Is Windham, NY Ready For An Anarcho-Syndicalist Running For Town Supervisor?
Let's find out?
While, I’m a registered democrat and I am poll worker in the elections—my true allegiance is to Anarcho-Syndicalism. Simply put Anarcho-Syndicalism is a horizontal egalitarian economic and political system that emphasizes the creation of syndicates (Unions) as the basic form of political and economic distribution of power. The idea is to create a bottom up type power structure.
This is a diagram that describes the power structure of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labor) formed in 1910 in the Spanish city of Barcelona. Its model is rather effective. And I think we can adopt something like this to Windham’s power structure actually.
Power To The People Section I:
The first most critical aspect of changing the make up of the power structures in Windham is creating a more direct democratic model of power in our town. I believe the best way to do this is create a serious of councils.
Economic Development Council
Labor Council
Land Development and Use Council (to replace the Town Planning Board)
Municipality Worker-Cooperatives.
A Parks and Recreational Council
The Economic Development Council should be concerned with a creating long term economic plans for the town. Including the creation of a Town Financed Credit Union that we can use to develop local Cooperatively Owned Businesses. This bank will help to fund cooperatives with low-interest loans designed for long stability instead of short term growth. Cooperatives offer the best opportunity for success in my opinion in our community. In the Italian Region Emilia Romagna one of the densest collections of Worker Cooperatives exist in the world. In contrast with Spain’s Basque region where the famous Mondragon Cooperative exists the Emilia Romagna’s worker cooperatives a smaller and have a higher degree of work place democracy. The Aspen Institute has found the following: “Cooperatives are more resilient to economic shocks, experience lower turnover among workers, and have higher productivity levels than traditional businesses. These economic benefits for worker cooperatives translate into economic benefits for individual workers and their families, who earn equal or higher wages than workers in similar jobs and often have more family-friendly workplaces”.
The next part of the economic council’s project should be to look at what Windham can do to create low-impact goods for export instead of importation. In this sense I agree with Jane Jacobs’ ideal conception of the regional producer that is an exporter instead of an importer of goods and services is the path to sustained development. This should be a broad group of things that we can produce effectively and sell in our local markets i.e. Catskill, Hudson, and Kingston, NY. One concept that I think we could do rather quickly is create a tote bags for shopping that made out of the waste of fast fashion. Fast Fashion is the process of creating low-cost clothing that is marketed on a time frame of 1 month to 1 week. In the process this creates a glut of waste in the form of cheap clothing that could be easily turned into the raw materials for a successful business model in our town. There are more ideas we could do as well. The idea is that we turn our town from a net importer of goods like these into an exporter. This will instead of extracting cash from our economy will interject it into the economy through a process of creating stable high income careers.
The Municipal Credit Union: This is going to be the critical part of my plan—it is time for Windham to embrace fully the concept of community banking. This bank will provide critical functions for the town: 1) it will be a source of funding for the local cooperatives that we will develop and 2) it will be a source of funding for stable long term homes with low interest loans and programs to develop home ownership in the community.
Credit Unions since they are form of cooperative institution yield themselves very well to distributing resources in communities to low-income persons and small businesses. Cooperatives also handle middle class persons just as well too. In the case of this model we should look to the issues in the Comprehensive Plan of 2022 that highlight income inequalities of the form rent prices and average home prices.
In this case the Credit Union will become the primary lender for low interest loans to develop housing. One of the critical problems in Windham at present is the over building of multi-million dollar housing and the lack of affordable housing. The easiest solution to this problem is the creation of a grant program that will allow people to come into town purchase properties that are distressed in some fashion and rebuild or restore them. This does three positive things for the town: one it reduces the rate of overbuilding in the town of new homes; two, it provides affordable homes to people who want to live in Windham full-time almost immediately; and three, it allows us to maintain the beauty of the town at a low cost and reduces the overall carbon footprint of affordable housing.
Obviously the finally function of the credit union would be to perform basic banking functions for the town like cashing checks, savings accounts, and so on. Even these simple processes of operating the Credit Union helps to increase the cash flow within the town. This is especially true when we take into account the investments these types of actions will have the town’s ability to fund its own growth. The dividends that the interest from savings accounts, Bonds and CD’s will help to fund our economic engine. Other benefits include a reduction in the employee costs for the bank. Instead of a CEO earning millions of dollars this money will rolled back into the community in the form higher paying banking jobs and greater funds to loan to small businesses in the town.
