center of the community, wherein or about, essential social functions took form. The church at the center of community organization was neither a political or economic player. It was a spiritual institution, gathering other functions around it through its capacity to gather a congregation. In the eleventh century, markets formed around the church as privileges to provide a market, mint coins, and collect taxes were usually granted to religious proprietors rather than to the feudal lords.

Munford claims that it was not the roaming traders that spurred urban growth but the producers. Even at a period later than the eleventh century, the producers in the early medieval town composed about four-fifths of the inhabitants.

As Mumford breaks down the transitional process of civilization, in which one cultural form transforms into another, to three components, the dominant culture, the mutant culture (in today’s terminology, disruptive), and the survivor culture. In the eleventh century, the mutant culture is capitalism:

It (capitalism) supplanted the old protective economy, based on status, mollified by religious precept, by a trading economy based on individual enterprise and the lust for gain : the economic history of the town is largely a story of the transformation of a group of protected producers living in a state of relative equality, into a small group of privileged merchants for whom the rest of the population ultimately toils Lewis Mumford The Culture of the Cities

In the early Middle Ages, town-building became a major industry, but it contained a conflict of interest within it that would eventually bring down the institutions of feudalism. In order to attract the labor needed to secure and build the town, the serfs were enticed with an opportunity to be released from bondage.

From the tenth century onward, towns developed as sovereign authorities, governing themselves and holding the privileges formerly exclusive to the church, privileges to provide a market, mint coins and collect taxes. The city charter, formed under the patronage of feudal lords, served as a social contract granting the corporate towns legal authority and military security. Military needs preceded economic needs as inhabitants were recruited to defend the new territory when the lords expanded their land ownership and constructed new walled towns or fortresses. The serfs lived in bondage but had a permanent claim to the land. In order to lure the serf into settling the fortress, the serf who took up residence in a corporate town for a year and a day earned his status as a freeman.

According to Mumford, this negotiation attracted the best of the rural craftsmen and trade classes into the cities. However, it seems more objective to say that it attracted those personality types who prefer the adventure of risk-taking over the stability of security and constancy in their lives. The talented serf, working on the land, might have been content in his connection to land and lord, while to another, the urban environment offered an environment of diverse possibilities and opportunities to carve new pathways, and most importantly to become a freeman, under the law. This created cultural mobility and the rise of a trading class.

Between the eleventh and the thirteenth-century, technology in the arts and science of agriculture developed dramatically. New sources of power came about through watermills and windmills which in turn transformed mining and metallurgy, changing the need for labor. Barter was replaced by money and servitude became contractual work. All of this released human energy for other purposes and brought about increases in population growth. Mumford compares this era of rapid European settlement to the settling of the American continent between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries.

Over time the technology of war wrought changes that shifted the center of power from defense to assault, requiring changes in the construction of the walls around the city that made them less adaptable to outward expansion. If the feudal landlords needed money to fight a war or for other purposes, he could divide the land within the walled city into more parts and so collect more rent, and thus life within the walls become overcrowded. The more complex walls needed for defense prevented outward expansion, causing the city to grow vertically. The open natural spaces of the Medieval city were built over.

A secondary means that lords had for increasing their income was through fees, tolls, and taxes, which also multiplied as the town became more populated. The need for urban labor drained the supply of rural labor and antagonisms developed between the urban and rural dwellers with urbanites developing attitudes of snobbery that Mumford describes as that which “ only the upstart and the nouveau riche can achieve.”

The end of the Middle Ages came about when the mutant culture (capitalism) became the dominant culture pushing the religious culture into survivor status. At the beginning of the Middle Ages security was rooted in faith but as the Middle Ages transformed into the Baroque period, faith as the basis of security was replaced with credit. As Mumford points out, the greatest loss in this exchange was that the culture held together by religion universalized the cloister, an inner sanctum where the inner life could flourish.

At the same time, to exist, in the Middle Ages, one had to belong to an association. Outside of the church, and the home, the most common form of association was the guild, which began as a religious brotherhood under the patronage of a saint, and then an association of craftsmen or merchants. As Munford describes the guilds “ they formulated regulations for the conduct of their craft: they planned and paid for and enacted their parts in their mystery plays, for the edification of their fellow-townsmen: and they built chapels, endowed chantries, and founded schools “

Over time, the cost of these buildings led to higher entrance fees for the guild restricting membership to the more wealthy members of the community, giving rise to a wealthy patricide of crafters who handed the privileges down through heredity and excluded the poorer craftsmen and the expanding proletariate. By the end of the Middle Ages, the wealthy had taken over the functions of the guilds, endowing schools and providing housing for the unfortunate, while despots took over the political functions of society.

As the capitalist functions expanded, other social functions shrank, the guilds all but disappeared into one main survivor. The name of the surviving guild was originally a common term used for any guild in the twelfth century. It was a university, whose purpose was to prepare for a vocation and to regulate vocational practices. The guilds survived as a culture that was no longer rooted in spirituality, the dominant culture at the time the first guilds were formed. Today. more often than not, universities serve the agenda of the capitalist culture of today’s corporate state.

The Middle Ages begins as a society of shared opportunities and responsibilities and ends as a culture with a great wealth divide and transitions into the baroque city wherein the masses served the benefit of a few who led an opulent and leisurely lifestyle. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, a neighborly spirit of working together provided the security needed for a peaceful existence. By the end of the Middle Ages, protecting the walls between the classes held more priority than protecting the city within the walls.

However taken as a whole, Mumford quotes historian Charles Gross (1857–1909), who described the Middle Ages as a time when “ Exclusive of the inhabitants of the privileged sakes, the . . . population was more homogeneous than that of towns existing at present; there were in the former fewer class distinctions, more equality of wealth, and more harmony of interests than in the latter. “

Mumford tells the story through the buildings, the arts, and the sciences, and of course capital, both in the sense of capital cities and capitalization. The only way to give his illustrious writing style justice is to end this review with a quote from The Culture of the Cities by Lewis Mumford:

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind. For space, no less than time, is artfully reorganized in cities: in boundary lines and silhouettes, in the fixing of horizontal planes and vertical peaks, in utilizing or denying the natural site, the city records the attitude of a culture and an epoch to the fundamental facts of its existence. The dome and the spire, the open avenue and the closed court, tell the story, not merely of different physical accommodations, but of essentially different conceptions of man’s destiny. The city is both a physical utility for collective living and a symbol of those collective purposes and unanimities that arise under such favoring circumstance. With language itself, it remains man’s greatest work of art

Originally published at https://www.datadriveninvestor.com on March 11, 2021.

Is Boothbay the right location for a forty nine million dollar school system?

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Sun, 28 Feb 2021 22:38:00 +0000

History Repeats Its Self. To Chart Where We Are Headed, Follow the Past!

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Published on Medium's Age of Awareness as A School System Should Not Be Approached as an Instrument of Gentrification

Recently I contacted a law firm specializing in non-profits about forming a 501(3)(c), which can function as a fiscal sponsor as I described in How Marxian Indoctrination Sustains The Great Wealth Divide. It was through the process of writing that I came to the realization that Andersen Design is ideally suited to create a new fiscal sponsorship model, or adapting existing ones, to benefit the maker first as opposed to the investment community first, relegating the producer and researcher to a secondary cause.

It was a fine conversation but the law firm is beyond my budget at an estimated cost of $22000.00 to help with the legal formation of a non-profit museum. I did not get to explore whether they are significantly motivated by the social and creative act of developing the model of fiscal sponsorship to benefit the makers and researchers. I was talking to the person who fields the calls and I was also fielding the potential expense as the information I wanted to clarify with my first call. Given those parameters, the call was more engaging than anticipated,

As is to be expected it was said that it would be easier to find a fiscal sponsorship than become a 501(3)(C) Museum that is itself a fiscal sponsor, but in fact, it is not easier, as I explained that there is only one existing fiscal sponsor for makers that I have been able to locate, just as there was only one bureaucrat governing the SBIR grants.

More on that later. On the local community front, in the local newspaper, there suddenly appeared a drawing board plan for a forty-nine million dollar school system, which also included "accepting unconditional donations to fund the approximately two and a half million phase, establishing a building committee which will solicit an architectural firm and, after the design is done, set a CSD-wide referendum".

I am opposed to this plan as it seems, and indeed is spoken about, as a gentrification plan, without much discussion about education and contextual issues, such as the fact that the Boothbay Peninsula has a very small number of young people. Therefore it is presented as if it is a plan to attract families with young people to the region, as opposed to serving the interest of an existing populous. Paul Coulombe, the pro-active private developer, makes the point that the people who work at Bigelow labs do not live in the region, and suggests that building a forty-nine million dollar school system will encourage them to do so. Could it be that the rising costs of real estate, driven by the tourist industry that Coulombe has been aggressively pushing toward becoming a wealth elite destination, is a reason why the cost of first home housing is not competitive? Perhaps the workers at Bigelow labs find it a fair trade-off to travel a short distance every day in order to get a better deal on a property in a surrounding town. The expenses that our gentrification cult keeps coming up with every six months is not helping to make housing affordable and this is the most massive expense introduced yet.

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There is no real plan for financing the forty-nine million dollar expense. Coulombe mumbles on about doing a non-profit fundraiser but even he, when asked, admitted that he did not anticipate that fundraising would come close to footing the bill. Looming in the background is the Confucius Institute at the University of Maine, owned, funded, and operated by the Chinese Government. The Confucius Institutes have been on a human rights and national security watch for years. Today some states are closing the Confucius Institutes, while others are expanding them to K-12 schooling, with funding from the Chinese government.

Behind this push for an expensive school system, is a questionable attitude that easily falls from the tongues of the proponents in their manner of assuming that all our local communities are in competition with each other. At the same time that I am listening to this conversation, I am reading Lewis Mumford, a favorite influence in my Dad's thinking. Mumford is not as well known as Karl Marx and so it was not easy to find his works online, but I found a full PDF version of the Culture of the Cities, which begins with the Medieval City. I am up to the Baroque City, a centralized culture that Mumford detested and does not hold back on saying so.

One of Mumford's point is that in the 17th city, the capital city was grown at the expense of everywhere else:

The state grew at the expense of the component parts: the capital city grew out of all proportion to the provincial cities, and in no small measure at their expense. Though natural capitals were usually situated at points of special advantage for trade and military defense-these being elements that entered originally into their selection-the baroque rulers brought all the powers of the state to bear to confirm these advantages. Where a natural center was lacking, they imitated at a distance Peter the Great's colossal willfulness in the founding of St. Petersburg. Lewis Mumdord- the Culture of the Cities

This, along with other passages about the baroque city makes a fitting picture of attitudes found by a certain class of people in Boothbay, who fancy themselves to be economic development leaders but they are really only gentrification developers.

Mumford likes the Medieval city much better than what followed because it was a more egalitarian culture.

Dropping the town competition angle, and taking a wider view, a school of the expense being proposed makes more sense as a regional school located in the town with the most pre-existing young people, not the town with the fewest.

A regional location would draw support and funding from a wider base. It would be much better for the kids to be exposed to a larger more diverse culture and economic strata than the location of a school on the Boothbay Peninsula permits. Located on the peninsula, the school would raise the property taxes and move Boothbay further in the direction of being an exclusive community for the wealthy only. The gentrification cult tells us that the increased property taxes will allow the town to build affordable housing conjuring up visions of an upstairs-downstairs community, but what is missing is this picture is the same thing that was missing in the picture of the baroque city, as Mumford pointed out:

Truth is that something vital had been forgotten in the culture of the baroque gentleman ; and it was naturally missing from the cities he conceived and executed. What was this element-religion? Not in externals, for in sheer mass of building the Church continued to occupy an undiminished place in the city. What was lacking in this scheme was suitable provision for work. No interest in labor as such : hence no suitable provision for the workplaces of industry, or even for the counting houses of the merchant, on the city plan

Are new residents supposed to move to Boothbay to live in affordable housing so that the kids can attend an expensive school? Then what? The young still move away because there is no culture to encourage them to stay?

Instead of making people move to where the school is, why not put the school where the kids are? Why spend a fortune on a gamble? Why not at least start by placing an expensive school in a location where it can draw on the largest base of existing students?

And why are we trying to overcrowd our peninsula? For increased property taxes? Overcrowding was one of the main causes that destroyed the natural balance and equitable culture of the medieval city.

The proposed school will teach the state agenda, being that the Maine Legislature has jurisdiction over all public education in Maine and uses it in the interests of the State's targeted industrial sector, like a development corporation. That means teaching the skills that are being favored everywhere, demanded by new technology. Imagine that school located close to Boothbay but off the Peninsula.

Now imagine a Museum of American Designer Craftsmen being located in Boothbay, and that it has a purpose that allows it to serve the historical functions that a museum served for the historical cottage industries, celebration and recognition, education, including making education, and economic development. Imagine a community of makers growing through the presence of the museum, an occupation that attracts all ages. That is industry, which can engage more industry and an industrial spirit and culture, and creates an identity beyond your everyday megalopolis.

Published on Medium's Age of Awareness as A School System Should Not Be Approached as an Instrument of Gentrification

How Marxian Indoctrination Sustains The Great Wealth Divide

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 18:50:00 +0000

Carving a Way Back to Fairer Distribution

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This story was Selected for Best of Tremr! Also published on Medium in The Shadow

Stop Trying to Make Sense of the World- Just Deal With it As it Really Is

Recently I spend three weeks as volunteer labor writing a review of a paper about a nineteenth-century philosopher known for advocating the abolition of private property.

I was reviewing a paper for publication consideration in a global peer-to-peer academic publishing organization in which the primary shareholders are deeply invested in global publishing, financial assets, and real estate across the western world.

I was approached by the organization in a manner of a non-profit organization, asking for a donation, not of money, but of my services.

I have a proclivity to place other purposes before money and so providing volunteer services to a wealthy for-profit organization is worth it for what it delivers in karmic justice. It gives me a voice in deciding which papers are to be published. It is particularly meaningful when the subject is a nineteenth-century philosopher deeply entrenched into an academic culture that produces graduates who become the deciders about who gets the portions of the global pudding of redistributed wealth.

I am undecided about whether the deciders of our fates are merely products of indoctrination, or are the self-aware manipulators of culturally embedded indoctrination, using it to the benefit of their own self-interest. Either way. it is to the benefit of all mankind to pierce the balloons of indoctrination with the pin of perception. I am but one among many of the Invisibles and this is my story.

I am the outsider that the nineteenth-century philosopher, wrote about. By the philosopher’s own definition, the outsider is not recognized. Thus the nineteenth-century philosopher did not recognize me, so blinded was he to the quality of work, by the quality of ownership, that he pushed my class of small entrepreneurs who are at once workers and owners, to the outside of what was to become the global world order, where the class of small entrepreneurs remains in today’s world.

For the love of the work process or love of money, that is the question. to which, she said, which came first, the chicken or the egg? photo by author

While I was doing the review, I had to think about Marx.

Marx is like a cake mixed with ingredients of self-contradictions, topped with a very thick frosting of diatribes directed at undifferentiated masses participating in one social order or another, the nineteenth-century version of the internet meme. I have no idea what is the percentage of frosting on the cake as reading Marx makes me feel like I, or some other group, is being beaten upon, and then I stop reading.

However, given Marx’s enduring popularity, there must be a nugget of truth worthy of recognition. In my own thinking, I aim to separate the truth at the core from the misleading diatribes. In a nutshell, I agree with Marx on one point, that money is often made into the exclusive measure of value and that nurtures inauthenticity in both the individual and society. I do not agree that there is one monetary system in which all participants are exclusively motivated by self-interest and care only about money, and another monetary system operating exclusively from a pure unselfish interest for the betterment of mankind and our environment, nice branding if it flies.

It needs to be recognized that in the contemporary order, that even if the cultural economic distinctions of Marxian ideology were true, today the oppositional structures (for-profit, non-profit, public-private) are so entwined in a symbiotic relationship that there is little difference between them as they are inseparably united in the embrace of a wealth-redistribution economy that trades in debt-free capital and fiat currency.

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One day as my thoughts were wrapped up in the philosophy of Marxism, I noticed a little gray arrow on my Facebook messages pointing right, to which I had never paid much attention. There I found a message from last September from the Communications Director of the Maine Development Foundation, saying she had read one of my blog posts, which she did not name, but, she said, they would like to meet with me, suggesting sometime in October “to ensure we understand and address your concerns/questions”. That means they want oversight on what I publish, but have no interest in my economic development vision.

I wrote back, saying I couldn’t think of any questions about the Maine Development Foundation at this time and pitched my own economic development vision instead, neither anticipating nor receiving a response from the Maine Development Foundation. The Communications Director at a large organization only wears one hat, unlike me, as Communications Director of Andersen Design, wearing so many hats that I don’t bother with titles. Perhaps I should just put on a bonnet inscribed with “Everything is Everything” and schedule a meeting with one of the compartmentalized directors of MDF.

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The Maine Development Foundation was chartered by the Maine Legislature when it created the command economy in 1976. At that time, Maine had the fastest-growing small enterprise economy, composed of businesses employing up to 100 people, in the nation. Andersen Design was one of those businesses.

As the command economy grew, it came to be governed by boards, opaque to public view, like the Wizards of Oz — photo by agnieszka-kowalczyk — unsplash

In 1976, Maine’s Governor Longley created a task force composed of the heads of Maine’s largest and wealthiest businesses in the state, which used the fact that small businesses have a more difficult challenge in finding capital than larger ones as justification for establishing a centrally managed economy which would come to the aid of small businesses and help them find capital. The specific argument was that equity capital would be much more advantageous to the small businesses of Maine than the more commonly available debt capital, although each has its own advantages and drawbacks. Debt capital is expensive but does not require an exchange in ownership as does equity capital, but the State had its own preferences and so deemed the centrally managed economy into existence on claims of serving the benefit of the small business economy.

The report concocted by Governor Longley’s board recommended that The Maine Capital Corporation be chartered to help small businesses with financing, but to all that I have been able to discover, the Maine Capital Corporation mainly benefited investors by providing them with lavish refundable tax credits and did very little for small businesses, setting the model for all that followed. I have documented that story in I am a Baby Boomer, and this is the story of how my generation let the great wealth divide happen;

Two grids acting together as the new centrally managed economy of a formerly free state. alex-wong-unsplash

The Governor’s Task Force report recommended that two complimentary corporations be chartered by the Legislature, The Maine Capital Corporation, and the Maine Development Foundation, which is not a foundation, in the traditional meaning of the word. If I am wrong on that, I welcome being corrected, but to my knowledge, the Maine Development Foundation does not fund charitable activities.

Better is always better.

