Humane Dane

Seeking to create a more humane, kinder, and egalitarian Dane County, Wisconsin for everyone.

Q: How Should Dane County Respond to the Current Economic Uncertainty?

A: Quickly localize as much of our economy as possible to build a strong, resilient, interdependent economy for Dane County’s residents.

About 90% of what we spend is on services and nondurable goods and can easily be produced locally. If your community is not 90% self-reliant now, tariffs are your invitation to get started.

How can we move our economy more quickly toward a self-reliance that’s economically practical? Here are ten distinct strategies your community can deploy:

(1) Leakage Analysis – Look systematically at where money is leaving your economy right now, and calculate which nonlocal-purchases are leading to the greatest job losses. What companies are extracting rather than creating wealth? These enterprises should become the focus of economic development efforts to grow new businesses or expand existing businesses to provide these goods and services locally. Shockingly, almost no economic development agency follows this very simple methodology for setting priorities. They instead waste their time, staff, and your money trying to attract outside companies—a strategy that’s a proven loser for economic development.

(2) Asset Analysis – Your community should make a thorough inventory of all underused assets. Do you have farmland with nothing growing on it? Public properties with zero economic activity? Is a large segment of your workforce unemployed, underemployed, or unhappily employed? Copenhagen developed its municipal land into huge new sources of wealth. Its projects, like Nordhavn, have created space for 40,000 residents and 40,000 workers. Revenue generated from the land development funded major infrastructure projects, including an expanded metro system, further boosting economic activity and connectivity.

(3) Circular Economies – A very specific kind of asset foolishly overlooked by most economic developers is what we mistakenly call waste—garbage, pollution, excess heat, and so forth. These waste products are potentially valuable inputs for new industries. South Australia has grown its regional economy and improved the state’s fiscal health by charging fees on all waste products which has incentivized industries to clean up and become more efficient, which has created more jobs.

(4) Vertical Integration – Leakage analysis should be performed not only by the community but also by its local companies. Zingerman’s Community of Businesses in Ann Arbor, Michigan, dramatically expanded its deli business by creating other local businesses—a bakery, a creamery, a farm, a coffee roastery—that supply goods to the deli. It now employs more than 700 people. Nudging your businesses to vertically integrate is a much more reliable way to grow the economy than bringing in an outside factory.

(5) Anchor Institutions – Vertical integration is particularly powerful if it is deployed by anchor institutions, the largest companies in your community that might be publicly owned or nonprofits. These could include public schools, universities, sports teams, and hospitals. Push the local hospital to buy food from local farmers, or public schools to purchase desks from local furniture producers. In Preston, in the United Kingdom, local procurement led by anchor institutions created more than 1,600 jobs.

(6) Business Partnerships – Local businesses can strengthen themselves by establishing partnerships with other businesses. Local restaurants, for example, can market themselves collectively and leverage their collective buying power to get better deals from wholesalers. Local hardware stores, which might not be able to compete on their own, have been able to succeed by being part of the global Ace Hardware Producer Cooperative. (These global networks of local businesses, by the way, offer clues on how local companies can cost-effectively produce durable goods.)

(7) Local Credit Networks – Strengthening local banks can strengthen local businesses that borrow from them. Most cities invest in global financial instruments that do no good at home. The Bank of North Dakota, (in a state with fewer than 800,000 residents) has, for more than 100 years, taken these revenues and put them on deposit in local banks and credit unions, enhancing credit available to local businesses. It receives interest from the deposits, and now clears more than $100 million in annual profits, which it uses for various economic development initiatives.

(8) Local Investment – Shifting the investment of residents from global companies to local ones can powerfully stimulate the local economy. And cost-effectively! In Nova Scotia, local pension funds called Community Economic Development Investment Funds (CEDIF) are enabling residents to reinvest in various local businesses. My favorite CEDIF, called FarmWorks, invests in local farms and food businesses. Residents receive tax credits, and a recent study found that the per-job cost of these programs was just over $500—about a thousand-fold cheaper than the cost of paying incentives to attract a large outside company.

(9) Innovation Centers – Innovation occurs when economic developers mindfully connect entrepreneurs with capital, mentors, technical assistance, support networks, courses, incubators, and accelerators. A great example of the virtues of localizing innovation support is the Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque Region of Spain. Started in 1956, Mondragon has grown into the largest network of worker cooperatives in the world, now employing more than 70,000 people. Central to Mondragon’s early success was a school offering support services that helped transform talented workers into entrepreneurs, all within the cooperative system.

(10) Global Partnerships – Every business design that helps a city become a little more self-reliant, whether in food, energy, or bicycles, should be shared and spread with every other community around the world. As this sharing network expands, communities will benefit from best practices across the world. This is already happening informally and formally through organizations like the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives and COPx. These networks should be deepened and integrated with local economic development policy.