Long Term Economic Planning. What is sorely lacking from my perspective in this town is long term economic planning. While the Windham Comprehensive Plan of 2022 is a good start it fails to create long term policy proposals to address any of the perceived weaknesses in our community’s economic future. It’s hard to plan for a future if you really don’t believe in planning. In one of the great ironies of our culture today — Windham’s once self-sufficient rural farming community is now essentially a food desert in many respects. These issues could be solved with some long term planning in our community that leverages the natural beauty of the region and still productive farming concessions into a worker-consumer type cooperative arrangement creating our very own Cooperative Supermarket/General Store. One could easily couple our small scale agricultural businesses to our tourist market via the super market and through a complete Farm to Table revolution in our local cuisine [ Yes, I know we have 3 restaurants that do this already— great, but we have many restaurants and they should all be using local produce (this note is for my local windham audience please forgive the tone to my none local readers)].
As we reclaim our local productive capacity in my example the first domino is local agriculture . We then look to other areas of the economy we can expand into that are easily sourced in our region: creating tote bags for the beach or the grocery store from recycled fashion is certainly a possibility; as are artisanal blown glass making, metal art works, wood carving (yes, I realize that some these already exist we can expand on them), tech companies creating applications, and more. All of which again can be sold in our store both locally and regionally or globally. The key here is that we’re creating two things one: employment that is sustainable and well paying; and two, we stopping the extraction process of wealth leaving the community and region that had always occurred before.
Avoiding the Philanthropy Trap: Our biggest goal as a town needs to be to create a long term plan that isn’t based on Tourism or the attracting wealth from Billionaire Philanthropy Projects. Philanthropy is a trap plain and simple. It comes with too many strings attached and too few benefits to the community in the long run as the money runs out the town is left holding the bag. In 2015 Mark Zuckerberg and his wife were basking the glow of their altruism when they announced that they would donate $45 billion or so dollars of their vast Facebook fortune to charity—one little problem they created an LLC company as a big tax avoidance scheme that also allowed them to invest in any for-profit company they so desired subsequently their net wealth is now estimated to be $171 billion in 2024. This is not a new story in the early 20th Century both Rockefeller and Carnegie perfected the art of creating the charity organization that ultimately is an investment firm for a massive familial fortune.
The investments in this town should be made by the people of this town and the people who want to become part of this town through a program of full employment [meaning Careers not Jobs] and sustainable population growth. We shouldn’t allow the allure of grants that aren’t federal or state funded to affect our investments. We need to invest in people who want to create long term attachments and will be driven to better themselves and this town for the future of their children and the town itself. Philanthropy all too often is flashy way to effectively control development of towns and people while pretending you’re a positive influence. In fact in most cases philanthropists today are negative influences on communities that allow the ultra-wealthy to further their control politically, economically and socially while throwing scraps to the towns people.
Labor Council: The concept of the labor council is both a means of monitoring our regions labor needs from a statistical stand point and also a labor relationship and training council. The dual function provides to elements of an interface between the worker cooperatives and the other economic appendages of the local government with statistical facts. Such facts might be the number of people employed in a, b, and c sectors of the economy and expected growth of d, e, and f business within them and their requirements for labor. The next part of the labor council is to help find the training resources for the cooperatives and their potential employees. Also higher education grants too for students and returning adults. All Labor is important.
For example the Labor Council might look for grants from the state or federal agencies to create a welding school program for employees in the town. Or they might create a coding program for kids after school with a grant. They might also be the ones that create an affordable daycare cooperative in town that allows single parents to work or just gives stay at home parents time off when they require it.
The function of the Labor Council is to help smooth out rough edges we find in our modern day lives.
Land Development And Usage Council: It is like a Planning Board and Urban Planning Office all rolled into one; The council’s mission is to maintain growth of new buildings in a steady state and to save the beauty of the area. Land is a natural resource our town cannot afford to waste any longer. According to our Town’s Comprehensive Plan from 2022 over 67% of our homes are vacant a significant part of the year. Which represents a loss in potential housing stock for long-term residents that wish to move into the region. The primary Goal of the Land Development And Usage Council should be the following:
Locating unused homes and purchasing them for sale to people willing to develop worker cooperatives or small business in the community (I would prefer worker cooperatives but I’m a little flexible on this issue). Mixed use real estate is probably our best and most efficient means by which to accomplish the goal of creating long term sustainable growth in this area. In conjunction with our Credit Union.
Federal grant raising for the maintenance and upkeep of our Historic Homes in the community. This will improve our overall appearances and increase our town’s charming persona with the tourist sector. In conjunction with the Credit Union.
Develop Parks and Recreational facilities that have low-impact ecology speaking and have multiple uses for our community members and our tourist friends. This will be performed in conjunction with our Parks and Recreational Council.