If one were to take the rationalization about the superiority of equity capital to debt capital as a real and valid motivation for establishing a centrally managed economy, including the chartering of the Maine Development Corporation, and if one were to accept that the motivation for instituting the command economy of Maine was the selfless desire of the founders to serve the interests of the pre-existing small enterprise economy, and then extrapolate that into today’s world, the argument would be that debt-free capital, sourced in foundations and other non-profit funding resources, is better than debt capital or equity capital for the small business sector. Debt-free capital sourced in non-profit funding allows the recipient to retain ownership, beating out equity capital.

However if one is to look instead at how the centralized economy has worked in practice, one might conclude that the overlords of central management understand why debt-free capital is better and that therefore its benefits should be reserved for the investment community to be loaned to the small business class for a profit scaled to fit the non-profit purpose of the parent organization.

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Social-Economic Justice

As this story shall demonstrate, every other sector has access to debt-free capital, why not the small business operating in the free enterprise sector, which is taxed to subsidize the command economy’s corporate welfare for large businesses? Shouldn’t what goes around, come around? The large corporations, subsidized by the taxpayers via the corporate state are traded on the stock market wherein profit is the bottom line. Large corporations accumulate large concentrations of wealth which are used to fund foundations distributing debt-free capital to non-tax-paying non-profits. Some non-profits are merged into the corporate state, while the private non-profits establish their own for-profit subsidiaries. For the tax-paying small business free-enterprise, at the roots of the economy, what goes around, doesn’t come around.

The small businesses and entrepreneurs are what makes for a thriving middle sector of the economy, the remedy to the ever-escalating wealth divide.

Fiscal Sponsorship has the potentiality to create a more fair and balanced wealth redistribution system, by distributing opportunity, in the form of debt-free capital, on a more equitable basis.

The pawn or the king- that is the question. jeshoots-com-unsplash

Fiscal Sponsorship, not defined by law, but within the law.

I first became aware of fiscal sponsorship via Fractured Atlas, which deals in fiscal sponsorship for the arts. I operated under the assumption that it was part of the tax code, defined in a legislative act. In the era of Benefit Corporations, which allows a company with shareholders to prioritize values other than profit, it followed that the small business free enterprise should be recognized in public policy as serving purposes beyond the purely monetary. Small enterprises are not traded on the stock market and are not obligated to shareholders to prioritize profit over all else. A small business does not need a new legal structure such as the benefit corporation to grant permission to order our priorities according to our own individualistic values systems. We already have that freedom.

Neutrality Under the Law

Operating under the assumption that fiscal sponsorship was defined by law, it seemed plausible that federal law would not be based on assumptions about the future intentions of the sponsored project to become a 501(3)(C) organization, even though the non-profit community promotes it that way. The crafting of the language stated on various non-profit websites came across as non-profit bias, designed to give the impression that intent to become a 501(3)(C) is somehow or other, mandatory, but not convincingly so.

Eventually, I came upon a discussion of the new Fiscal Sponsorship Model L, wherein it states that a project does not have to have intentions to become a 501(3)(C):

On the other hand, Model A would be more appropriate if the project has an uncertain future, or if the organizers have no intention of going through the expensive process of setting up a new corporation, obtaining IRS recognition of tax-exempt status, and then administering a stand -alone nonprofit

The Use of LLC in Fiscal Sponsorship- A New Model L

Still, the language has a motivational implication, that the reason one would not want to become a non-profit organization is mere concern about the expense of the process, recognizing only a monetary reason for wanting to remain in the free enterprise economy.

This Eastern Bluebird is one of a large line of sculptures designed by our family finished in original glazes and decorated colors Photo by author

There is another more fundamental reason that makes the free enterprise small entrepreneurial world attractive. It is having the autonomy to make one's own decisions, and to avoid having others in controlling authority over the important decisions in one’s enterprise and thereby redefining the identity of the enterprise without concern for the authentic purpose of the enterprise. Such an attempt to redefine our purpose is exactly what Andersen Design encountered when it applied for fiscal sponsorship, but ultimately fiscal sponsorship is a potential benefit if looked at through a different lens and approached in another way.

A Convenient Way with Words

In the process of trying to figure out the ins and outs of what was actually going on, I encountered a proclivity in non-profit policy statements for an oddly structured language such as:

For a for-profit subsidiary, the Parent prepares the Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws. The Parent as shareholder should have the right to vote for the board of directors, the right to remove directors without cause at any time, and the right to approve any amendments. The Parent should make a reasonable contribution to the subsidiary’s capital. Formation and capitalization of the subsidiary should comply with state and federal securities laws. Forming a Subsidiary of a Nonprofit, Charitable Tax-exempt Corporation

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The Natural Order

The basic legal rule of thumb is that when something is mandatory the legal term is “shall”, and when it is optional, the legal term is “may”. Articles of Incorporation have a descriptive function that informs what can be done. The term “should” is usually used as a form of advice: “You should do this- because you can do this, but it’s optional, not required.” Structurally, optional advice does not belong in a basic description of permitted parameters.

Then I came across this statement on the America Bar Association:

Because fiscal sponsorship does not refer to a relationship that is defined by the law, it may take many different forms.

That changed everything about my understanding of fiscal sponsorship as I considered the descriptions found about fiscal sponsorship in the context of encounters with the non-profit sector in a free market environment. The non-profit sector does not abide by the common law of the free-market sector but makes its own rules (models), commonly to benefit the organization, first and foremost.

Non-Profits Re-define Common Laws of Free Enterprise

A few years ago I was exploring juried craft shows. Most asked a jury fee of $35.00. It is appropriate to ask a jury fee for a juried show that is on display for a limited time and it is common practice to submit slides of one’s work online.

In the process, I came across a partnership between a government quasi and a non-profit organization collaborating on a retail store featuring hand-made works. While vendors selling other products such as books or music were treated by the standard rules of retailing, the collaboration was charging a jury fee of $60.00 to craft vendors to present their work to buyers. The craft vendors had to drive on long icy winter roads to specific locations and times to show their work to “jurors” as the buyers were called. There were no terms of agreement specified, such as whether the retail venue would purchase the work or expect to display it on unspecified terms of the consignment. In essence, it was being run as a fund-raising event for the non-profit and broke long-honored conventions of the free market place. Andersen Design has sold to many prestigious retail venues but never, ever, have we been asked to pay a fee to show our work to a retail buyer.

The Gentle Sandpiperby Andersen Design Photo by author

I believe Andersen Design’s work would sell very well in the location but I am not willing to support the transformation of the common rules of doing business in a way that exploits the maker in order to advantage the retailer, especially not by an organization whose non-profit purpose is to support the makers. I asked the organization why they were charging a jury fee for a retail store. I was told, “Because we are in it for the public good” implying that I, as a representative of a free enterprise designer-craftsman company, was only in it for the money.

Legal Creativity Within the Law

A historical timeline following the development in thinking about fiscal sponsorship.

The following item from the above timeline explains why the Maine Technology Institute is chartered as a nonprofit corporation with public and charitable purposes. MTI is operated through an independent board that is authorized to make a profit and acquire intellectual property rights. Since MTI is a public corporation chartered by the Maine Legislature, its organization is more transparent than its private non-profit counterparts, but the concept of a legal channel that funnels non-profit fundraising to for-profit investors is prevalent everywhere and takes on many forms.

An Act of Congress

1969 — The most significant development in fiscal sponsorship since 1954 was Congress amending the Internal Revenue Code by dividing 501(c)(3) organizations into public charities and private foundations. As a result, public charities became magnets for sponsored projects, spawning the growth of fiscal managers mistakenly called fiscal agents. This popular term suggested the manager works for the project instead of having sole discretion for the charitable contributions.

Not an Act of Congress:

2011 — Description of new Model L published. In this model, the fiscal sponsor acts as the sole member of an LLC, a limited liability company, and the project is operated from within this separate entity; if properly done, the sponsor should have no liability for LLC’s debts and obligations

According to the Description of new Model L, by the Alder Colvin Law Group, Model L is a parent-subsidiary model. The legal discussion in the Non-Profit Limited Liability Company by the NEO Law Group, states that “ technically there is no such thing as a non-profit LLC but for the purposes of this article, I’ll refer only to tax-exempt LLCs that are organized and operated for charitable purposes” and goes on to describe that the LLC can directly apply for 501(3)(C) status, or take on the characteristics of its sole member, a 501(3)(C), or act as a pass-through organization for all its members which are 501(3)(C) organizations. The reason the LLC is not technically a non-profit is that while it may be exempt from federal taxes, it is not necessarily exempt from state income and property taxes. On the other hand, a non-profit can own its own LLC.

Since the models are not created by Acts of Congress, they are created by lawyers, and other models can likewise be developed.

The Barred Owl in Natural Brown by Andersen Design Photo by author

All the models I have observed have mainly created investment subsidiaries and perhaps a housing subsidiary or a special interest consistent with the federal and state, taxpayer-subsidized “targeted sectors”. State corporations are more transparent than private organizations since the charters of state corporations are a matter of public law, but in a world that embraces the public-private relationships, the boundaries are blurry. Every which way one turns, there is a new model developed to facilitate the transfer of non-profit fundraising to for-profit investment groups. Since information is scarce and requires fact-checking, it is not possible to say definitively that the profits made by for-profit subsidiaries of non-profit organizations are uniformly invested back into the organization as an “evergreen” or “roll-over” fund — or if some seeps over into private profit of partners associated with the non-profit organization. Everywhere diverse rivers of concentrated wealth enhanced by tax-payer subsidies and non-profit fundraising are flowing together, by design, where they mix and merge before they come out, on the other side, potentially in a new transformation.

SEE MODELS FOR FISCAL SPONSORSHIP

Everybody's Doing It

Today, we’re announcing the creation of a new entity to advance Fractured Atlas’s mission of democratizing access to the arts and advancing human creativity: Exponential Creativity Ventures, a new investment enterprise that will make early stage investments in start-ups that are innovating at the intersection of technology and human creative capacity. year 2017

Today a search for Exponential Creativity Ventures leads to “website expired”
But the 2017 Fractured Atlas Blog is still live as is this 2018 page about it on Cornerstone Capital Group. The 2017 blog refers to “Fractured Atlas, our nonprofit parent organization,….So, with an initial $2 million commitment from Fractured Atlas at the start of this year, we officially launched Exponential Creativity Ventures, a $20 million evergreen fund investing in human-centered creativity platforms,…..Before re-entering the creative tech space as venture capitalists, we first had to ask: Would there be sufficient deal flow to achieve both the social and financial returns we were targeting?….Within our first month, we met with hundreds of great companies in their earliest stages.”

These plans coincide with the time during which Andersen Design applied to Fractured Atlas for fiscal sponsorship as a social enterprise for our historical ceramic design and slip-cast production enterprise. At that time Fractured Atlas had been operating as a Model C fiscal sponsor, and I was unaware of its behind-the-scenes transformation into a Model L fiscal sponsor.

Model C. Where the individual or entity who approaches the sponsor becomes a grantee of the sponsor (but the project activity is not absorbed into the sponsor), we call this “Model C,” “indirect” or “re-grant” fiscal sponsorship. The sponsor receives donations for the project’s purposes, retains discretion and control over the funds , grants them for project purposes, and requires reports to confirm that funds were spent properly.

The intermediary between ourselves and the board was fully confident that Andersen Design would qualify based on our life-long history of teaching the skills of making ceramics on the job. After taking an inordinately long time to decide, the board rejected our application stating that we were rejected because I used the word “production” on the application, which the board declared to signify that one is only in it for the money.

Large Seal by Andersen Design in interactive glaze and decorating colors developed by Andersen Design Photo by author

Meanwhile, the CEO of Fractured Atlas was starting a venture capitalist entity under the parent company, Fractured Atlas. The mission of the new entity is said to be “to advance Fractured Atlas’s mission of democratizing access to the arts and advancing human creativity: Exponential Creativity Ventures, a new investment enterprise that will make early-stage investments in start-ups that are innovating at the intersection of technology and human creative capacity”

The laws governing fiscal sponsorship require that the fiscally sponsored project, serve the mission of the sponsor, which for Fractured Atlas is listed as “arts, culture and other” and consistent with Andersen Design’s long history of ceramic art and design and running production as an art form.

Even if it were true that Andersen Design is “only in it for the money”, it would not change the fact that Andersen Design has been teaching the skills of making ceramics on the job since 1952 and so we meet the requirement of Fractured Atlas’s stated non-profit purpose. Something else was going on.

After rejecting for the long-standing purpose of our business, the board advised that we could apply as a museum or a school but as a school, we would be forbidden to teach others how to make our designs, excepting they would allow us to teach how to make our original glazes that are our own intellectual property and central to our brand signature.

Small Melon Vase in Blueberry Glaze designed by Weston Neil Andersen for Andersen Design Photo by author

On the spur of the moment I decided to apply for a museum, Despite our lack of experience and background in running a museum we were readily approved for a museum, a museum based on a company that is only in it for the money, apparently. It was nonsensical. Was it appeasement of guilt or a negotiation tactic between those who supported us and those who opposed us?

The fact that Fractured Atlas rejected Andersen Design for its long-standing historical purpose for which we have a lifetime of experience, and then advised us to apply for a different purpose for which we have no background, supports the theory that Andersen Design was not rejected because of who we are, individualistically, but who we are as a class, the small business entrepreneurs.

Approving Andersen Design, the designers and makers, for fiscal sponsorship, could have potentially established a precedence that would open the door for other small businesses as social enterprises allowing the free enterprise sector to apply for foundation grants via fiscal sponsorship, a class that has been largely excluded from the benefits of the wealth redistribution economy, excepting the high tech, new tech sector, where the billions are to be made and the rules are completely different. The wealth redistribution economy, whether it is public, private, for-profit, or non-profit, is built upon a model that consistently benefits the investors and excludes the small entrepreneurs of the productive and research economy.

Chipmunk by Andersen Design Photo by author

For example, a parent organization with a non-profit purpose of economic development, such as “To help create economically and environmentally healthy communities in which all people, especially those with low incomes, can reach their potential”, creates a for-profit investors subsidiary that receives debt-free non-profit funding from the parent and the fund is used to make low-interest loans to small entrepreneurs as debt-financed capital. In order for the for-profit subsidiary to qualify for fiscal sponsorship by the parent organization, it has to serve the non-profit purpose of the parent organization. By offering an interest rate lower than otherwise available the non-profit purpose of the parent is satisfied but since the capital being lent is sourced in debt-free capital, the profits made by the investment company is calculated on the amount of debt-free capital mixed with capital that the investors bring to the lending fund. In order for this model to maintain itself, it needs the small entrepreneurs to be borrowers. If the small entrepreneurs are fiscally sponsored they can apply for debt-free funding from foundations and other non-profit sources which would decrease the pool of available borrowers for the for-profit subsidiary fund, as a Model L venture capitalist fund formed under a non-profit parent company.

The culture that values and favors the investment community over the research and productive community starts at the top. In Marco Rubio’s American Investment in the 21st Century, he reports that American corporate culture has progressively decreased investments in research and production and increased investments in financial assets since the turn of the century.

If the small entrepreneur can qualify for debt-free funding through non-profit resources, then the non-profit parent company does not have means or has a reduced means for realizing a profit through the for-profit lending subsidiary but it is becoming the choice of contemporary philanthropy to shift from grantmaking into debt capitalization:

Philanthropy can bring its whole self to work with an impact investing mindset that expands horizons beyond grantmaking alone. Imagine what more foundations could achieve — from community development, to racial equity, to climate change mitigation — by supplying loans, loan guarantees, and equity investments for social good. Beyond the Grant: Foundations as Impact Investors

Instead of looking for fiscal sponsorship, Andersen Design could become the fiscal sponsor as the Andersen Design Museum of American Designer Craftsmen with its own 501(3)(C) status. As a sponsor, we define our own non-profit purpose when we apply for 501(3)(C) status. Andersen Design has a legitimate history for establishing such a museum and as a part of our larger vision of transforming our production into a 21st-century cottage industry of independently owned studios. Yes Marxists, I am talking about the ownership of production by the production workers! Craft Museums have historically functioned as educational and economic development resources in addition to displaying and celebrating the work of designer-craftsmen.

It's time to write such a non-profit purpose for the Andersen Design Museum of American Designer Craftsmen.

Andersen Design does not have to invent a new model. We just have to redefine whom the model benefits. There are many non-profit organizations that are offering low interests loans to small businesses but almost none that are making fiscal sponsorship directly available to the small entrepreneur, except those in a subsidized government targeted sector. Hand-made crafts are designated to take place in developing nations, excepting hand made crafts sold in the highest-end markets.

Weston and Brenda Andersen established Andersen Design during the time when the American middle class was at its peak. Dad grew up on a farm in Iowa. My mother was raised in London and was from a long line of craftsmen. Andersen Design was founded on a love for and identification with the middle class. Weston and Brenda Andersen did not choose to work in slip-cast production for the money but because that is a way to make a finely crafted product affordable to the middle classes. Both my parents went to art schools where they encountered class snobbery, but the middle class is not that. Andersen Design chose to situate itself in the middle as a preferred cultural environment. Today the American middle class is endangered.

A mission of the Andersen Design Museum of American Designer Craftsmen as a fiscal sponsor will be to enable the free enterprise small entrepreneurs of the designer-craftsmen community to have access to debt-free funding and to encourage the community of hand-making in America. The independent handcrafting studio is a natural complement to the new movement in remote working, both concepts are merging home and work into a “quality “ lifestyle. There is no need for Andersen Design to include low-interest lending services because there are many other organizations doing that. Andersen Design can fill a need that is seldom addressed, to provide small entrepreneurs, at the roots of the economy, access to debt-free funding. If other sectors of the economy have such access but the roots of the economy do not, it is an inequity that contributes to the expanding wealth divide.

It is but a small step in addressing wealth inequality but one small step followed by another is how we make a better world!
Read More About How Museums have been historically used for education and economic development here!

Mackenzie Andersen's About Me Profile on Medium

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 14:37:00 +0000

An enhanced version of Mackenzie's Remote Working Profile sponsored on Data-Driven Investor

About Me — Mackenzie Andersen

An Independent Journey

Mackenzie Andersen

Jan 18 · 9 min read

Mackenzie Andersen by Mackenzie Andersen

This Profile is an enhanced version of my Remote Working Profile sponsored on Data-Driven Investor

Cultural Background

I was raised in a business in a home, established in 1952 on the coast of Maine. as a complete product development system from design to marketplace. Production started with bags of raw materials mixed into glazes and casting slip, using original recipes, designed by my Dad. and poured into original mold designs to create ceramic functional forms and sculptures, which were then marketed in-house to wholesale and retail markets.

The Andersen Design enterprise was formulated as an S corporation and located in a historical old homestead. It was started on a shoestring and pulled up by the bootstraps in the golden age of the American middle class.

In 1968 the American economy was centralized, with barely a bleep in the national conversation, which was then limited to the newspapers and the six o’clock news, not at all like the amazing interactive media we have today. Maine followed suit and became centralized in 1976.

A Universal Theme

Image by Mackenzie Andersen using public domain clip art

My story, I am a Baby Boomer, and this is the story of how my generation let the great wealth divide happen. begins in the late 1960’s when there was a silent coup of the United States Constitution enacted while the media and culture was focusing on other social issues. The story follows the transformation of the USA as it becomes a coup of the Maine State Constitution by analyzing the first enactment passed under Maine’s new centralized economy in 1976.

The story analyses what happened during the 1984 review of the Maine Capital Corporation, as required by its statute, to determine if it was consistent with the goals of its enabling legislation. All agreed that the MCC was not consistent with its enabling legislation but that it should be allowed to continue and was only repealed when the refundable tax credits for its shareholders expired.

Following just the facts of what is permitted by the statute, and what was actually done by the MCC, leads to the conclusion that the statute is written to benefit investors first and foremost and only incidentally, if at all, to benefit the small business sector, which was used to justify and enable the charter of the Maine Capital Corporation.

As I studied the Maine economic development policy that is the foundation stone of Maine’s centralized economy, I found that the same truth encapsulated in the first enactment of the centralized economy, persisted over time without ceasing.

As I expanded my focus to the world at large I found the primacy of investor’s interest to be a universal truth of centralized economies and organizations, everywhere, and that the public-private, for-profit, non-profit sectors have merged into a seamless whole serving the interests of the investors class, which in another age and time was called “the owners of the means of production”.

The Classic Chickadee, forever in style, designed by Weston and Brenda Andersen, photo by Mackenzie

In the 1980’s America, when most western ceramic companies moved their production to overseas labor markets, my family’s business, Andersen Design remained an American-made hand-crafted product, a choice consistent with the purpose the working process gave to our lives. As an American made art form Andersen Design was competitive in a market flooded with products made in global low-cost labor markets.

Systemic Awareness

The environment in which I was raised was an environment where one learned to do everything, no specialists around, no hierarchy, the designer also carries the fifty-pound bags of raw materials down into the basement and mixes up the casting slip, identifying not with a singular function but with the whole.

The Present

Today many voices are discussing how to live during times of uncertainty, which was our communal norm when I was raised. I think there has been a lot of unaccounted for cultural loss in the restructuring of society as a system where security is prioritized over work engagement and opportunity. In this historical moment as the old norm is transforming some are discovering talents, skills, understandings, and desires that they never knew they had as they adapt to living on the edge of faith.

Two vintage Prototype designs by Weston Neil Andersen Photography and Editing by Mackenzie Andersen

Learn Farm

In Times of an Unknown Future, Let Synchronicity Be Your Guide! by Mackenzie Andersen

The environment in which I was raised was a learning environment. Because we lived on the edge, we needed to learn to do many things for one’s self, such as photography and photographic printing used in marketing the product we made.

I believe that elemental process is a constant that unfolds in diverse applications. This is key in a world where entire industrial sectors can be wiped out by new technology, as the elemental process of processing remains the same and is very adaptable.

I learned darkroom printing in the eighties in New York, working for a Swiss photographer who at first resisted training me because I am an American. He told me that Americans can’t do anything right. He usually worked with Swiss and German students, and in his mind, there were no greater people on earth than Swiss-Germans. After a week he was telling me that I was the best printer with whom he had ever worked.

Researching

Melon Vase in Bronze glaze designed by Weston Neil Andersen and applied by Mackenzie Andersen. Photo by Mackenzie

Black and white darkroom printing is similar to creating ceramics and glazes because what you see while you are working is not what you get when it is done. Designing a ceramic glaze requires delving into its invisible structure and interactive processes, mirroring the path I am unresistingly compelled to follow, into the darkness to discover the light, into confusion to discover order, if I don’t become lost before I am found, I might have missed something important. This is what makes an indefatigable researcher.

Back around 2007, I started looking for funding to situate our business in the new digital age, as I did so I encountered for the first time, the centralized wealth redistribution network of Maine and, being the researcher that I am by background, I applied those skills to reading the statutes and other documents that are the foundation stones of Maine government by central economic development, entwining the public-private and profit-non-profit sectors into a single system, including the fourth estate. I published my research independently on my own blogs.

My Blogs:

Andersen Design Economic Evolution Discourse,

Preserving the American Political Philosophy.

Reviewing

Mackenzie’s ORCID ID- Connecting Research and Researchers

Sometimes you may want a different pair of eyes to review your work. I made a radical decision in my youth, not to own a TV, and that meant I read many books. In the 1990’s I started watching TV and thought my previous choice was a mistake, but if I had not made that choice I would not have had as much time to read books, fiction, and non-fiction. In reading one becomes one with the flow and feel of the words on the page. A good reader can recognize when the flow is interrupted and how to fix it.

Recently, I was asked, by Palgrave Communications, to review an economic development paper about a Southern Hemisphere country. Palgrave Communications is now called Humanities and Social Sciences Communications and is part of Nature.com. As it happened the system being implemented in the South American country is very similar to the system implemented in Maine since 1976.

I had recently published Were Itinerant Craftsmen Free Agents During the Bronze Age and Why Does it Matter?, which includes reviews of several research papers on the role of craftsmen in the Bronze Age.

The action I advised in my review was acted upon. The fact that the review was done is documented on ORCID and I have been awarded “preferred source” status on ORCID, an organization that connects research with researchers.

Circa 1950’s A Family of Fish By Brenda Andersen on Platter designed by Weston, Photo by Mackenzie

Writing

I spent many years of my life excluding all other media except the written word of books, reading the 19th-century classic fiction writers, contemporary writers, and thinkers, science fiction, quantum theory, and metaphysics.

In retrospect, it is a bizarre choice to exclude contemporary media and one that I persist in by not owning a mobile phone. Someday I may decide to get a mobile phone and think that I should have done so a long time ago. Maybe one day I will decide to have our ceramic designs produced in another country, and think I should have done that a long time ago as well, nothing is written in stone unless it is the philosophers stone, ancient, constant, and contemporary.

Doe with Fawn by Elise Andersen, Photo by Mackenzie Andersen

A Personal Mission

But for now, it is my mission to create a center facilitating a network of independent slip-casting studios, much like the pre-industrial revolution cottage industry. I believe that the global world order has got it wrong, we need many types of industries everywhere, to accommodate the diversity among humankind.

For the time being, I am a writer, researcher, analyst, photographer, graphic editor, text editor, and web designer. I have also dipped into video clip editing, which I would like to pursue further.

The skill sets I am offering on the Data-Driven Investor platform are researching, writing, and reviewing. The program is set up to charge by the minute. I prefer to also offer a project-based rate as well, which hopefully can be negotiated through the platform if the need arises.

Sea Otter by Christine Thalia Andersen, Photo by Mackenzie Andersen

Philosophy

Philosophically I am a Hermetic Christian, which entails perceiving the archetypical similarities running through every religion and philosophy, a perspective carried through to perceiving everything as a process and all processes as unfolding in similarity. To understand how to approach anything, one must understand the fundamentalism of process, right down to where energy becomes mass and the observer affects the observed, a primary creative process, though, of course, we do not always need to be working at the level but only to understand that it is always working.

I think it is important to allow breathing space in whatever one is creating, whether a long or a short project. One should permit the latitude to walk away from what one has created, give it a rest, and come back to it with fresh eyes. That is when the layers start interacting and the process goes on a journey of its own of unknown duration.

In the 1950’s, The Original Happy Face by Brenda on Mug by Weston, Photo By Mackenzie

Art, Society and Culture Category

I chose the Arts and Culture Society category. for its wholeness, I would like to have the opportunity to apply my diversified skills to storytelling, which taken all together means film.

Filmed stories are told with dialogue, images, color, movement, sound and silence, place, time, and characters. I often find myself imagining the research that I am writing about coming alive as a political drama.

A Rose is a Rose is a Rose and the Simplest Rose is a Rugosa Rose. Life should be a simple as a Rugosa Rose.

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Represented for Remote Work by Data Driven Investor

About Me Stories

Tell The World Who You Are

New Horizons and An Old Order

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 22:43:00 +0000

Prototype of Leaning Mug. designed and decorated by Weston Neil Andersen Photo and editing by Mackenzie Andersen

A Proposal Gets A Positive Response

In Starting a Remote Work Career from Scratch, I made a proposal to Humanities and Social Science Communications, and asked if they would waive the very large fee for publishing a paper in consideration of the fact that I reviewed a paper at their request, without charging them.

As it happened that was a good move. At first I was given the brush off and a link to the page listing the very large fees. I responded that it is beyond my means and forgot about it until yesterday when I received a different response from an assistant editor in London which includes the contact information to apply for a waiver and the next day I was asked, by a different office to review another paper, which I accepted.

The new paper to review is quite different from the last which was an economic development paper from South America. This one is a philosophical paper about Marx with an abstract that sounds quite novel.

Weston, Neil Andersen's last sculpture, today only two exist

When I read the economic development paper, I found that it was describing economic development policy very similar to the Maine system, which I have been researching for over ten years. The choice of a paper about Marx is not so surprising since Marx is a very prolific research topic today, I have seen many works on Marx in my email notices and saved a few intending to read them but time did not allow it.

Around 2004, the Maine Legislature assigned itself jurisdiction over the curriculum taught in public education from sub-primary class to higher education,

Also since around 2004, there has been a minor at the University of Maine in Marxist and Socialist Studies with a course description that reads more like indoctrination than education. There are no courses taught in the public educational system on the Maine Constitution, which I have also been studying in conjunction with the statutes enacted since Maine became a centralized economy in 1976, Connecting all of the treads of all projects landing on my table simultaneously should be interesting because, everything is everything, as they said back in the days of wine and roses.

It is a lot of work to read and review a paper but if I can list a second review and also a paper of my own on Orcid, it will be a strong asset for my remote working profile on Data Driven Investor. Research and reviewing can pay well and I can invest the money earned in getting the ceramics into production again.

Prototype of Leaning Mug handcrafted and decorated by Weston Neil Andersen, Photo and editing by Mackenzie Andersen

A New Project to Develop a Proposal for A Twenty First Century Cottage Industry Network

While occupied with all of this I opened an email from the USDA, about a Rural Economic Development grant and immediately spotted a paragraph so disturbing as to ruin my state of mind for the rest of the day. The reason why is the subject of another post.

I wrote back and asked what qualifies a “qualified private (for-profit) organization”,

After my conversation with the correspondent from the local office in Bangor, a seemingly nice and decent person who was trying to convince me to read the statute and apply, I decided to put that on my list of projects to do after I review the new paper and submit a paper of my own (providing I am approved for the waiver) to Humanities and Social Sciences Communications and finish setting up my profile for Data Driven Investor using the Iphone app, once I get an Iphone.

QR code for Mackenzie Andersen's Orchi ID

I used my Orcid ID when I signed my email to the Bangor Rural Economic Development office and I will use it again when I write my grant application for Andersen Design as the "private", "for-profit", “intermediary”, organization for a network of home slip-casting studios that I have been expounding upon in this blog. The deadline is toward the end of March and should allow enough time to complete the other projects in between.

My profile for Data Driven Investor is now online but I do not have the chat app yet due to needing to update my devices.

HSSC Welcome Video and More!

The new welcome video for HSSP portrays a global organization for academics of multiple disciplines. The two videos following are also interesting with two different editors speaking about how they decide what to publish. One consideration is "Do we need it" for which the criteria is"Is this about ideas that are very frequently expressed or does it bring something new to the conversation?".

Local Services

The profile for DDI was limited to three services but for locally I can offer additional services related to photography and graphic design, even video editing. The photos of the mugs are displayed in this blog both because mugs are probably going to be the first product we develop working with other studios, and because they represent photos I took and enhanced through the editing project. This is a skill that I am offering,

This is a prototype decorative pattern executed by Weston Neil Andersen. This may look simple but no two people will do this pattern alike and each artisan has to rely on confidence in his own natural hand to make this pattern his or her own. The pattern will also vary according to variations in the way the slip and glaze is applied. There is not one right way, it just has to be right for the manner in which each artisan works with this pattern.

This is the type of work I hope to pick up locally because I already have research, review and writing projects to work on. Working on visual content provides a necessary balance. I enjoy working with photographs and developing them through editing. You can contact me by email to discuss your project. Please use “Project Inquiry” as the subject line.

AFTERWARD:

It didn't take long for all of those plans to change, The Waiver Department of HSSC sent a rather cold response:

Given that you are an independent researcher at present we understand that it would be difficult for you to provide documentation of your lack of funds.

As such, I am writing to confirm that we will be able to offer a 50% APC waiver for your prospective Humanities and Social Services Communications manuscript.

That brings the fee down to $580.00 for publishing an article if it is accepted. Meanwhile I was told flat out that they "don't pay reviewers" What a business model for a peer-to peer research reviewing network. Reviewers get paid nothing and authors, if their work is accepted pay a very large fee.

The reason for this way of thinking is that research is funded by many well endowed institutions. HSSC has a Funding Resources Page for such resources but the response did not mention it, probably because they know that independents need not apply. I found it later but its not worth my time.

When I first interacted with HSSC, the correspondence gave the impression of a non-profit organization in its style of appeal. It is a subsidiary of Nature.com . The About page says that Nature Research is part of Springer Nature. The main shareholders of Springer Nature are Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, "uniting world-leading publishing houses across the globe." and BC Partners,"Founded in 1986, BC Partners is a leading alternative investment manager focused on private equity, credit, and real estate, with deep networks across Europe and North America."

I am better off focusing on Data Driven Investor because they have encouraged me from the start, and their contract is very fair.

I am feeling a bit played but I have committed to do the second review and I will do so. It will still make my Orcid profile better,

So I decided to rearrange my priorities and put reading the material from Rural Economic Development first, and soon learned that too is a futile cause since it is a matching grant. Matching grants sound fair on the surface but in fact they clearly benefit the haves over the have nots and so encourage the top and discourage the bottom of the economy, furthering the expanding wealth divide - a great and growing social issue of our times.

So my focus will be Data Driven Investor, which has been developing functions to help writers to develop an income, without being asked. Now that I signed the contract, I can develop an income from articles published on DDI, though that has not been explained but I was not expecting that to be part of it so whatever it is a plus. They are representing an impressive group of thinkers and in addition I like the blogging style of presentation that uses imagery versus the academic style that does not. Like being bilingual.

Are "We the People" Being "Deleted As Spam" in the USA?

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Sun, 03 Jan 2021 18:54:00 +0000

Happy New Year Everyone

brian-wangenheim-unsplash

Yesterday morning I posted a comment to a story in the Boothbay Register about the minimum wage increase in Maine. It remained online for a least a minute before it was wiped.

Interestingly Disqus was on to it before I even got there about two minutes after my comment was wiped. The message on Disqus says "Deleted as Spam: and then "Thanks, were working on getting this corrected".

A while back, when my Boothbay Register comments first started being deleted, they were marked as spam in Disqus and there was a link to contest it. Now it is being corrected by Disqus without any action on my part.

Perhaps the Russian hackers are doing me a small favor since so many major corporations were hit, could it be that their hack detectors are working much better now, across all industries?

I should add that I am actually using Blogger to compose my post. A while back I was working on a post for several hours in the morning and saved many times leaving a record in my browsing history. I then took a break and when I returned all my work was gone and there was no record of it in my browsing history.

A week later the same thing happened again. There after, until today, I have been using a different application to compose a post. So far so good today. My post is still here despite its obviously sensitive subject matter. Could it also be that Blogger has beefed up its security since the far-reaching Russian hacking was discovered, affecting many major companies?

A significant change the Blogger page source.

In the past, when composing in Blogger, I saved an html doc as a protection against losing the entire text that I was working on. In that event I was able to locate the text in page source and copy and paste it back into my working copy. Since I returned to using Blogger to compose, it is no longer possible to find the text of my story in the page source in either a draft or published form. That is an inconvenience but it is also an indication that a security leak has been fixed. Now the doc is saved as an image representation, only.

It is conceivable that the deletion of my entire post was part of that larger hacking event, known as "the Russian cyber attack". The deletion of my drafts occurred before I read about the cyber attack. I did not think to connect what was happening on my blog to a larger hacking context. I will probably never know. I am left wondering why there is no place to report interferences with normal functioning to the platform. Browsing through long past memories, I recollect finding a number of Russian sites in my stats, but did not think to pay it much attention.

The day before yesterday my comment in the Boothbay Register was restored, The comment moderator said the Register is not the agent of the disappearing act.
Yesterday the entire conversation is wiped, as if no one ever commented at all.
The comment moderator is again saying it is a Disqus problem but my Disqus account has no message indicating that any comments were deleted, and so I surmise that the agent responsible is local, and by-passed Disqus by deleting all comments responding to the article.

Restored But Hidden

Today the original conversation, including all comments is restored on the Boothbay Register but the Minimum Wage article has vanished from list of articles displayed on the home page. To find it, one must use the Register search function. Then the article, a public service notice, and the comments are displayed but since the article, is not displayed with other articles, few will find it. This is not accountable as a Disqus error.

Here is the original comment:

The Vanishing Comment:

Minimum wage raise is not subsidized by taxpayers as is the case with the “quality jobs”, which in Maine legislative speak means “jobs that pay higher than average wages and benefits”.

In other words, in the State’s “targeted sector”, which is a tax payer subsidized sector, the minimum wage is “above average pay and benefits”. That is what is needed to qualify for Maine’s corporate welfare benefits.

The upper end of the economy is subsidized by the taxpayers of Maine including their job training, which is now even using the public education system at the high school level.

Meanwhile minimum wage is the job training wage in the free enterprise economy existing outside the centrally managed economy. It is not subsidized.

The Maine Legislature has tied minimum wage raises to raises in inflation- brought about by its own policies such as the Seed Capital (refundable) Tax Credit available to large employers and investors.

The Seed Capital (refundable) Tax Credit targets large capital and is worth up to 50% of the owners capital investment. There are many tax exemption in place in Maine to transform a refundable tax credit into a subsidy including the Pine Tree Zone Tax Credits worth up to 100% and a little known 100% tax exemption left on the books when the Maine Capital Corporation was repealed once its tax credits expired.(around 1984).

The Pine Tree Zone is up for repeal at the end of 2021,and has been reported to cost the taxpayers more than it gives, according to a report commissioned by the Maine Legislature around 2014.

Meanwhile there are many job training programs for the State’s “targeted sector”, including our public educational system. When the Industrial Partnerships Act came out in 2014 it said in specific words that a high school diploma can be given for training for one of the States approved careers (quality jobs), I believe it said that approved career job training can be in place of the traditional education once required for a high school diploma. That statement is no longer located where it once was in the statute, as often happens after I write about such things in my blog, but that does not mean it is not still there.

The minimum wage is, as it says, a minimum wage- Never intended as a living wage- which used to be a middle class wage, when we had a middle class before economies across the globe became centrally managed.