Our goals as a town should be to increase the multi-use nature of our properties that create full employment and long term growth. We should minimize growth of AirBnB’s, Hotels, Motels, Restaurants, and Retail Space. We should promote the growth of a Cooperative General Store, Agriculture, Crafts Workshops, Tech Developers, and the manufacture of low-impact goods i.e. tote bags from recycled materials, furniture constructed from recycled industrial materials, and so on. That’s where the focus of our planning should be focused on. A pleasant by-product of this policy is that by focusing our energies on long term growth and rebuilding old homes while limiting large secondary homes— the secondary home market i.e. large homes over $1.0 million in value should hold their value due to scarcity. And with our increase in using current stock of homes housing values shouldn’t shift around too much even though we are developing a massive stock of affordable homes.
Municipal Cooperative: It is time to give some of the most important people in our community a full voice in their employment and their futures. The first goal is to create a truly democratic workplace in the Municipal Sector. That means the Highway Department Supervisor will no longer be voted on by the general public but by the members of the Highway Department themselves. After all would it be fair for outsiders to vote on your boss? No, not at all the workers who work in profession should vote on who leads them.
The focus of Municipal Cooperative should be to provide the highest quality of maintenance possible given the weather conditions and demands of the season for roads. Developing long term strategic planning for countering the increase in rain falls that will accompany Global Warming will promote the long term viability of the town.
Also the Municipal Cooperative should be a source of recycling in this case “compositing” should also be a critical service that the town provides to the community. “Compositing” will reduce our waste in land fields and potentially could provide cleaner biomass fuels like ethanol or even direct electricity in a Biofuel Cell. Eventually, those resources could be used to power some of the local municipal buildings.
Another Avenue of resources the town is at present leaving untapped is the waste heat of waste water. In Kappala, Sweden the waste heat from the purification process of waste water is captured in heat exchangers and used to heat buildings in the city. This could be used as a potential source of energy and economic development for the town of Windham as well. Using a type of low-energy source such as the purified waste water a series of Stirling Engines could be used to generate power and sold as commodity at first before becoming an integrated grid system. Ultimately through a series of low-density power generation techniques from geothermal and small hydro-electric systems to roof-top solar power and storage systems such as flywheels and thermal batteries Windham could effectively become a self sustaining micro-grid. Ultimately ending in a town with its own Electric Cooperative that sells its excess power to other regions. Providing stable careers and lower costs to our end users. It’s a 10 or 15 year in the future plan if we start now, but it could be our best way to maintain a strong base of technical people in our town from line-persons and electrical engineers and software designers.
Ultimately the Municipal Cooperative could provide the necessary core services from waste disposal to power generation all in one neat package operated by local residents for local residents.
Section II: More Direct Democracy
The second part of my proposal is to create a zest for Democracy in our Town. As I stated before I’ve working the polls lately and I can say this Windham lacks a zeal to vote. We have 1708 citizens in the town and perhaps 300 to 400 of them vote in a Primary election maybe 450 in a general Election total. These numbers are low to say the least— I do expect to see an energized crowd for Trump so perhaps we will get 600 voters. I would be very surprised if we get more than that number. We’ve allowed apathy to creep into our population because voting seems like a mindless task that benefits no one but the politician. And that is true to a certain extent if we keep voting the way we do now.
Transparency In All Town Meetings— This Our Town And We Are All Important!
More Involvement Of The People During The None Election Years.
More Direct Voting On Referendums In The Town By The Population.
All Council Positions Elected By The People .
Transparency In The Town Meetings: Every citizen in the town of Windham should have the ability to access critical information about the town with ease from the town’s website. This includes town budgets, progress on how the town is following its budget, future projects in the town , and all town meetings should be video recorded and easily downloaded by the population. Also 6 times per year the town should have large scale town hall meetings where the public , town board, and the councils answer questions of the public that might need to be addressed.
Town Budgets should always go to a referendum and have a 3 week period of public discourse with the town’s people over how and why the money will be spent. The new Councils should be made up of elected members of the community with 2 year terms. Their recommendations to the town board should be ratified by a referendum vote on all major policy procedures. All people who are tax payers should have a vote in these referendums.
Our goal as a government should be to engage with the population and create a strong dialog to help grow the town. We should focus on what we can do to increase the best qualities of our town and to support all people who want to build a stronger town with us.