Maine became a centrally managed economy by legislative deeming in 1976, and inflation and the wealth gap has been expanding in Maine ever since, and so it is reasonable to consider policies of central management as a cause of inflation and the wealth gap.

The minimum wage is the job training wage for the free enterprise economy which still exists on the fringes and is primarily taxed to finance the centrally managed economy. Some one has be taxed since the targeted sector is largely tax exempt.

If a large company is offered lavish corporate welfare in exchange for providing a specified number of “quality jobs”, then it may be more profitable to do so even if they do not actually need that many workers to produce their product or service. If so- that right there, causes inflation since in the free enterprise economy wealth is created by producing something.

Of course we are not really a free enterprise economy any more, we are a wealth redistribution economy, fueled by fiat currency with a free enterprise economy operating on the fringes.

Mackenzie Andersen's Research, Analysis, and Review Services Offered

Orcid ID

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0570-5280

Starting a Remote Work Career from Scratch

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 17:41:00 +0000

How I came to be recruited without an organizational background

mitchell-hartley-unsplash

I am taking a break from working on my consulting profile. Submitting my profile will mean having an agent for remote work. I was invited to do so as an outcome of publishing on my own as an unknown. In corporate speak, I have been recruited.

I am now creating my portal to the remote working community and scaling into the larger world where I have traditionally found greater acceptance. I have not the conventional background but the movers and shakers are not necessarily looking for conventional. All you have to do is watch a few TV series to know that!

Right now I am watching the latest season of Billions. I remember it being more interesting than it is this season. The characters seem to have become more wooden or maybe they always were but it didn’t bother me before. It is useful to watch at this particular juncture because the show probably has a lot right about corporate culture. The characters are all super talented perfect people who always listen to and take in one another’s ideas even if they are at war with each other. Every communication is boiled down to pristine insights, No human meandering, This could actually be depicting a community of very advanced robots. Perhaps the show is building up to a surprise ending.

The rhythm of the show should translate terribly into subtitles. One can get worn out quickly reading the speeches delivered at warp speed. None the less the ideas are interesting, even if the world is portrayed as too perfect. Its the ego of corporate America let lose on the script with corporate culture’s propensity to publish ideal behavior patterns and a God-like image of themselves. Back in the eighties they were forth right about it. They just called themselves the “Masters of the Universe!” easy peasy, as simple as pie, make you rich in the blink of an eye!

Changing the channel back to the real world, internal quanta fluctuates from focusing in to withdrawing away from the project at hand. That is normal but not at such high frequency. Publishing a remote work profile can be a very productive move but it also has to be right. I want to make a lot of money but I want to do so while using my energy in the most appropriate form for my life. I am the brand. That is the mantra. Everyone who gets here probably knows its a lonely place to be, but also an inspiring place and so the light flickers in and out like a firefly. The signals will tell when it is right. At this moment, “visualizing the life you want to live” makes more sense than it ever has before. This is an exciting time to be alive!

The function the platform will handle is similar to what the function Orcid performs for the research community. In a global community there needs to be a way to establish trust, which is the essential roll played by the platform.

I am an independent researcher, working outside the established system but I have a Orcid ID because I reviewed an economic development paper at the request of Palgrave Communications, now called Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, a subsidiary of Nature.com. I did not get paid, The organization did not offer and I did not ask. I had no experience in review writing but in my experience it is very difficult for an independent researcher to establish communication with organizations. My instinct was to just go with the flow and review the paper, no questions asked. Just do it. The most valued end result for me, today, is I have an Orcid ID, which is not easy to get in a system that seems to be a closed circle in which gaining entry into the circle requires already being there.

From what I have been able to discover, one cannot approach this circle as an unknown, but Humanities and Social Sciences Communications approached me as an unknown, shortly after I published this story in which I independently reviewed three research papers on the Bronze Age,

If I had not written a review of the economic development paper for Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, and perhaps if my recommendation had not been acted upon, I would not have an official Orcid researcher’s ID, but to submit my own work on Orcid, I have to do so through a trusted organization. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications is the only organization on my list of trusted organizations. I have found that research organizations in my own State, Maine, where most of my research is focused, are also a closed circle and do not respond to correspondences. I wonder if I were to include my Orcid ID in my email signature, they would respond differently- this I have not tried as it is only occurring to me as I speak that an Orcid ID is somewhat like an entry key badge.

After I submitted my review to Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, it was accepted and I am now a “preferred source”, and so I thought I would submit a work for peer review to Humanities and Social Sciences Communications but soon discovered that the fee for submitting a paper is very high, much more than I can afford and so I dropped the idea at the time.

However today I realize that having a work of my own posted on Orcid would be a very good reference for the profile I am currently composing. Its never too late to ask, and there is nothing to lose in doing so and so I did- as in, How about accepting my paper for review without charging me in return for my reviewing a paper without charging you? The auto response says that no one is in the office until January 4, 2021.

I am fortunate that a private company has recruited me for their team. There are illustrious and interesting people writing for the platform and I am honored to be included in such a diverse group coming from the high halls of the corporate world to independent unknowns such as myself. The diversity of the mix speaks for itself.

I hope this helps some others who may find themselves dealing with a similar situation. This is an era when we carve our own paths. Interesting times are upon us.

Published in Medium's An Idea (by Ingenious Piece) Dec 29 , 2020

A Starlit Conjunction Brightens the Horizon as the Days Grow Longer

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 23:39:00 +0000

A Christmas Star Makes a Rare Appearance at the End of 2020

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Christmas is already upon us in this strangest of years, preceded by a Saturn-Jupiter conjunction on the night of the Winter Solstice creating an image in the sky of the Christmas Star as it appeared in Jerusalem on the original Christmas Day.

Here is an amazing shot from Japan of the Christmas Star in 2020.

At the end of year filled with such a earth changing events, it sends chills and hope as a star in a form so meaningful appears above the world and, for the first time in 200 years, the Saturn and Jupiter Conjunction is occurring in an Air sign instead of an Earth sign and it will continue to meet in Air signs every twenty years through 2080.

According to astrologers, these rare heavenly events herald a time of paradigm change with different values coming into prominence than those that dominated during the meetups in earth signs. Jupiter and Saturn are moving into Aquarius, which is my Sun sign with my Saturn in Aquarius as well, According to astrologer, Susan Miller, this will be a time when the world becomes more harmonious with my way of seeing things. I hope so. Without reading astrology, I already am aware that this is a great transitional moment, and I don't even want to bring up the national political transition, which is too strange for fiction and there is no shortage of people talking about it. However seriously one takes astrology, it is astounding to think that at the end of this tumultuous year, a conjunction is occurring in the heavens just as the days become longer as the light returns to this side of the planet.

One of the transitions in my life began with an invitation to set up a consultant profile on a site that features bloggers of many sorts. This is an idea that had not occurred to me but it is of the moment, when the remote working movement is on the rise. I wrote this sketch of a profile, thinking it is only a sketch but then I realized that in the new media age, that is what it should be, as the media has become very conversational and everything happens quickly.

I published it on Andersen Design in the About Section and am also publishing it here, by way of an announcement.

To note, I had not heard of the Jupiter-Saturn Grand Conjunction at the time I wrote this, but it resonates.

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and are fortunate enough to see the Christmas Star. Our skies have been too cloudy as of late to see the stars.

I have been working on a consulting a services profile, starting with a new current photo of myself, not such a thrilling thing to do when one is in one's seventh decade, but at the same time, I think this society needs to re-adjust its concept of aging as we have seen in the way that Biden, who has suffered from stuttering since he was a teenager, is repeatedly portrayed as having dementia, as though it were a condition that automatically sets in once one passes a certain age threshold. As an older person, I do not feel that I have stopped learning yet and that if one never stops learning, one keeps on getting better at what one does.

Today I see many blogs discussing how to live during times of uncertainty, which was our communal norm when I was raised. I think there has been a lot of unaccounted-for cultural loss in the restructuring of society into a system where security is prioritized. Now that system is devolving causing some to discovers talents, skills and understandings within themselves that they never knew they had.

The home business environment in which I was raised was a learning environment, in part because we lived on the edge, resulting in a need to learn to do many things for ones self, such as photography and photographic printing.

This story began because I wanted to see what the self portraits I have been evolving look online. I can preview them on my blog without publishing.

When my parents started their business, back in the day when photography was done in a black and white camera only, they took their own product photographs. I have a vague memory of a dark room, which they must have had because film processing is expensive. I don't think they could have afforded to pay for film processing, and my father would naturally have an interest in the process. It was an environment where one learned to do everything, no specialists around. No hierarchy, the designer also carries the fifty pound bags of raw materials down into the basement and mixes up the casting slip. To this day I can still do that. I miss the physicality of the process now that we no longer have a production studio.

Dad in his 90's. He had a brain injury which some mis-identified as dementia, but it was an injury that disrupted his ability to connect subject and action in a complete sentence so that he spoke in cryptic terms, A single word, like "Wow! communicated worlds of information. He spent most of his days in deep contemplation and would sometimes suddenly speak of an event in the distant past and so I knew that he was contemplating his life. I was setting up a display with lights to photograph products on the kitchen table and Dad be came very animated while describing it. The light was coming from the window behind him and probably from some that I had set up for the display

So for the time being, I am mostly a writer, researcher, analyst, photographer, graphic editor, text editor, and a web designer. I have even dipped into video clip editing, which I enjoyed doing. Those are skill sets I will be offering.

I learned darkroom printing in the eighties in New York, working for a Swiss photographer who at first resisted training me because I am an American. He told me that Americans can't do anything right. He usually worked with Swiss and German students, and in his mind there were no greater people on earth than Swiss-Germans. After a week he was telling me that I was the best printer with whom he had ever worked.

Black and White darkroom printing is similar to creating ceramics and glazes because what you see while you are working is not what you get when it is done. One has to have the ability to visualize the outcome with dark room printing and to understand molecular relationships invisible to the eye with ceramics.

Philosophically I am a Hermetic Christian, which entails perceiving the archetypical similarities running through every religion and philosophy, a perspective I carry through to perceiving everything as a process and all processes are ordered in a similar way and so to understand how to approach anything, one must understand the fundamentalism of process, right down to where energy becomes mass and the observer affects the observed, a fundamentally creative process, though, of course we do not always need to be working at the level but only to understand that it is always working.

In the seventies my talent for color and printing was recognized when I worked for a brief time in the textile industry as a colorist and was sent down to the mill in the Carolinas to do strike-offs. My boss was always telling me I took too long to produce results but she was always giving me the work that others had done to bring to completion. As I recall, her efforts to make me faster didn't have much of an affect. I was only interested in producing an appealing color combination and that was a matter of feeling it. My boss would come back with swatches of fabric and hand them out to everyone and tell us to create something like it. Most of the others would match the colors in the swatch and put them in a different pattern but that seldom produced a successful result. I understood it was a matter of producing a similar type of feel and not a direct match of color to color. Feeling is not a process that responds well to being clocked but we live in an odd world where we are always being told to produce, produce produce, as if quantity is more important than quality.

As I write I am aware of the mantra that one should publish every day and not be a perfectionist. This is another of my experiments in that vein, which works for me now because I am exploring how to create a profile for myself as a consultant. The publish-every-day exercise can be equated with maintaining a sketch book but taking time is a rewarding process to work that engages more interacting layers. I think it is important to allow breathing space in whatever one is creating, whether a long or a short project. One should permit the latitude to walk away from what one has created, give it a rest and come back to it with fresh eyes. That is when the layers start interacting and the process goes on a journey of its own of unknown duration.

But today, I am sketching. Soon the bell will ring! Then the sketch is done! Mission accomplished!

This is not my not yet official services profile but if you are doing a job that requires some of my skill sets, you can contact me at mackenziana@gmail.com or by phone at 207 809 1632.

I will next be working on listing skills and pricing them for my Data Driven Investor profile, which functions as an agent between parties, handling transactions and any other concern that may arise.. My Andersen Design profile is targeting direct one to one relationships that are anticipated to be more locally based.

In Times of an Unknown Future, Let Synchronicity Be Your Guide!

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 20:15:00 +0000

As Corona Virus demands change, a transforming culture grant us permission to be who we never thought we would be.

Photo by Mackenzie Andersen of Pelican sculpture by Weston and Brenda Andersen for Andersen Design

I awoke in the morning in an instance that dreaming becomes consciousness, a transition as elusive to detect as that precise moment when night becomes dawn.

I was travelling in my dream on the main road out of town passing through the point where the Harbor becomes Boothbay. On the side of the road, I saw a sign that said “Learn Farm”, crafted on a wooden board painted with weathered white paint, and written in Times New Roman font. A frame around the words lent the sign traditionally old fashioned flair.

In dream word play, the message is its new but its old. Times, New Roman, correlating with to my concept of a twenty-first century cottage industry, a network of businesses in residence, pre-industrial culture resurrected for a world evolving toward smaller, autonomous interactive parts.

At first instance I read “Learn” as the name of a family farm, and on second thought I understood it to be a verb. The sign was on the right side of the road, off the beaten track, only noticed while passing it by. as I made a mental note that it is the right way to go.

Tall Pelican by Andersen Design, Photo by Susan Mackenzie Andersen

Looming ahead is that political conglomeration known as the Boothbay Roundabout. I am on a track to go through it. Too late to turn around, I am traveling too quickly toward the point where the common road makes way for the new main drag connecting centers of concentrated wealth, halting the common traffic in its tracks, or else speeding it along without pause into the conflation of streams going round and round the roundabout, to decorative effect.

In former times the functions served by the roundabout infrastructure, were handled off to the side of the common road, concerning only those whom it needed to concern.

Photo by Mackenzie Andersen

The roundabout is a political construct, one I must deal with as the path I am travelling in my dream offers no other choice than to keep on moving forward into the future.

And so it is in life that one must become a political actor, play or be played.

Large well capitalized businesses negotiate with state policy makers to achieve their own ends. Small businesses must do the same. A vision of a network of independent slip casting studios becomes more viable if business in residence zoning is actualized in law and if financing options are crafted by similar intents as those applied to stand alone housing and business development.

The ideal first step wherein vision becomes actualization is the acquisition of real estate for a center of learning, research, a small production where training can happen and a gallery and someday-social-gathering-space can serve as a center for a community of like minded artisans and entrepreneurs, all the while working on advocating for better laws, ordinances, and public programs to manifest an extended network of independent contractors. Call it “Learn Farm”, for short.

Vintage Creamer in rare yellow ochre glaze both by Weston Neil Andersen, photo by author

Independent contractors are today’s dynamic players in remote working culture. This is their time to make a big social impact.

The goal is to establish a network of independent slip-casting contracting studios. I have contacted many local economic development resources during the past decade receiving no response.

Writing and publishing casts a wider net but the wider net might take one further away from where one needs to be rooted. By going around the roundabout about one can turn around and get back to the right turn in the road.

Perhaps the roundabout I am entering are orbits of my own making, meeting and converging, seemingly through happenstance, or as Jung would say, synchronicity, or meaningful co-incidence. Synchronicity is the guide which navigates through the unfamiliar. When all orbits are synchronized from the center outward they act as one reverberating wave function.

Vintage Creamer and Sugar Set in classic Blue Green Hand Painted Stripes, Photo by Mackenzie Andersen

I began this story with the intention of introducing the new website design which I have been developing during the past six weeks, repurposing our website which markets products as a tool to promote a KickStarter campaign and extended fundraising efforts.

These days every presentation is supposed to be as short as an elevator pitch. Once, the recommended time of a video was three minutes but it is now said to be better done in two.

So my challenge is how does one communicate something so complex as our business in simple form? The complexity can be communicated using a link to our website where the full range of the Andersen Design’s work from mid-century to 21st century is represented. As in a dream, a link is shorthand for an expansive concept.

Most of our standard line is out of stock as we no longer have a studio for production but the line continues to retain its market appeal representing a qualified economic development asset. As a small size production it cannot saturate a global or even a national market. The many variables in our line and processes makes the making of the line an engaging experience involving hands-on physicality. Please check out and sign up in support of our pre-launch efforts.

Sleeping Sandpiper, designed and decorated by Elise, Photo by Mackenzie

As I am working on my new design, I receive an invitation from a venue where I publish, to participate in a newly forming consulting platform. The platform handles the transactions and relationships between parties, crucial as a matter of trust in a globally connected world, and a hedge against fraud. The platform is geographically located in Singapore, an Asian city-state. Lately I have been watching television series from another Asian country, Korea, finding the culture to be more American than the United States is at this present moment, which I find fascinating. The sound track for one Korean love story drama, features a uniquely rendered version of “Stand by Your Man”. The dialogue is Korean but the music is American country.

That was a diversion, or maybe not.

In another recent dream my Dad was standing between my desk and the window and told me to get a new chair. In the material world, the chair I was using was falling apart, until a couple of days ago, when I fixed it. At that time I literally needed a new chair but in dream speak, the message delivered by my father, standing between my seat of work and the window of opportunity, is that I need to get myself better SIT-uated.

This new opportunity offers the potential to become better situated. There is no guidebook, not even sample profiles. The lack of a guide is a situation common to many, facing new situations in the wake of corona virus.

Sheeba in unglazed white stoneware by Weston, Photo by Mackenzie

A company culture that invites one to become what one doesn’t think of becoming oneself, is inspiring and motivational, granting permission to believe in learning as a continual transformative process, which in todays world takes place at a faster and faster rate. Many careers may be outpaced by new technological developments but hand made ceramics is as old as human history. By continuing to exist as an entity, Andersen Design, and other small businesses provide the opportunity for others to discover skills and talents that they might not otherwise know they have, adding variety to available options.

Many decades ago, I read a book by Harold Geneen, in which it was said that Geneen would offer potential employees higher pay than they expected while presenting them with the greatest challenge of their life. That was the Geneen company culture.

Leadership cannot really be taught. It can only be learned. Harold Geneen

As I was formulating the new website, I had been planning to offer services on our website but left it to the last. As it happened The web design was nearing completion when the new consulting opportunity presented itself.

Sheba by Weston, glazed in White and decorated by Christine, Photo by Susan (Mackenzie)

The consulting platform is entirely different than any other I know because it features writers who are also the consultants. The writers come from many different fields and walks of life. The website is called Data Driven Investor, which on the surface is not where I expect to be published but that is relative to on how widely or narrowly one defines data.

Is the definition of data exclusive to what can be gathered in a computer compiler or is it inclusive of a living experience, more subjective than objective? As we move into the area of quantum computing we are entering a domain in which the observer affects the observed. Computer input and out put is artificial intelligence, but human intelligence programs the computer. Can artificial intelligence program AI, intelligently? That is a question on the looming horizon of the new frontier.

In the meantime, the human mind retains its mystery, The many voices of the family of man is how we create our database of living information. The great twentieth century science fiction writer, Philip K Dock coined it as Valis, Vast Active Living Intelligence System, a book he wrote as fiction about a character who perceives ancient Rome at the time of Christ, superimposed on California in 1974. Yes, that’s Times New Roman in short code. Dick said his novel, Valis, is autobiographical but no one would be believe it so he published it as fiction, because truth is stranger than fiction and nature will always be infinitely more than artificial intelligence can know.

Dialing Up Free Enterprise & Dialing Back the Command Economy

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 20:54:00 +0000

Under Maine’s Progressive Governors, Creeping Corporatism Grew the Wealth Divide

Welcome to my world Photo by sunyu-kim-unsplash

Today I woke contemplating an idea I spoke about planned residential dwelling units at First Park, the three million dollar project of rural lands transformed into a development corporation by the Maine Legislature in 1998.

I wondered how a residence would create the jobs promised by the promoters of the development corporation, unless zoned as businesses in residence, an idea whose time is waiting to happen.

After twenty years Municipalities Incorporated was far away from the 3000 jobs promised to materialize from a business park built in the rural meadowlands.

The business park is one of those ideas that is popular despite its inappropriateness to a location, like the mini-round-about placed in the unobstructed main throughway in my home town, requiring another road to be inconveniently rerouted to give the appearance that there was a functional purpose in placing a roundabout in the middle of the most travelled road in town. Praise Be to the landscape in the middle of the road, is it an automobile gliding rink?, is it a God?, or is it just an obstacle in the middle of the road?

There is no rational other than fantasies of financial windfalls for a business park to be arbitrarily placed in a rural region. The equivalent cost could be spent on each municipality supporting its own region.

The contextual infrastructure of a business park is that of a commuting culture expanding amid increasing concerns that global warming may be caused by carbon emissions.

The economic model is to concentrate the wealth of an entire region or state to build up the economy in small targeted hot spots.

Inevitably this leads to underserved communities of the region wanting out and powerful oligarchs preventing their exit.

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Why would a business prefer a public location in artificially developed surroundings over the private natural surroundings found through out a rural region? other than zoning? If a business is large enough, and rich enough, and tuff enuff, community leaders will give it all the love it wants, with or without a lawsuit.

If the business has a reason to be in proximity to other businesses, there is an old fashioned concept called a town that might work. The rural business park is urbanism imposing its own values over rural sensibilities, as if one should insert full blown city blocks into the countryside. Why? Why not let the country side be the countryside, accommodating human activity in a more relaxed style? Rural living is an graceful choice if one is fortunate enough to have such an opportunity, so why would those so fortunate desire to remake themselves as city and surrounding suburbs of commuters?

Photo by john-bakator-unsplash

At the turn of the century, these thoughts were not on the minds of Maine’s ruling class of constitutional progressives as they made plans prohibited by the words and intent of the Maine Constitution, the word and intent of the law being the definition of constitutional originalism, as Senator, Angus King, former Governor at the turn of the century, recently riled against in an opinion published in the Atlantic.

Four City-States Chartered During the King and Baldacci Governorships

Maine has four city-state corporations that I know of. One is the Kennebec Regional Development Authority and the other three are former navy bases repurposed for civilian use, but not by the political ideology that founded the United States and Maine. It is tragically ironic that bases that were used to defend the nation against advancing totalitarianism have been transformed into the instruments for creeping totalitarianism.

There was a purpose in addressing the loss of military jobs in creating business parks at the three base closures, but the essential vulnerability inherent to reliance on large employers is amplified in the policies of central management which routinely seeks to solve problems in large brushstrokes, while dismissing the benefits of diversified opportunity across the entire economy within an incremental scaling of economic strata.

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Maine Constitutional Progressivism Leads the Way in Repurposing Former Military Bases

In 1994, Loring Air Force Base was the first former military base to be closed and then transformed by the Maine Legislature into a “municipal corporation serving as an instrument of the state”, aka a “quasi-public-agency”.

In How Regions Adjust to Base Closings: The Case of Loring AFB Ten Years After Closure, 2005 . a Maine Center for Workforce Research and Information document, The term “a quasi-public agency”, masks the fact that a “municipal corporation serving as an instrument of the state” is arguably in violation of Article IV Part Third, Section 14, of The Maine Constitution, and also defies the standard legal definition of a municipal corporation as an instrument of municipal government, and not an instrument of a state government:

As an “authority,” the LDA is a quasi-public agency with jurisdiction over a public resource, in this case, the base property that became the Loring Commerce Centre. The LDA acts as a municipality and a corporation, but without the ability to levy property taxes. How Regions Adjust to Base Closings: The Case of Loring AFB Ten Years After Closure, 2005

Legal Definition of Municipal Corporation by Cornell Law School

A city, town, village, or county that has been incorporated by a state and is authorized to administer local, governmental affairs, e.g. to establish a police force. A municipal corporation is created by a state’s legislature which also controls, inter alia, its duration, rights, and powers. Also called a municipality. Cornell Law School

Maine Constitution , Article IV , Part Third

Section 14. Corporations, formed under general laws. Corporations shall be formed under general laws, and shall not be created by special Acts of the Legislature, except for municipal purposes, and in cases where the objects of the corporation cannot otherwise be attained; and, however formed, they shall forever be subject to the general laws of the State.

That said, How Regions Adjust to Base Closings: The Case of Loring AFB Ten Years After Closure, 2005 instills confidence in the integrity of management in its straight forward transparency and attention to detail as it relays in unapologetic honesty how wealth redistribution and corporate welfare was utilized to make the transfer to civilian use a relatively smooth one after environmental clean up was addressed, and handled by the federal government.

Today the Loring Center website refers businesses to local economic development groups to learn about available incentives supporting a protocol that treats the wider culture equitably, as is possible, relative to a development authority designated, at one point, at least, as a Pine Tree Zone.

The character of businesses located at the authority blend into the rural Maine culture, giving substance to the development’s decision to call itself a “center” as opposed to an “authority”. For these reasons, I rate the Loring Commerce Center as the most successful city-states despite the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority boasting over 2000 jobs to the Loring Center’s 1200. Midcoast advertises its corporate welfare incentives far too aggressively as it stands on the brink of possibly losing a central core of Maine corporate welfare if the Pine Tree Zone is repealed at the end of 2021.

The Loring Air Force Base was located in Aroostook County in northernmost Maine. According to the report, 62 percent of the base area is in Limestone, another 32 percent is in Caswell, and the remaining 6 percent is in Caribou.

Today Limestone is a designated opportunity zone, pursuant to the Federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

The transference to civilian use of the Loring Air Force Base, in Maine’s third poorest county, makes for an interesting comparison with the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority, in Maine's wealthiest county. Loring also provides a stark contrast with the handling of the transference of Cutler Navy Base in Washington County, northern Maine’s poorest county, while the comparison of The Kennebec Regional Development Authority in Maine’s seventh wealthiest county, in close proximity to the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority in Maine's wealthiest county, underscores the unfair advantage the Pine Tree Zones confers on the chosen locations over every where else.

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A reason for the more legitimately planned transference of the Loring Base, rather than the shady hand dealt the Cutler Navy Base, is accountable, in part, to the degree of environmental clean up required by the former Loring Air Force Base, preventing the possibility of external parties swooping in to grab the real estate interests. The federal government was needed to finance the environmental clean-up at the air force bases.

The Fate of the Authority in Maine’s Poorest County

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The redevelopment of Loring, was strategically planned and involved massive amounts of federal and state aid, while the transference of the real estate properties at Cutler Navy Base was a fly by night operation, arranged by a special congressional delegation to the Navy, and the Maine State Legislature, which left the base without assets or local authority to raise revenue through property taxes.

A significant difference in the fates of WCRA and Loring is the way that expensive-to maintain military property was handled. In the case of Loring:

As it began its work, the Loring Development Authority recognized that something needed to be done to keep the base from deteriorating. The State of Maine could not afford the millions of dollars needed to protect and maintain the buildings on the base. The Authority and Maine’s politicians lobbied for federal assistance. Loring pioneered a 10-year caretaker agreement with the Air Force. The base went into “caretaker status” after residual operations phased out with its subsequent closure. Caretaker status meant federally-funded security and limited maintenance to keep base facilities in “mothballed” condition. How Regions Adjust to Base Closings: The Case of Loring AFB Ten Years After Closure, 2005

Federal base closure rules qualify economic development organizations “in one form or another” to present proposals for the use of the base. It is possible to obtain the property for no or very little cost. The main stipulations for that opportunity is that proceeds of sales or rental of property be used for economic development at the former installation and that public agencies or private non-profits provide vital public services such as education, health care, homeless services, parks and recreation, law enforcement, prisons, self-help housing and transportation.

The Maine Legislature got around the requirement that proceeds of real estate revenue be invested in the former base located in Cutler, Maine, by first chartering the base as a municipal corporation serving as an instrument of the State. In accordance with DOD rules, the Washington County Redevelopment Authority was to serve as an economic development instrument of conveyance from the DOD, but the economic development of the base was clobbered by what happened next.

Based on history to date, it is reasonable to conclude that The Washington County Development Authority was created solely for the purpose of receiving the property from the federal government and then giving it to a newly created private non-profit, Cutler Development Corporation, which in turn sold the real estate to a private developer and the proceeds were split by the surrounding towns and nothing was invested in the base, which was then promptly forgotten about by the Maine Legislature which still claims the Authority as its instrument.

According to hearsay, the WCRA gave the real estate to the non-profit Cutler Development Corporation. If the Cutler Development Corporation had purchased the property from the Navy, it would have been required to pay fair market value as the corporation did not meet the requirements for a no-cost conveyance. If WCRA had sold the real estate to the Cutler Development Corporation, it would have been required to invest the proceeds in the base, but a gift is not a sale and so there were no proceeds required to be invested in the base.

In an economic development model that inverts conventional wisdom, the combined actions of the Authority and the corporation depleted the base of capital resources needed for development.

Instead of investing concentrated wealth in the economic development zone on the theory that it will trickle down to benefit the surrounding region, in the Cutler case, its resources were taken out from under in order to sell the real estate and distribute the cash among the towns of the surrounding region, without involving a job-creation initiative. The well considered report on the Loring Base explains how the loss of military jobs affects an entire region. Was Cutler an exception? Were there no job lost in the closure of the Cutler Navy Base? Why was the instrument of conveyance used to transfer military property to civilian use left with fewer financial resources than a conventional municipality has to maintain and develop its assets?

A Tale of Two City-States

In contrast the Loring Development Authority was the agent that sold the real estate to private businesses, re-investing the proceeds in the base.

In July 2001, the Air Force transferred 2,805 acres out of a total 12,000 acres of base property to the LDA at no cost through an economic development conveyance….The Loring transfer, besides being the largest military base transfer at the time, allowed the LDA to sell the property to businesses instead of leasing it, as it had been doing. The remaining 21 acres were transferred to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to establish the Aroostook National Wildlife Refuge. How Regions Adjust to Base Closings: The Case of Loring AFB Ten Years After Closure, 2005.

A View from Sunrise County Economic Council

In 2015, I was aware that BRAC closure rules gave first priority to local organizations and so I wrote to the Sunrise County Economic Council and asked this question: “When the Cutler military base closed down did any of the economic development organizations in Washington County bid on it or was the state the only one? I received this answer:

The Cutler Base closure was a very interesting process. Because of the usual transition of surplus military property (if I remember correctly it is other branches of service first, then federal government, state government, local government, then other organizations), the State created the Washington County Development Authority (WCDA; a quasi-governmental agency) as a local entity who could receive the property directly from the military The WCDA was able to then give the property to the Cutler Development Corporation (CDC) which was a local development corporation created to assist the town and local area with dealing with the issues caused by a base closure. The CDC sold the property to a developer and the bulk of the funds from the sale were shared between the towns that made up the CDC.

There have been issues at the base, and development has not gone as planned. The base has two segments — commercial and residential. The commercial side has recently been granted back to the WCDA and they are considering options for possible reuse of facilities.

My correspondent did not remember correctly, or else she was not informed correctly. The following is from the Military Base Reuse Handbook:

The community in the vicinity of an installation is defined as the political jurisdiction(s), other than the State, that comprise the LRA for the installation. If no LRA is formed at the local level and the State is serving in that capacity, then the community in the vicinity of the installation is deemed to be the political jurisdiction(s) in which the installation is located.

Public agencies and private nonprofit organizations

Public agencies and private non-profit organizations are often eligible for one of several public benefit conveyance programs that make surplus properties available at up to a 100-percent discount of fair market value. Surplus military property may be conveyed to these public agencies and private non-profits to provide vital public services such as education, health care, homeless services, parks and recreation, law enforcement, prisons, self-help housing and transportation.[1]

[1] https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/MilitaryBaseReuse.pdf

On the other hand my correspondent was correct as specially negotiated rules were arranged for the Cutler Base by the powerfully connected .

A Trip to Washington to Change the Rules

In 2000 The Bangor Daily News reported that Senator Olympia Snowe supported by Maine’s Congressional Delegation introduced federal legislation to transfer two hundred sixty acres of coastal real estate including 22 administration buildings, 61 units of base housing, and a variety of recreational facilities, garages, a concrete dam and a freshwater reservoir that the Navy no longer needed to a local reuse authority composed of the towns of Cutler, East Machias, Machias, and Machiasport.

The BDN article is no longer available on line. However at the time I read the article in 2015 I thought that what occurred was not being reported accurately. The articles of incorporation of the Cutler Development Corporation can be downloaded from the Secretary of State website. Cutler selectman, David Eldrige and Machias selectman, Kenneth Bucket Davis were the two incorporators, listed as private individuals without mention of an official relationship to the towns.

Maine’s congressional delegation to Washington D.C. included Senator Olympia Snowe (R), Senator Susan Collins (R), and Representatives John Baldacci (D) and David Allen(D), who met with Navy Secretary Richard Danzig to discuss plans for the Cutler Naval Base. Danzig assured the delegation that he made the final call on whether the Navy will transfer all military personnel from Cutler.

The Secretary of the Navy is subordinate to the Secretary of Defense. BRAC Base Closure Rules grant authority to the Secretary of Defense to transfer real property and personal property to the redevelopment authority for consideration at or below the fair market value. A reduced or no cost conveyance can be authorized when it is determined to be necessary to support economic development and when DOD could show that other transfer authorities were insufficient. The Washington County Redevelopment Authority was the instrument of conveyance, supposedly under the rubric of economic development.

The delegate to Washington negotiated a special act of legislation H.R.4205 — Floyd D. Spence National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000, which authorized the conveyance of the Cutler Military Base to civilian use, changing the priority for instruments of conveyance.

General BRAC closure rules grant priority to local economic development conveyances (EDC). H.R.4205 — Floyd D. Spence National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000 allows for the property to be conveyed to “to the State of Maine, or a subdivision or agency thereof”, changing the priority of transfer conveyance from a local authority to a state authority and from any type of organization to a government organization.

The Washington County Development Authority was left without assets and as an instrument of the state it lacks the authority to collect property taxes. The statute authorizes the base to raise money through issuing bonds but as the Authority is an instrument of the state, it must have the bonds issued through the state, and so what is said about it is really quite confusing since the media never mentions its statutory status.

In 2014 the expensive to maintain commercial property was given back to the base by a private developer, As written in WASHINGTON COUNTY ANNUAL REPORT July 1, 2014-June 30,2015, The volunteer board of WCRA petitioned the Legislature for a bond to maintain the property and develop the base and the Legislature shelved the request to the next session.

No further news was found until this story in February 2020. There is at least one business at the Washington County Redevelopment Authority and the owner seems very gung-ho. The business is over one hundred years old. I am glad the Authority has found one so enthusiastic.

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Timeline of Four Corporations Chartered by Special Acts of Maine Legislation 1998–2005

Because of the complexities involved with environmental clean up and other federal involvement, the transformation of Loring took a longer time between base closure and the establishment of a commerce park, which happened gradually throughout the time that the KRDA and the Washington County Redevelopment Authority were chartered as corporations by the Maine Legislature.

Kennebec Regional Development Authority, was chartered by the Maine Legislature in 1998, hosting the first business park, aptly named First Park. It is the only business park that is not chartered as an instrument of the state, instead the region of municipalities have become the instruments of KRDA”s corporate board, thanks to an act of the Maine Legislature.

Washington County Redevelopment Authority was chartered in 2001 in the state’s poorest county, coincidentally around the same time that property was being transferred to The Loring Redevelopment Authority, using a starkly different method of transfer.

Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority was chartered in 2005 in Maine’s wealthiest county.

Photo by gabriele-stravinskaiteunsplash

In part, the proliferation of business parks is due to the command economy’s preference for targeted sectors. Maine’s arguably most successful city-state, the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority has its own targeted sector of industries, a phenomena which occurs on its own in a free enterprise economy as businesses gravitate to clusters of other businesses supportive of their own economy. A free enterprise economy does not need oligarchs to impose artificial divisions, nature creates a diversified mix serving subtleties of human culture that command central cannot accommodate and does not recognize, as in general, the centrally managed economy fails to recognize the existence of that which it does not manage.

As a designated Pine Tree Zone, tax payer subsidized by the entire state, MRRA has an unfair advantage over other business parks, excluding Loring which is stated as being a Pine Tree Zone in How Regions Adjust to Base Closings: The Case of Loring AFB Ten Years After Closure, 2005, though currently not identified as such on its website.

First Park is taxpayer subsidized by a region of municipalities and does not list corporate welfare benefits specific to First Park, where as MRRA has an extensive menu of incentives specific to MRRA.

Hegemonic plans for the redevelopment of Maine include a suburban wonderland — Photo by breno-assis-unsplash

The Pine Tree Zones were enacted in Maine around 2003 as a program for low income high unemployment areas, but four years later, with little media fanfare, PTZ’s expanded to state wide locations to be designated by the central managers of Maine’s economy.

On March 19, 2013, Mr. Douglas Ray, legislative liaison for the Department of Economic and Community Development testified before The Joint Standing Committee on Labor, Commerce, Research, and Economic Development

Of the 390 or so businesses participating in the Pine Tree Development Zone Program a vast majority, more than 300 are manufacturers, that’s roughly 80%. These businesses have pledged almost a billion dollars in investment and anticipated payroll of nearly $850 million and 74 hundred jobs.

The average wage calculated on Mr. Ray’s figures is $114,864 annually, more than three times the median income in Maine in 2013, and yet the MRRA is both a designated Pine Tree Zone and a designated opportunity zone, which targets high unemployment, low income areas. pursuant to the Federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 .

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I can only speculate on how it can be that a zone that boasts the highest income in Maine can also be designated a low income opportunity zone. It might have to do with designating income tracts by family incomes. Former military bases include residential units but non-residents employed in highly paid Pine Tree Zone jobs are (speculatively) counted as residents in different tracts.

a. Eligible tracts.