Section III: Building Our Public Infrastructure
The future of our town is going to be a series of necessary Public Cooperative Works I feel these include the following things:
Public Transportation
Utilities Cooperative
Cooperative Healthcare
Public Transportation: Our future as a town is that of a well connected to the outside world with transportation that allows us to move from the center of the town to the Capital Region , Hudson, Catskill and eventually NYC. Our long term goal as a town should be to develop two different types of public transportation:
Cooperative Regional Bus Service with other mountain top towns that will allow service for people across the entire Mountain Top Region so that it is possible to travel between each town on the mountain top and to larger towns like Catskill , Greeneville and of course Hudson and Kingston. This should be implemented as soon as possible.
Cooperative Regional light rail service between the Mountain top and NYC. Much of the rail that was once the old Ulster & Delaware still exists in Kingston, NY and Phoenicia, NY— we should lobby state and federal resources for a grant to reopen and extend those lines from Kingston first to Tannersville and then eventually into Windham itself proper. Yes, it is an expensive item; but, the economic possibilities it offers are too great to ignore. Burlington VT spent 30 years trying to get back into service with Amtrak. Hudson has also benefited from the presence of the Amtrak station. There is little doubt that Windham and the Mountain Top wouldn’t benefit with a train that reach Kingston and NYC potentially along with Albany and Montreal.
Cooperative Utilities: The basic structure of a cooperative utility is that of a consumer cooperative. These cooperatives will be part of the larger Municipal Cooperative.
Electrical Utility this is the most common type of utility that is cooperative in nature. Usually they owned by the consumers but in our case the ownership is going to be the workers and consumers will more like common stockholders with a shared presence on the board of directors. This will allow the workers to have their voice and the consumers to their voice in equal presence. By-laws and regulations can be determined at later date but the important idea is that instead of having our local hard earned money from going to large multinational corporations like Fortis Inc. that owns Central Hudson Gas & Electric or NYSEG who’s parent company Avangird is majority owned by the Spanish company Iberdrola the world’s largest electrical company by marketshare. Instead we should put those funds where they will do the most good in our own credit union and in our futures.
Water Utility: Again we seeing the negative effects of the rush to privatization everything with Water Utilities in this Nation as well. We must protect our water rights from the massive corporations that wish to maximize profits in all sectors of the economy. In Arizona in 2023 it was reported that during the massive drought a Saudi Arabian owned company was capable of drawing unlimited amounts of water to grow Alfalfa. There is no doubt in my mind that given our present climate issues with Snow that given enough time new majority owners of the Ski Slope will look to increase their permitted use of water each ski season as artificial snow must be used to cover more and more of the slope longer and longer. This will negative impacts on the price of water in the town. We must control all of our water assets or face the fate of Bolivia in the early 2000’s. This also means taking over control our water from the DEP and restructuring more equitable control of these resources with NYC.
Gas Utilities: Like the other two utilities the clear advantage to creating a cooperative in this respect is that we can leverage our power as consumers by purchasing gas in bulk from one supplier. Then our distribution method can be through municipal cooperative just like the other two giving us the critical cost savings that will eventual lead to great benefits for all.
Cooperative Healthcare: In the 1930’s an immigrant doctor by the name of Michael Shadid from Lebanon (1898) started a movement in Elk City Oklahoma in 1929 with the opening of his first hospital. By the 1940’s Texas was leading the nation in Rural Community Cooperative Hospital Development. States like Texas were facing the same problems then that we are now: a shortage of medical care that is on there mountain top. Our nearest hospital is Hudson, NY over 30 miles away.
The New York Nurses Association is already working on developing Cooperative Healthcare systems in NYC. The Mountain Top can do the same by pooling our resources between all the communities on the mountain and centralizing our operation we can build and support a modest yet beneficial health center that meets the local needs with low-cost and high yield results.
Section IV: How Do We Pay For It All?
The Solution to paying for these projects is the creation of a policy of full employment in the town that helps to spill over to other parts of the region. As I’ve stated before the idea behind this concept is two fold:
We are removing the extraction of wealth from our community by altering the demand curve from outside resources to local and regional resources. This will put more into our region and stimulate further investments.
Full Employment we can use our town’s municipal cooperative as a means of creating a town jobs guarantee that will both help to maintain salary parity with out regions but also provide the needed employment to sustain our steady state system.
Using Federal And State Grant Money to help jump start our programs. There is always a myriad of funds available to communities and our job as local governments is to seek out these funds and to use them to benefit the community in ways that provide superior services to the community i.e. like cooperative healthcare, cooperative utilities, cooperative broad band ownership for the Mountain Top.
The paying for this is not as big an issue as the will to Do Things That Are Big! We have the capability to do this do we have the Will?
This My Official Announcement of Candidacy For The Position Of Town Supervisor of Windham NY. I am here to work with you not against to build a tomorrow that we can have today!
This is a great local program!
I really like the ideas for local cleaner energy production. Excellent