The definition of an LIC under the quantitative limits on QOZs and non-LIC contiguous tracts is similar to the definition under section 45D(e)(1) for NMTCs: any population census tract if (1) the poverty rate of the tract is at least 20 percent or (2) the median family income for the tract does not exceed 80 percent of statewide median income, or, for a metropolitan census tract, 80 percent of the metropolitan area median family income if greater than the statewide median. 107 A non-LIC tract may be designated if it is contiguous to an LIC that has been nominated as a QOZ by a state (including a different state), and if median family income for the tract does not exceed 125 percent of the median family income for the contiguous LIC tract.108 However, no more than 5 percent of a state’s QOZ designations can be allocated to non-LIC tracts.

Primer on Qualified Opportunity Zones

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And there is this:

BRUNSWICK — A new development of three dozen single-family homes at Brunswick Landing could bring some much needed “affordable” and workforce housing to the area.

Shipyard Ventures, or Brunswick Landing Ventures, is developing 36 single-family residential lots on Neptune Drive, Forrestal Drive, Intrepid Street and Guadalcanal Street in Brunswick Landing, the former Brunswick Naval Air Station. Portland Press Herald August 19 2020

Low income opportunity zones are determined by median family income within the tract. Affordable housing located in a business park that negotiates corporate welfare for upper income jobs can serve to qualify the tract as a low income zone, the more so if the affordable housing is rental units, assuring, in compliance with the IRS Safe Harbor Act, that the income of residents will not significantly increase as the Safe Harbor Act requires landlords to designate rental units per income brackets permitting very little room for economic growth.

MRRA is facing the possibility that the Pine Tree Zones might be repealed at the end of 2121. Low income housing in a high income business park can serve to preserve its subsidies needed to attract the high income employer. It’s an odd recipe for economic integration, especially if the Major Headquarters Expansion Act is factored in.

The Major Headquarters Expansion Act is based on the Pine Tree Zone Tax exemptions reinvented for national or global corporations hiring at least 1250 employees at higher than average wages and benefits. It was concocted by Governor LePage during the season of the Amazon Headquarters contest, and passed with barely a media mention.

Imagine the evolution of the town of MRRA as a municipal corporation featuring low income rental housing and high income global corporate employees who commute from other regions, while also serving as the capital center of the public-private corporate state of Maine, kind of like a Silicon Valley of houses made of ticky tacky that all look just the same with the corporate state kingdom court in the mix.

MMRA is the unofficial hob nob central of central management which includes The Maine Technology Institute, The Department of Economic and Community Development, The University of Maine, Tech Place, Southern Maine Community College and other regional organizations, a golf course and an airport. You might say it is the campus of Maine State Inc.

As a highly subsidized campus, it is possibly as dependent on the subsidies that the Pine Tree Zone tax exemptions enable, as the region was once dependent on the Air Force Base.

It is, of course, speculation on my part that affordable housing is needed to keep the base in its subsidies, if the Pine Tree Zone should be repealed, but my speculation is not out of character with they way special interests have been innovatively adapting many programs in Maine, the fate of the Cutler Navy Base, being a case in point.

Most economic development thinking fails to take the psychological cultural environment into consideration, but it is something that powerfully affects the individual’s sense of well being and belonging in the world. I grew up in Boothbay where the stakes of cultural walls separate the year round local community with very long roots, an equally long rooted summer community, and new, mostly well-to do transplants with time on their hands. From one Maine culture to another, one can extrapolate how the cultural mix at MRRA can potentially evolve into an upstairs downstairs community rife with self esteem issues among all levels of the populous.

Glaringly missing in this picture is the middle. It’s time to give voice to a new middle. Who is it? Where is it? What is it? And How is it? And Why do we need it?

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Is an Alternate Movement Viable ?

As I indulged in my morning meditation fantasies, the thought of First Park’s proximity to MRRA, the core of central management’s inescapable network, sparked an image of two contrasting cultures representing top down competing with roots up, except for the minor detail that First Park and the entire region of twenty four municipalities is a regional development corporation, not a promising scenario for autonomy. Still the essential contrast is dynamically representative of the command economy vs the free enterprise economy, a confrontation taking place on a global scale. How hip is that, in a state so obsessed with being “world class”?

The ideal location for the alternate economy, zoned for businesses in residence, is in a town having its own charter pursuant to the Home Rule Amendment. While a town charter is not essential, it clearly establishes that the town is the local authority, as opposed to having state and regional organizations govern the town, as is the case with the city-states.

The progressive business parks are the full blossoming of seeds planted by the federal government in 1968 with enactment of The United States Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1968, Public Law 90–577, an act which uses wealth redistribution to encourage states and municipalities to change constitutions and ordinances to conform with federal management of the Union’s economy.

The Home Rule Amendment was added to the Maine Constitution in 1969, a year after the federal congress passed The United States Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1968, Public Law 90–577 and seven years before the Maine Legislature deemed Maine to be a centrally managed economy during the Longley administration. Local governance, granted by the Home Rule Amendment, is ideologically opposed to that of central management

Today we are in a time of significant change. In Maine, the new spikes in corona virus has not yet slowed down the real estate boom. Maine is experiencing a migration into the state that may equal past out-of-the-state migrations during eras of major industrial change.

The following words said about base closings equally applies to this current time of change and transformation:

Furthermore, base closings underline a more common theme for all communities. Communities must recognize that economies have limited lives and that the success of a community depends on its ability to recognize economic lifecycles.

…..Closure announcements should not be met with panic and fears of “doom and gloom.” Rather, they should be seen as opportunities to shed the old in place of the new, which ultimately lead to innovation, production, and growth.

How Regions Adjust to Base Closings: The case of Loring AFB ten years after closure

As the state controlled economy has become more deeply entrenched over the years, I have noticed a hierarchical attitude creep into the cultural norms as those occupying positions in government or non-profit organizations manifest an attitude of authority over anyone’s choices about anything in an inordinate manner, by constitutional standards.

The existence of a hierarchy of power, imagined or otherwise, marks a distinctive difference between the cultural character of a command economy and a free enterprise economy in which there is a wide distribution of interacting hierarchies based on diverse cultural values.

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Business in Residence -an Expansion on the Artist in Residence

In searching for a location to invest our unusual assets, my instincts tell me that municipalities chartered as instruments of the state are a must to avoid. The configuration at KRDA requires that local property taxes subsidize the business and development at First Park. That means that small businesses located in municipalities in the KRDA region add another layer of taxation to the federal and state taxes used to subsidize larger industries.

The possible exception is the Washington County Redevelopment Authority, as it is ignored by the Maine Legislature, but WCRA would need to reclaim its constitutional municipal autonomy first- and why don’t they? What has being an instrument of the state ever done for them, other than rob the base of its real estate assets and its ability to levy property taxes?

All the legislation needed is that required by the Home Rule Amendment to the Maine Constitution, to prescribe the procedure by which the municipality may so act to amend its own charter. Then the municipality can repeal the words that say it is an instrumentality of the State and become a town, like any other town.

So There ! Photo by patrick-pettitt-unsplash

If Maine is ever going to reverse centralization, which has only expanded the wealth gap since it was instituted in 1976, a repeal of the Pine Tree Zones can be a significant advance, by preventing the Pine Tree Zone tax exemptions from being used as an instrument to transform refundable tax credits such as the Seed Capital Tax Credit, into a 50% subsidy cost passed on to the working class and the lower end of the ownership class, to capitalize of the upper end of the ownership class. In a time when Marxism is still a voice heard around the world, job creation is marketed as justification for the workers to finance the ownership, by the elite classes, of the means of production. How did we get from there to here?

Businesses in residence support the lower to upper ownership class as an individualized opportunity zone. Typically in my local region, town ordinances restrict the number of employees allowed for businesses in the home to two non-family-member-employees, functioning as yet another means to cap economic growth at the roots of the economy. No wonder the wealth divide keeps expanding! If such ordinances existed when my parents were growing their business, they would have had to move to a different location to avoid having their growth nipped in the bud by town leadership.

The ordinances allow artists to have a gallery but the artist is only allowed to show their own work. My mother went to the gift shows and brought back many interesting objects to sell, receiving awards for her retailing talent, but today such creativity is a violation of Boothbay town ordinances. written by those who have moved into the area more recently. We are experiencing a new migration into our communities. What changes will this new migration bring about? The local real estate market is booming from the bottom to the top of the market. What does this tell us?

In a natural economy, there is no reason to cap the numbers of employees for businesses in residence, any more than there is a need to cap the number of family or friends, or maintenance workers who are allowed to congregate at a location, because that number is limited by the physical space on the premises. If a business outgrows it space, it looks for another space, rather than packing its employees in like sardines. These ordinances are designed to cap economic growth at the roots of the economy, and to eliminate a quality rural lifestyle.

There is a justifiable purpose served by current affordable housing caps on the income growth of its occupants, which is to insure that affordable housing is always available for those most in need, but in an era in which there is an ever widening income gap, there needs to be attention paid to the availability of accessible pathways to increasing financial status throughout economic strata.

Business in residence zoning, supported by financial assistance programs. function as individualized opportunity zones. Persons owning their own business develop opportunities for themselves and others using their own skills and talents and that of their teams. The ability to combine home and work has all kinds of advantages, including economic advantages.

Remote working introduces a potential shift in cultural values representing a wider spectrum, similar in range to the variety in the missing middle. Conceptually, middle class financial success is measured by the individual’s ability to comfortably support his own life, whatever it entails.

2020 is forward-looking at a very different future than 1998. Its a time to consider fresh approaches, or a return to earlier ones. With fiat money being the current global currency of governments, central management and the wealth redistribution economy are here to stay, at least for a time being. Large systems cannot be changed abruptly, without causing mass disruption. They require an awareness of incremental change and a conscious vision of where we are going.

Published in Illumination, a Medium publication Dec 3 2020

Waiting in Limbo and Chaos as a Creative Writing Process

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 22:02:00 +0000

Let in confusion to reveal your message

Photo by alexander-tsang-unsplash

Waiting for the election results to come in feels like being in limbo. I read a Facebook post about companies giving employees a day break after the election. Trump supporters were all up in the air about the indulgence of the policy but as this election takes the long winding road to its conclusion it is really hard not to have one’s mind on the event until either candidate gets to 270.
Either conclusion represents a transformative change for America and the world. I should say the United States and the world, but I prefer the alliterative sound of “America”. America is soft and lyrical while the United States sounds harder in its precision beats. America glides across the tongue and travels on wind currents around the world. Bono got it right when he said America is an idea, the idea on which the United States of America was formed, but America is where ever freedom is the most prevalent in the world at any time.
And so we wait. At this moment everyone, even Trump supporters expect Biden to win but it hasn’t happened yet.
As I wait I read stories on Medium. I recently decided to change my marketing strategy and go for a larger audience. I started out my Medium journey, hoping that it would not way lay me into forgetting my original purpose in writing. I read many articles about how to be successful on Medium but they all seemed to measure success in making money and increased number of followers. That has nothing to do with why I write, at the most fundamental level of purpose. I was afraid of falling into the trap of mistaking the one for the other.

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I have gotten past that now. I followed the advice about writing every day but ignored the advice about publishing every day and found my writing process becoming increasingly complex.
The writing process mirrored the painting process in which I once engaged. I couldn’t love my painting until I first thoroughly hated it. I was compelled to delve into the forest of confusion and darkness to find what was on the other side. I wanted to create a painting that changed all the time, not one that was static, interesting at first, and then just sat there hanging on the wall inactively. I wanted to create an experience that was always interacting with the viewer, which means something mysterious and illusive which cannot be created by conscious intent. It must be created by beingness, inclusive of the known and the mysterious.
My paintings took months to evolve. I sat and stared at the canvas for many hours imagining endless directions it could follow through color, form and texture, until one day I would realize that I had been thinking of painting yellow right of center, for months and that I should act on it, once I acted it was as if I turned on perpetual motion, just as before I had been in a state of inert rest. Afterward I looked at the painting and thought that is the most awful thing I have ever seen! The next morning I awoke to something beautiful and alluring.
Art dealers came to my studio and asked “Where does it fit into the market ?” but the electrician who came by talked about the sail boat floating in the painting, which I had never seen until he brought it up and then I saw it every time I looked. The painting had no specific top bottom or sideways but could be hung in any direction and so it was like four paintings in one.

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Writing is a similar process. I get to a point where I feel it is heavy or boring, an all over the place mess of a thing, before I can start making it into something that hopefully speaks as a message that I only become conscientious of as part of the process of writing. I might think I know what I am going to write about when I start, or maybe not, but the process follows a formational path of its own, not intended by my direction until the end, when it is. The process of completing a painting is the same as perfecting the details of writing as one pays attention to the flow of the content and the choice of words until it feels right.

Now I am secure that I will not let go of my process in exchange in incorporating other intentions. Stage two of my Medium journey is to follow the advice that I intentionally ignored in stage one.

This post is an experiment in “publishing every day” though I do not know if I will actually take it so far as “every day”. This story is intended to be something written and published in a day. I can have that intention because I am in between writing a story using the chaos process. Once in the chaos process, I do not know that I can switch on the quick post process, but that doesn’t matter today.

My second new goal is to submit to publications with a larger audience on a regular basis. I have built up a collection of published works allowing me to feel the latitude to invest in the waiting period it takes to submit to some larger publications. Previously I needed the closure that publishing brings, but since I have a library of published articles already, I do not need that closure to come at the same rate as previously. Everything is always about process and how each activity or decision interacts with the larger process of writing so that it keeps on flowing at a steady pace.

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One publication with a large readership accepted and published one of my first stories. I did not see a wider readership for that story than my other stories but it targets a niche audience and I had no followers at that time. All stories target a niche audience but as one reads other stories published on Medium, one gets a sense of being part of a global conversation. I also need to make some money to advance my own life goals, and so it is time to embrace popular advice but without letting go of what is valued most deeply.

Since the large publication that published my early story took a long time to respond I had stopped submitting to it, not having the patience required by that process. I didn’t want to let waiting around create a limbo in my work flow, but one day I read an article by its new editor and decided to submit again. This time I got rejected within the space of twenty four hours. My story wasn’t right for their publication, which is the publication’s version of asking “where does a painting fit in the market ?”

I don’t mind a rejection based on not fitting in when it comes within a day of submission. My creative cycle can accommodate a day, and I appreciate that the rejections sound like they are from humans who actually read my story. The most recent one said “ It is an interesting story but..it doesn’t fit”. I place more importance on the first part of the statement than the latter. I know I don’t fit….but the world is evolving, not always the same. I am the world. It is me. We are all One. There is a time and a place for everything. Patience is a virtue, as I always tell my cats but they don’t listen to me.

Originally published on Medium, An Idea (by Ingenious Piece) Everything Begins With An Idea. November 6 2020

#1 for the week featured on Many Stories

When Does Cultural Advance Become Cultural Decline?

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Sun, 01 Nov 2020 21:24:00 +0000

Extrapolating into the Future While Walking and Ranting Through America’s Command Economy Politics.

This Post was selected for the Best Of Tremr!

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The Battle of the Centuries

Far-reaching ideological battles are concealed in, and over shadowed by policy issues of a moment.

As corona virus explodes uncontrollably in the midwest and fires ravage the west coast, on the coast of Southern Maine, we are experiencing a real estate boom in properties selling at all price points.

I marvel at the ability of some leaders to think on their feet, turn on a dime, and make decisions that reverberate across the world. Remote working is becoming a main stream institution, overnight, giving cause to extrapolate how remote working will transform ideologies and vice versa. While the term “remote workers” implies workers who derive their primary income from a large corporation, remote workers are also a subset of independent contractors and businesses in a home, modelled on the family farm, that mainstay of rural living.

In Maine, anyone working in their own space is an independent contractor, a small business that You own. Will there be proposals to change that fundamental concept in the interest of maintaining a semblance of employee-employer relationships, as opposed to a business to business relationship? Or, will remote working instigate changes in laws and ordinances more accommodating to businesses in a home, in general? Will business in a home earn a spot on economic development and housing maps? What kind of cultural change will emerge from this new world ordering?

How will remote working change the thinking of community and economic development? How will remote working be visualized by those writing regulations? Will there be a separate class of businesses in a home designed for large corporate relationships and opposed to small independent ones?

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The Cottage Industry

In Germany, the government rushes to pass new legislation making it legal to work from one’s home. I am shocked to learn that working in the home was ever illegal in Germany.

I googled for information on when working from home became illegal in Germany but it was easier thought than done.

Instead my search produced an interesting quoted passage from THE PAMPHLET COLLECTION OF SIR ROBERT STOUT: VOLUME 85

Sir Robert Stout was the both the Prime Minister and Chief Justice of New Zealand, at separate times, during the 19th century. The entire Robert Stout collection is published by the Victoria University of Wellington Library

The excerpt is written before the industrial revolution. It tells about the educating establishment of the Gewerbe-Museum at Vienna that provided training in the production of crafts that can be made in a home. At that time cottage industries were in decline due to factories that could produce a similar product using fewer hands. In response, the competitive edge for repopulating rural regions is envisioned as creative artisan design.

The effort at reform consists in establishing trade schools where modelling and drawing hold an important place and in which the young people can learn new and attractive designs for their home-made wares, thus securing their sale. They also acquire the power of expressing their own ideas in designs, and so obtain control of their own inventions. THE PAMPHLET COLLECTION OF SIR ROBERT STOUT: VOLUME 85

A twentieth century American design classic. The Large Sea Urchin Bowl, slip-cast design by Andersen Design, photo by author

The story goes on to describe the program at Gewerbe-Museum at Vienna run by Dr. Exner, with two plans, one which focuses on developing a product for a commercial market, as they would say today, and boasts of how many pieces of student work were sold.

The object of the Museum is to collect examples of the best products in every trade for purpose of instruction.

The story moves to the population problem in Austria, there being a great migration into the cities that was depopulating rural villages as the size of the populations had not changed. Once again the solution to repopulating rural areas is the ability to design creative new forms.

Inquiry into the causes of this movement has brought out the fact that the peasants of these villages have lost the market for their baskets and other wares because their Swiss and French neighbors, who have had abundant schools of industry, have devised new and more attractive forms for the same wares. The peasants of Austria were unable to compete because, through their ignorance of design, they were confined to the old and unsalable forms, and, with the fatuous haste so often seen, crowd the cities in the vain hope of bettering their lot

THE PAMPHLET COLLECTION OF SIR ROBERT STOUT: VOLUME 85

This pre-industrial revolution thinking resembles the vision for future of my family’s enterprise, Andersen Design and the economic development assets we inherited. Our assets can potentially make it possible for some to locate rurally by providing a means to develop an income working in a studio attached to their home, but we do not today have the support of community leadership. That is why I write my own blog, to engage a conversation that is otherwise missing. It has to start somewhere, so the meeting of the outsider minds is hereby called to order, in my community and everywhere.

The idea of reinventing our production as an independent studio network has been our operating concept long before corona virus but just happens to be perfect for developing an income and career while sheltering in place during corona virus. It is consistent with our midcentury beginnings when My Dad bucked the trend in plastics and started our company with the notion of creating a hand made product affordable to the middle classes. At the same time he took a different path from the contemporary midcentury designers of his era when he started his own production company rather than designing for the large ceramic factories then located in the western hemisphere.

Sometimes my father would question his choices and say that he should have gone the corporate route and I would say “But then we wouldn’t have this!”. I inherently valued the small intimate studio working environment over the corporate world, but our line grew much too large to be produced in a singular studio and so I landed on the idea of a network of independently owned studios, recreating the environment I loved and in which production as an art form can thrive.

Who-What Gives Voice to a Class?

In recent times independent contractors are portrayed as an exploited class, focusing on the fact that independent contractors take on the expenses of the business that they own, parlayed into exploitation by not including the advantages of owning your own business, which in a nutshell gives you more control over your own destiny. Like any other terms of agreement its a tradeoff with advantages and disadvantages.

In Maine, if a person works in their own space, they are legally categorized as independent contractors. I thought it was federal law, but I happened upon the Oregon laws, which are more complicated, indicating that the questions that I asked earlier in this story are already answered by some existing state enactments. If every state has a different set of laws governing independent contractors, it is another level of complexity to factor in for those relocating and planning on working remotely.

It is wildly challenging to form a picture of how each state handles laws governing remote working. People often do not think of these things when they are purchasing a property and make assumptions instead, such as the artist who purchased a house at Ocean Point. Maine, thinking he would be able to teach a small class in his home but was denied permission by the town selectmen. One can no longer grow a business in the home in Boothbay, Maine as my parents did. The ordinances are designed to cap the growth of businesses in the home.Businesses in a home do not have a representative voice to counter the forces of central management that are the ultimate authors of our local ordinances, which I say based on the observation that some passages of out town plan have been copied word for word from state statutes.

If there is to be reconsideration of the restrictive regulations it will require a group effort to put pressure on the town leaders, who are not really town leaders but an extension of regional organizers functioning as subsidiaries of Maine’s corporate state.

States Compete in a New Arena

Laws and regulations governing remote working, independent contractors, and business in a home may become a new area of competition between states. For decades competition between the states has targeted large corporations. Consequently, it is hard to x number of “quality jobs”, in Maine defined exclusively as jobs paying higher than average wages and benefits. With corporations downsizing their headquarters and remote working on the rise, a change in State strategies is on the horizon.

In the historically long ideological debate over who owns the means of production, it is an ironic twist that a class who does own its own means of production is portrayed as exploited, but not surprising, as the emphasis on owning the means of production has never dwelled on the expense of doing so. The two go hand and hand. Capitalization makes it or breaks it.

River Otter, slip cast design by Christine Thalia Andersen for Andersen Design , photo by author

Today capitalization is controlled by a power elite who not only manipulates the distribution of capital but also the production of fiat money that fuels it.

Governments are the means of production of fiat currency, distributed into an economy where in free enterprise competes with a wealth distribution economy which has a greater access to debt free capital, not so readily available to the free enterprise sector. Which sector can be projected to grow at a faster rate under such terms of financialization?

The wealth redistribution economy has become so large that it even the non-profit sector competes in the free market economy, often changing long established rules of engagement of the free enterprise economy. In the hand crafted industry, one might see a public-private non-profit organization charge a jury fee to show work to the buyers of a retail store, or artisans are charged a monthly retainer by a non-profit retail store that takes work on consignment, or the work of students who have paid an organization for studio space is automatically sold in a fundraiser for the organization.

Once I asked one of these institutions why they were changing long established rules of free market engagement. On the phone, the voice of a sweet young woman replied “because we serve the public good”, with the unstated but obvious implication, that out company, a big bad micro-business operating in the free enterprise economy, did not serve a public good, although we are of the class and category that the non-profit’s purpose purported to serve.

Vintage Starling Sculpture by Weston Neil Andersen

Evolutions in Marketing

When my parents started out, they made a critical leap by entering their work in the first New York Gift Show, when products were displayed in hotel rooms, before the NYC Gift Show moved into a large exhibition space.

The gift shows were a productive venue until they multiplied and dispersed the buyers market across too many locations. At the same time the internet was growing as Main Street, malls and department stores, and mail catalogs were falling into decline.

Andersen Design was established as an original production as an art form. Hand crafted production patterns were repeatable but not mechanically executed. Each artist’s hand adds their own expression, counterintuitive to conventional concepts of production work. The Boat Bowl was designed by Weston Andersen and Decorated by Brenda Andersen. Photo by author.

Todays online marketing uses applied data science, and social media. A favorite venue, Medium, is a place of many voices telling their own stories, and makes for a source of extraordinary insight into the world at large and small. By participating on Medium, and some other venues, a source of demographic information emerges through the profiles of followers, producing more information than one can glean from data compiling programs. Medium sends a notification for every new follower which includes their profiles. and the stories they write. This is a much better and more individualized demographic picture than mere age, race, gender, economic status.

I envision the new marketing as working with a stable of content providers of unique personas covering diversified subject matter and creating a community of engagement, online and off as circumstances permit.

A vintage baby seal slip-cast sculpture in our vintage natural brown slip technique designed by Weston. The baby seal was designed in the late fifties to early sixties and has retained its market popularity ever since. The brown slip is now produced commercially by another company.

As one gathers a following, cultural themes emerge. A common thread in my followers is that of bucking the dominance of super organizations imposing rules as a one way street in their terms of agreement. This promises to be an emerging social conversation as the work environment re-organizes in accommodation of remote workers, a subset of both independent contractors and businesses in a home.

As I write about economic development and advocate for complexity over central management, I see that interest reflected in my followers, such as Bill Fulton who describes himself as “ Author, urban planner & former politician from Auburn, NY. and once Mayor of Ventura, CA. Planning Dir, San Diego and now Dir of Kinder Inst at Rice U. in Houston.”

Bill Fulton’s story How My Hometown’s Failed Urban Renewal Strategy Shaped Me As An Urbanist tells of Auburn, NY., where Bill was raised, as an organically organized community that could serve as a model community targeted by today’s urban designers, before malls changed the community. before the internet drove out the mall and environmental issues impacted community design and corona virus is changing everything.

Auburn — a city then barely over 30,000 people, hosted a great deal of cultural diversity of the sort that comes about naturally when a community grows from the roots up through the natural talents and interests of its inhabitants, distinguished from the megalopic town of Ubiquity that is furthered by the central management of today’s everywhere culture.

Curled Cat in Brown Stripe by Brenda

The new tech sector accounts for 10% of the economy, but in much economic development talk, it is the entire focus. In my local community after a state inventory rated us as over served in broadband capacity, the broadband committee raided the town economic development funds to hire a wealth consultant to do another report which the arrived at the same conclusion .

The broadband survey was a joint-venture between Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor selectmen. Last September, both boards contracted with the firm for $18,000 for a comprehensive survey. The towns used $7,500 from a Maine Community Foundation grant and $5,250 each from their respective Joint Economic Development Committee accounts. Both towns are also interested in providing residents with fiber optic technology for more reliable and faster service. Lippold reported building a fiber optic infrastructure would cost slightly less than $6 million.

Broadband survey shows customers better served than in other rural towns by Bill Pearson, Boothbay Register

The $18,000 consultant then gave some very conventional advice on the obvious steps to take next. I do not know why the council could not figure it out for themselves. Even though they are supposed to represent the whole community, they are clearly concerned only with advancing the upper crust, but they are using tax payer dollars derived from property owners at all strata of the economy.

My theory is that the town selectmen believe that they are not only hiring a consultant but purchasing an authority figure to mandate that what they want must be done, kind of like a corporate CEO, replacing the natural authority once conferred on of the inhabitants of the community. They have been pursuing this project for a very long time, without revealing what the real agenda is. Now that there is a wealth consultant, through his voice they have started talking about a three million dollar project, which may be only co-incidentally half of the six million dollar figure originally quoted by the consultant. It sounds like a public-private partnership but they have not said so.

It is no longer only the state operating as corporation engaging in partnerships with private special interests but municipalities as well. This is not surprising in a state which has actually turned a whole region of municipalities into a development corporation through a special act of legislation.

The Company Town

The chartering of a region of Maine municipalities into a development corporation seems to be a little known fact, and perhaps intentionally hidden, possibly because the Maine Constitution, Article IV, Part Third, Section 14 prohibits the Maine Legislature from chartering corporations by special acts of legislation which is exactly how the Kennebec Regional Development Authority was chartered.

I came upon the KRDA a number of years ago and as I recall it was then found in a normal search of the Maine Revised Statutes, but today I could not find it’s charter through a Maine Statute Search and so I returned to my old documents to find the link which brought the charter up on an oddly colored background, not the usual blue background of the Maine statutes.

This seemed quite unusual so I did a bill search using the word “Kennebec” and the 118th session, which produced confirmation that the bill had been enacted as an emergency measure signed by then Governor, John R. McKernan Jr. It is filled under Chaptered Law as a downloadable word document, and is the strangest thing I have ever come across in my studies of the Maine statutes. Is it a law? Or is it a shadow law?

Chaptered Law ACTPS
Chapter 79

Word DocumentThese are unofficial documents that may contain errors. See the Session Laws Of Maine (when available) for a final version.

The information I found confirmed the enactment but did not give a history. I knew that the KRDA was still operative because of this recent article dated September 30, 2020, but was it still a state chartered development corporation composed of a region of municipalities? I searched for the Kennebec Region Development Authority on the Secretary of State’s corporate name search and found nothing. That tells me it is not a private corporation since the State corporate name search excludes state corporations but should include private ones.

The above linked article is published in Maine Biz, which never has anything critical to say about the functioning of the public-privately managed economy of Maine. The article is a typical example of how economic news of the State is reported in Maine, always wrapped in the packaging of a success story to the degree that it is possible. The story tells us that big project of the KRDA,a business park called First Park, is finally paid in full on the purchase of First Park, twenty years later, but after twenty years, the promise of 3000 jobs appears to be short by at least 2000 jobs.The byline says the corporation is working to market the remaining lots at the 285-acre campus. but never says how many lots there are and how many remain. Much is made of a dog park at the business park that once was meadowland, giving pause to wonder which would the dogs prefer, the park or the meadowland ? The board is allowing residential units. Will they be allowed to be businesses in a home? How else does one translate residential units into jobs?

At the time I first came across this corporation, there were a number of municipalities trying to get out of their contract with the KRDA but it was not reported in the state-wide media, only in the Kennebec Journal. That is too long a story for this post but I posted my original research here, which is very long and detailed. Here, I will leave it at that under the category of “very very strange”. I wonder if people buying property in the affected municipalities are aware that they are buying property in a development corporation, not in a conventional town. In connection with this, it should be noted that the recent attempt by the State legislature to take over the ownership of power companies in Maine had a provision in it to use the private property of Maine residents as loan equity for the forced sale of private utilities to the state. I was the only media to point this out which is found in this post.

Back to the Present

Installing fiber-optics infrastructure is a private company expense, and a very expensive one. Rural areas are not densely populated so the return on investment must be small. If the town takes it on, property taxes go up, and it might be categorized as intentional gentrification. If the town has fiber optics it will attract highly paid remote workers. One wonders how this has become a town expense, especially when the hidden player is the large corporation who employs the remote workers. A town taking on the role of a development corporation subsidizing the infrastructure used by remote employees working for large private corporations may be the next chapter of the corporate city-state but can we say WHOA. and give ourselves a chance to consider the other options, before a town becomes a company?

The Queen of Sheeba by Weston Neil Andersen in Verdigris glaze designed by Weston and applied by author , In the background is our old historical home, now bull dozed over and replaced with contemporary nothing burger architecture. The trees and garden are also gone.

Exclusionary Policies Paid For On the Public Dime

A similar group, calling itself an economic development council, spent $79,000.00 of public money to hire a New York firm to write a business plan for our region. The report recommended museums. At the time I had applied to a powerful fiscal sponsor in the arts in hopes of qualifying our design and production enterprise as a social enterprise so that we could apply for non-profit funding as a artist-designer production company.

The fiscal sponsor organization rejected us citing my use the word “production” in the application. The board, with whom I never directly engaged, claimed if one uses the word “production”, it means that one is only in it for the money but there is no definition that I am familiar with that says so, not published on the fiscal sponsor’s site or anywhere else. It’s news to me!

Andersen Design is a free market enterprise that makes its income from producing, but as I said in the application, if we were only in it for the money, we would have our products produced in a developing nation, in conformity with the global world order which designates the making of hand made crafts to the developing world, excepting those sold to the wealth market.

I wondered why a powerful fiscal sponsor for the arts so concerned about monetary motivations, accepts funding from foundations of corporations obligated to its stockholders to prioritize profits?

An S-Corporation without shareholders is not obligated to prioritise profit. We can function as a benefit corporation, without asking anyone’s permission.

People and trees are all unique even in their similarities.

Let it be said; My motivation in preserving this enterprise for future generations is an outgrowth of my love for an engaging work process.

The fiscal sponsor said that we could apply either as a school or a museum. If we applied as a school we would not be allowed to teach how to make our products, excepting that we could teach how to make our original glaze and body recipes, which comprise some of our essential intellectual property.

I opted for a museum, making sure to present a hypothetical budget in which we would lose a great deal of money, realizing that when I projected breaking even in my figures for our original application, it must have confirmed to the board that we were only in it for the money.

We were approved to be fiscally sponsored as a museum.

Taxed but Not Represented

The museum is an interesting idea but I lacked experience in how to go about it and so I naively went to the local economic development council for support where I was promptly told to get lost- they can’t help individual businesses, they said, as they used my property tax dollars in support of a project revolving around a super funded non-profit which does not pay property taxes.

The Fin Whale, it takes a very special skill to get this slip cast sculpture right!

Why did the economic council spend $79000.00 dollars on a remote consultant, only to ignore the consultant’s advice? Is it because other people’s money is so easy come, easy go, for the masters of the wealth redistribution economy?

Or, was there was a grand strategy at work. A Museum of American Designer Craftsmen would encourage a sector of the economy, not considered compatible with a suburban bedroom community for the State’s nearby corporate welfare city, a tax payer subsidized town where incomes are steadily creeping upward in compliance with corporate welfare terms of agreement and exceed the income of the surrounding region.

KRDA is a similar business park idea, but, as far as I can determine, without the Pine Tree Zone tax incentives. More on Pine Tree Zones here.

In pre-industrial revolution days, a company like Andersen Design with hundreds of original and classic designs and many original glazes and decorating techniques would have been counted as a valuable economic development asset. In the global world order, our assets are valuable in the developing world, correlating with way most of the western ceramic industry moved production to foreign labor markets in the 1980’s.

Andersen Design is unique because we did not export production, remaining rooted in our commitment to the process of making ceramics and a belief that the work process matters. Work that engages the individual meaningfully, centers the individual’s life in well beingness. Hand made production is not a mass industry but society needs to provide spaces for all, not only most people. It is to public benefit when industry diversity exists to serve the diversity of the faculties of man. It is not to the public benefit when an outsider class is created because only those who work in state-targeted industry are given consideration and value.

The world is at a new turning point, not only because of changes initiated by corona virus. Climate change looms over everything as the world is running on unlimited fiat currency while bitcoin is competing for dominance as a currency based on a limited supply. The definition of money itself is under revision in an age of escalating wealth divide. The industrial revolution replaced the cottage industries and now is being replaced by automation. The meaning of work, and money feels like it has been thrown into a giant blender and no one knows what will come out of it!

I don’t have answers to the big questions but I do feel that there is no reason to adhere to the same ideas as before. From my perspective of hand made production, I say since the industrial revolution is running out, lets bring back the cottage industry and make things by hand again, just because it is an engagingly awesome work process and humanity needs fulfillment through work for its well being.

In designing a system of checks and balances, the Founders of the United States Constitution considered the character of humanity but could not predict or control the collective quality of human character, as it evolves over time, or of the individual character of those in power. The character of a man ultimately determines how well a system works for the common good, or not. To that cause it is important to examine how different systems form the character of social interactions. A hierarchy culture breeds one kind of social interactions and a free enterprise system another.

WRITTEN BY

Mackenzie Andersen

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America is an Idea, Not a Location

noreply@blogger.com (Mackenzie Andersen) — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 18:25:00 +0000

Are United States and Chinese Economic Policies Just the Same?

Singapore xavier-unsplash

Introduction

On Medium there is a lot of advice given by the writing community to the writing community. Many stories are published about how to be successful, using money as the measure of success. Digging deeper is seen as perfectionism. a fault, an obstacle to success, a function of procrastination.

Frequent advice is to publish a story a day and don’t get hung up on perfection. Continual production is the secret of success. One is encouraged not to think about quality, only about quantity, only about getting your name out there every day so that the public knows you. And as one does so quality will naturally follow, so we are told.

nad-unsplash

As one who was raised in a business in a home that incorporates a production process, I disagree. My belief is that one should first focus on quality and then quantity. Production whether applied to writing or making ceramics is a process. If one takes the time to understand the quality that one is aiming for, quantity will follow and in a more pleasurable way, but as you shall read in what follows, enjoying one’s work is conceptualized as an obstacle to success. by some ideas afloat in our world today.

In The Cold Mountain Effect Explains Why Incredibly Talented People Struggle to Achieve Their Goals, Jessica Wildfire writes that “Charles Frazier spent almost a decade working on Cold Mountain. According to lore, he couldn’t stop and it was only because a friend intervened that the book was ever published to wild success.”

The implication of the article is that it was fear of success that led Frazier to continually revise Cold Mountain, and that he could have had the same success if he had produced it at a faster rate, perhaps taking only a year to write the book.

Ms. Wildfire fails to incorporate in her thought process that all of Frazier’s books since have a similar period of time between publications, anywhere between nine and twelve years, with the exception of a cook book. Ten years is the natural length of time for Mr Frazier’s internal process to evolve toward completion.

According to Jessica Wildfire’s view, the book would have been just as successful if it had been written in a year. If one accepts Ms. Wildfire’s argument, the end quality of the product has no relationship to the process it takes to get there.

Ms. Wildfire succinctly tells us that Mr, Frazier’s problem is that he loves his work! He enjoys it too much! That is his problem! Think how much more successful he could be if he took only a year to write his books!

“Frazier’s problem was that he was just too good at what he did. He loved doing it too much.…..

…Someone can know too much. They can be too talented. They’ll turn any project into an epic journey through the Himalayas. They don’t get tired of working. They don’t want to see the end. They’re not even perfectionists. They just love their work too much.” Jessica Wildfire, The Cold Mountain Effect Explains Why Incredibly Talented People Struggle to Achieve Their Goals

OK! That seems to be a prevalent view in contemporary culture, We see it in State economic development policies where a “quality job” is defined solely as a job that pays higher than average wages and benefits. The goal of work is to get paid, not something intrinsic to the work process itself. The worker could hate every minute of his life on the job but if he makes more money at it than most, he has a quality job and is not one of those losers hung up on enjoying their work!

The measure of “innovation” in the bureaucratic state is also entirely focused on the product and not the process. I submit that it is not the role of American government to produce products for the commercial market, it is a more American role of government to encourage an environment where an innovative process can unfold. Whether that is appropriately American is up for debate but it would be a turn in the right direction, in my opinion, and that is what we must do in these times- roll our direction back to the American Idea.

America is an idea. Ireland is a great country, but it’s not an idea. Great Britain is a great country, but it’s not an idea. That’s how we see you around the world, as one of the greatest ideas in human history. Bono

I spent several weeks navigating the SBIR.STTR grant support system as an uninvited outsider, deemed at the outset as not qualified to receive system support. The seemingly general assumption is that the applicant will accept the adjudication from the first support organization and be done with it. I, however, decided to proceed to see if I could find an open door where I could apply on my own. Eventually through persistence I returned to my original starting point and this time passed through the door to have confirmed what I had already concluded.

kyle-glennI-unsplash

The SBIR STTR grant program is a civilian economic development program embedded in a national defense act. Perhaps that is what it took to get the national defense act passed or maybe packing civilian policy into a national defense act gives it cover as an enumerated federal power.

About Me

I am an American citizen, female, small businesses person, and independent citizen-researcher on government economic development policy.

My family business was established by my parents on the rural coast of Maine as a business in a home in the 1950’s, an era when the United States had a strong middle class and the free enterprise system reigned.

The core of our business is a research and development, designing original ceramic glaze and body recipes, as well as all of the ceramic forms. Our business produces and markets products, wholesale and retail. The whole of our business spans the three phases of the SBIR grants as a complete system that begins with research and development, produces a product and follows it through to the marketplace.

The Evolution of the Morrill Act

My first encounter with the support system for the SBIR grants was through the Maine Center for Entrepreneurs.in partnership with the Maine Technology Institute, a public non-profit charity with a for-profit board, assigned by the Maine Legislature to be the singular gatekeeper for SBIR/STTR grants.

All channels I went through in my journey of seeking an application venue for the SBIR grant referred back to MTI, described by one consultant as having “taken the SBIR grants under its wing” in the manner of speaking in systemic code that uses the term “angel investors” to mean “high growth investors”.

The board of MTI is authorized to make a profit and to own intellectual property rights, When I eventually brought up this statutory fact to the MTI SBIR consultant, she adamantly denied that MTI seeks ownership of intellectual property, but she is only a consultant whose purpose is to process the SBIR grant applications, how would she know what goes on behind the closed doors where the public-private negotiations of the parent company she works for take place?

It’s not only that the board of MTI is enabled to make a profit and own intellectual property rights, but MTI is closely tied to the University of Maine, which has its own intellectual property ownership claims in place which I covered in How The Morrill Act Gave Birth to Public Ownership of Private Intellectual Property in the USA,

Title 5: ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURES AND SERVICES

Part 19: RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

Chapter 407: RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

Subchapter 1: MAINE TECHNOLOGY INSTITUTEE.
E. A program in collaboration with the University of Maine School of Law to support the commercialization and manufacturing of innovations in the State by providing education and assistance with the patent process of the United States Patent and Trademark Office to companies, inventors and entrepreneurs in the State. The administrative costs of a program under this paragraph are not management and related operating costs of the institute under section 15305. [PL 2017, c. 109, §4 (NEW).] (emphasis mine)

In 1999, §1921. Maine Patent Program was enacted as an educational program on patenting. The University of Maine claims that it can charge “a reasonable percentage of the royalties for any successful innovation patented through the program for services provided in registering a patent.” You can read more about this in the story on the Morrill Act. previously mentioned.

I have become aware that systemic language is intentionally used to convey an impression to the uninitiated while communicating another meaning that is implicitly understood to the cognizant. In this case, the core practicing policy of the SBIR/STTR grant system could have been explained up front but was never stated by anyone in so many words until I got through the inner door.

At one point it is stated in writing on the SBIR website, under the heading “Solicitations” that no unsolicited projects are accepted, but that is the only instance where I found the actual practicing policy stated, before passing through the gates of the inner support system.

Solicitations

You must respond to a funding solicitation from a particular agency, because the SBIR/STTR programs do not accept “unsolicited” proposals (a proposal that does not address a topic specified in a currently open agency SBIR/STTR solicitation). …. (emphasis mine)

The policy in practice is a direct contradiction of the words of the SBIR/STTR Policy Directive, specifically stating that the solicitations are not intended to be a substitute for unsolicited proposals.

(3) SBA does not intend that the SBIR/STTR Program Solicitation replace or be used as a substitute for unsolicited proposals for R/R&D awards to SBCs. In addition, the 83 SBIR/STTR Program Solicitation procedures do not prohibit other agency R/R&D actions with SBCs that are carried on in accordance with applicable statutory or regulatory authorizations. (emphasis mine)

In practice, there is a bulldozer psychology implementing a policy that enforces its own laws, inconsistent with the statutory policy and the USDA SBIR website literature. As a government institution making its own rules the SBIR/STTR grant program would qualify as a shadow government were it not for the fact that it is the consistent practiced policy, relegating its own enabling legislation to the shadow realm, hidden in the mists into which the Founder’s USA is receding.

When one explores the USDA SBIR website one encounters a long list of federal solicitations, too long and complex for most to navigate on their own, and so for that purpose there needs to be a support system of specialists to guide the applicant through.

What I could not find on the website was any place where one can submit an application for an unsolicited project related to the SBIR grants as it is presented in the online literature and in the enacting legislation.

The first response I encountered on my journey was to be told that the Maine Center for Entrepreneurs questions if our business qualifies as a rural business, having only been a rural business located in Maine for sixty-eight years.

In retrospect, I understand this statement meant that MCE questions if we would fit in with the federal governments solicitations. When I finally had an opportunity to meet with the MCI consultant, it was confirmed that the singular function of the support system is to match the applicant to a federal solicitation. The counselor justified this system by saying the solicitations are very broad categories but that does not change the fact that the system is functioning exclusively in service of the federal government’s purpose, as a function of a command economy which is ideologically opposite that of a free enterprise economy, the one is top down central management, and the other functions through the inner complexities of a relational world.

The phrase “relational world view” just popped into my head as I was writing. I looked it up, thinking it must be a specific term for a general concept but found that it is a specific term defined in the context of tribal cultures, as if a culture as large as the United States could not also be relational. It was likewise thought, at the time of the Founding Fathers, that a Democratic Republic couldn’t work in a geographical expanse as large as the thirteen colonies.

At the roots economy there is spoken a different language than that used by the centrally managed economy, as if each is a separate nation having its own separate language.

The next step after entering through the front door of State support services, is speaking with Mr. Elrod at the federal level. Since I was denied support at the outset, by the time I finally met the MTI consultant I had already been there, done that, and been dismissed without my scheduled phone interview, given the reason that Mr. Elrod read the one page abstract I submitted and decreed that our project was not particularly innovative.

markus-spiske-unsplash

Ditto. I do not find the economic development bureaucracy innovative at all. It is a bureaucracy that defines innovation vertically as next generation technology products while the bureaucracy itself and its concepts of what advances innovation are stuck in a rut. The top down system imposes a rigid set of rules over process development, be it research and development or economic development. By using the proposed end product as the measure of qualification for a publicly funded system, the system functions as a product development corporation. Product development is an improper object of government, as I understand it in the words of James Madison,

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.

Those words place the people before the government. The government serves the interests of the people and not the other way around. A Constitution built on the premise of individual liberty and freedom supports growth from the roots up. If the federal government is involved in economic development it should be limited to furthering an environment that supports the realization of individualized potential.

The federal government should be like the wave function is to the particle. The wave function is a full of probabilities, not actualities. The particle is the actuality but the system that measures the particle must be set up in a way that excludes the measure of probabilities.

Innovation occurs as an outcome of process, just as Mr. Frazier's novels are the end result of a process that spans a decade. Mandating an end product is the equivalency of conducting a scientific experiment to reach a predetermined conclusion. The scientific process, conducted properly leads to its own conclusions (products). Imagine if Planck were solving a mathematical problem to arrive at a predetermined conclusion. Would the quantum domain have been discovered, or would the conclusion that led to its discovery have been discarded as noncompliant? Planck was open minded enough to accept that the results of his mathematics led to an interpretation of nature that he could never have imagined.

There is much talk, and money going to government and private non-profit programs for economic development. One can easily become seduced by this illusion into believing that the system actually cares about economic development in a way that is inclusive of all. But it doesn’t. The system cares only about its own self interest.

A person working within the system may have such a capacity to think innovatively about solving individualized problems but it is not part of their job description to do so. Their job description is limited to jobs performed by rote, such as matching up projects to government solicitations, placing cubes in square holes, or so it appears from my perspective of interacting with it on the basis of an individual business with individualized needs.

In all I met with five consultants, explored the website, and read relevant parts of the federal act and associated guide book. Throughout I was told that qualifying projects must be very risky and world changing, only for superstars extraordinaire.

Contrarily the SBIR/STTR Policy Directive defines innovation inclusively as

(t) Innovation. Something new or improved, having marketable potential, that includes the development of new technology, the refinement of existing technology, or the development of new applications for existing technology.

The federal act and the directive published in association with the federal act represents the proper measure of the program, as enacted. That doesn’t change the fact of how the act functions in practice.

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I approached the grants believing what is stated on the website and the SBIR/STTR Policy Directive, but I soon realized that the act itself is conflicted.

The ideologically conflicting core of the act is between purpose (2) and purpose (3) as stated in the following paragraph:

© The statutory purpose of the SBIR program is to strengthen the role of innovative SBCs in Federally-funded research or research and development (R/R&D). Specific program purposes are to: (1) stimulate technological innovation; (2) use small business to meet Federal R/R&D needs; (3) foster and encourage participation by socially and economically disadvantaged SBCs (SDBs), and by women-owned SBCs (WOSBs), in technological innovation; and, (4) increase private sector commercialization of innovations derived from Federal R/R&D, thereby increasing competition, productivity and economic growth.

Purpose (2) implicates that the program is driven by the needs of the federal government acting in the manner of a corporation pursuing its own agenda, and (3) allows room for a individualistically-determined free enterprise system, where the government serves the interest of the people with an intent to be inclusive

Our business is women owned, rurally located, in a non-agricultural business. Although the USDA SBIR website states that one need not be in an agricultural business, I found no support dedicated to non-agricultural businesses.

Although the SBIR website says it encourages women owned businesses, the local women business center knew nothing about SBIR grants and referred us back to State central management. Nor did I find any support for women owned businesses on the USDA or SBIR website.

I would argue all free enterprise micro economy businesses are economically disadvantaged in a wealth redistribution economy that favors large corporations and non-profits, but that is another topic.

In the US Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship Report, Made in China, 2025, and the Future of American Business, industries are designated to either the developed or developing world. Certain industries, targeted by China, are classified as of major importance to the US economy.

Government Report- Public Domain Image

The reason we are told that we should be concerned about China’s move toward economic dominance is because China is an increasingly oppressive totalitarian state, but if one compares what is written in the Senate report about a merging of the government and private sector in China with the entrenchment of the command economy in the USA, one is forced to consider how far the United States has slid down the slippery slope to the point that our government operates identically to the way that China’s government is described in the following paragraph of the Senate report.

Compare:

Reported to have been expressed by Wang Xiaochuan, the CEO of a Chinese search engine company. We’re entering an era in which we’ll be fused together. It might be that there will be a request to establish a Party committee within your company, or that you should let state investors take a stake, you know, as a form of mixed ownership. If you think clearly about this, you really can resonate together with the state. You can receive massive support. But if it’s your nature to want to go your own way, to think that your interests differ from what the state is advocating, then you’ll probably find that things are painful, more painful than in the past.” Made in China, 2025, and the Future of American Business. pg 39.

meeting-between-the-united-states-and-china-on-trade-(public domain)

How is the direction in which China is moving different from federal solicitations used to marginalize a free enterprise driven economy by awarding SBIR STTR grants exclusively to projects that align with the interests of the state?

The fusing together of the private and public, for-profit and non-profit sectors into one centrally managed system that recognizes nothing outside of it's self is already codified into law in Maine.

(2) use small business to meet Federal R/R&D needs; (3) foster and encourage participation by socially and economically disadvantaged SBCs (SDBs), and by women-owned SBCs (WOSBs), in technological innovation.

In practice the SBIR/STTR legislation, should be practiced as inclusive of purpose (3) by providing specific support for economically disadvantaged SBCs (SDBs), and by women-owned SBCs (WOSBs).

The United States needs to reconsider the federal government’s role in economic development, including where national defense policy ends and civilian policy begins. Since the seventies “merge” has been the name of the game, merging the public with the private, for-profits into the non-profits, the defense department into civilian policy. They call it innovation but in practice it is totalitarianism, a one way street. Innovation from the top down, only.

There is no longer a separation of powers among the economic sectors of public, private, and non-profit.

America is an idea, but it may have moved on to other parts of the world. It’s not too late to call it back to its place of origin. We must ask ourselves is it true that all power is exclusively economic? Do we to have to compete with China? If we must compete with China, must it be on China’s terms? Is there still power in an idea? How powerful can an idea be?

Andersen Design Economic Evolution Discourse

The Difference Between Writing for Substack and Writing For Medium

Decentralized Opportunity Zones is the Future of Work-Life Balance

[ 2013, c. 368, Pt. FFFFF, §1 (NEW) .]

Support this blog by adding to your Andersen Design Vintage Collection!

…………………….Continued in Part Two………………….

Nature vs Machine: Will Human Evolution Bifurcate?

Why are social impact investors trying so hard to defeat smaller shelters for the homeless?

"Social Impact” developers in Portland, Maine seek to squelch a referendum for smaller shelters called for by qualified practitioners with concrete experience in the field.

Nov 2nd- The people decide. What's it gonna be?

Ballot Question:

Option B allows three times the number of beds in a room as Option A.

Option C allows an unlimited number of beds in a room.

Another candidate for the State of the Art in Homeless Sheltering Award

The Real State of the Art Solution presented by the Coalition for Smaller Shelters for the Homeless:

ALTERNATIVES: Everyone agrees that the City’s Oxford Street Shelter is overcrowded and inadequate. But that doesn’t mean we should settle for replacing it with another mega-shelter in a different location. Better options are available. We need our City leaders to explore them

Humanism is a very old idea

Humanism is surging today in the phenomena branded as The Great Resignation, a rising protest by the workforces against the hierarchical order of corporate culture. As U-Ming Lee put it succinctly in The Great Resignation: Why Millions Are Now Fed Up of Corporate Bullshit

The Developers

The developers Andrew Sigfridson SIOR, Managing Director The Boulos Company, and Developers Collaborative Predevelopment LLC have donated $20000.00 each (totaling $40,000) in the Portland Cares-Vote C, Political Action Committee. It buys advertising in the Portland Press Herald.

The Portland Cares-Vote C political action committee was formed to promote unlimited beds in a single room.

Sustainable Development in Practice: A Case Study Analysis of Coastal Enterprises, Inc.’s Experience

The non-transparent non-profit for-profit relationship.

Public Disclosure and Perception

Potential Investor Benefits

Developers Collaborative Predevelopment Inc says “We’re not like most developers”

The Future of Work is Remote So What Then is the Future of Housing and Community Development?

Reality check on the rush to develop large-scale workforce housing on the Boothbay Peninsula and Beyond!

No Plan? Or Just Not Saying? Boothbay's Unfunded Fifty-Million-Dollar School. Time to Visualize An Alternative Way.

Comparing Centralized and Decentralized Development Strategies for Future Culture and Economies.

Is Newsbreak Just Mainstream Central or is my local community too small for them?

The LifeStyle Approach To Economic Development Makes An Environmentally Sustainable Paradigm

Read more about the historical precedence set by the New England village here:

Scoring a point for inclusion of The LifeStyle Factor

The targeted sector mentality still rules the day!

The JECD Party Policy Paradigm

A Distinct Uptick (in gentrification)

The wealth divide is an issue for the younger generation that Boothbay needs to attract

NO! Let them build businesses in a home!

An affordable spacious living style that doesn’t threaten the water supply.

Green Party Paradigm:Don't rewrite the ordinances to decrease lot sizes, rewrite the ordinances to encourage a business in a home lifestyle.

Support from an unexpected place, the VC community

Did I Fall Down The Rabbit Hole Into A Dystopian World Or Is This Really Real?

The 1986 Ordinances

Helping the poor by investing in the rich

Lewis Mumford’s Insensate Industrial Town

The “Regional Economic Development Master Plan of 2018”

“trying to get businesses to move to a region that cannot support the necessary workforce”

The real deterrent to affordable living on the Boothbay Peninsula

Reality calls for a different working paradigm

Call Me David, Cause I have a vision too!

astrid-schaffner-unsplash

The Insensate Baroque Industrial Vacationland Levittown by the Sea

What Ceramic Casting Slip Can Tell About The Effects of Development On The Water Supply, That Our Political Leaders Won’t Say

Mackenzie Andersen

What Do Lessons from the Industrial Revolution Have to Tell Us Today?

The Saving Grace of Nineteenth-Century Was Incomplete Central Management

The New England Town

The New Migration: Urban to Rural

A Watershed Moment Underway?

What is the Meaning of “Capitalism” and Other Out-Moded Terms?

In the Beginning:

Reconsidering the entrenched concepts

The Contemporary Definition- Static or Transformative?

The first definition by Dictionary.com and is disingenuously constructed:

The term “non-profit” is a misnomer.

Merriam-Webster has a better definition.

Does state-capitalism have a definitive existence?

Merriam Webster defines state capitalism

So how does Merriam Webster define ”private capitalism”?

Answer: It doesn’t:

Let's try Merriam Webster for “free enterprise”

I decided to look for another definition of “private capitalism”.

A general google search resulted in switching the search term to “capitalism”.

Is there more than one type of capitalism?

Is there a new “radicalism” brewing that defines the function as the function rather than the agent of the function?

Lewis Mumford, A Thinker for the Ages Tells a Tale Of Cities Since the Middle Ages

Is Boothbay the right location for a forty nine million dollar school system?

How Marxian Indoctrination Sustains The Great Wealth Divide

This story was Selected for Best of Tremr! Also published on Medium in The Shadow

Green Party Paradigm:
Don't rewrite the ordinances to decrease lot sizes, rewrite the ordinances to encourage a business in a home lifestyle.