As my examples suggest, these ten localization strategies are not hypothetical. They are already being implemented somewhere on the planet and showing impressive results. They are generating income, wealth, and jobs far more cost-effectively than current economic development strategies to “attract and retain” outside global businesses.

So I say Don’t succumb to our Mad King’s trade wars. Use this crisis as an impetus to accelerate localization in your economy. Let’s work together to find the business designs and strategies that collectively reduce our vulnerability. The faster we can take our local economies out of the line of international fire, the more secure we will be—and the more our peoples will prosper.

Excerpted from The Best Response to Tariff Wars? Declare Economic Independence--by Michael Shuman

Here's a link to the original:

https://mainstreetjournal.substack.com/p/the-best-response-to-tariff-wars?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=294556&post_id=160185372&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=dhf1p&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

January, 20, 2025

Hello ,

Last week, Representative Stubbs and Senator Roys organized a listening session in Monona to hear thoughts, feelings, and ideas about how to respond to the school shootings in Dane County. Many county officials were there to listen as well.

I was shocked that the mayor of Monona said that we have no idea how to stop them; There are ideas, but I fear that nothing concrete will happen to prevent them, outside of hiring more security guards and mental health professionals, that the meeting was just an extended photo-op. I hope hope hope I’m wrong.

Since humans with their needs met do not commit suicide by shooting up a school, Humane Dane pleaded for immediate action to bring about a more humane Dane County that meets the universal needs of humans.

The core problem is that we have built, and continue to build auto-based, alienating sprawl that serves the needs of trans-national corporations and prevents the human needs of connection and contribution and meaning from being met. It will take a long time to dismantle it completely, but first, let’s stop the bleeding...

Here are concrete, actionable ideas that were presented:

For school districts to actively recruit mental health “nurses”, each to work with just a few students, to be a caring adult, a model of emotional regulation and love.

Stop feeding junk to our children. This idea could make money for the district, if we gave our students real work of growing, producing, preparing, and serving food. Aquaponics would be a great place to start.

Start a rudimentary, rail-based transportation system.

Stop approving extractive companies.

Set up a local investment exchange.

Are you committed to do what you can to make some of these ideas a reality?

Thanks for reading,

Richard Wagner

www.humane-dane.org

It's time for action!

Our huge mental-emotional health crisis is growing. The increase in suicide, self-harm, and overdoses is alarming. Here in Dane County, we’ve had two school shootings in a matter of months. Meanwhile, our government hems and haws and does nothing. We can’t wait for the government to act; we must act as citizens.

Fortunately Dr. King, in his final speech (given the night before he was killed), gives the blueprint for affecting huge, profound social change that requires no government involvement: collectively and publicly withdrawing economic support from companies that harm mental wellness and collectively and publicly supporting businesses that promote community and mental well-being.

We at Humane Dane are asking you to join us in the fight for a county that promotes community, connection, and interdependence. Our approach is holistic: to heal and ultimately prevent the hurt while addressing the cause: why is our modern world causing so much pain, alienation and anxiety? To do this we are asking you to join the Humane Dane Group on Facebook. in order to learn from each other and act. Please follow the link to join.

Here's a link to view the speech and check out our Facebook Group:

An open letter to Dane County:

Feel free to copy and paste and send to your representative

Hello,

In deciding how to respond to the recent school violence, we need to ask the right question: not “Why the shooting?”, but rather “Why the pain? Why the despair?” While the first question addresses the symptom, the second addresses the cause.

The short answer is that we have created a modern world that does not meet the universal, bio-psycho-social needs of humans; in fact, this modern world works to de-humanize us. Young people are canaries in the coal mine. We don’t blame the canary; instead, while we work to cure the canary, we also determine how the mine is deficient, and how we can re-form the mine so as not to harm more canaries. The question is, “Is our modern world meeting the needs of humans? And what can we do to change that?”

Gabor Mate says that evaluating a culture is easy: “to what degree does it meet the needs of human beings, and to what degree does it undermine the needs of human beings?” Let’s see what our culture is creating:

As is (and this is PRE covid; don’t blame the quarantine)

Conclusion

Our (Civilization? City? Way of life? Unsure of the word) is in crisis. The canaries are dying in the coal mine. Of course we need to heal the canaries, but we must also transform the coal mine. We have created a largely unnatural world that does not meet our needs and produces mental/emotional dis-ease. We need huge change, and huge change often requires courageous, profound, systemic change in both schools and in our county. We must create a civilization that meets the basic, universal, bio/psycho/social needs of the people.

Here are my recommendations for both school and county:

School recommendation

Creating in the district a culture of compassion and humanity by--

Training the existing staff from school board to (fill in with whomever you feel has the least power in schools) in Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Model of the Brain and Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication.

Taking advantage of the incredible plasticity of the young human brain, and pour the lion’s share of our resources into PK-2nd(?) grade by--

Making the meeting the universal needs of staff and students, along with the skill of self-regulation, the prime directives of 4K to 2nd(?) grade by--

Revolutionizing early curriculum to emphasize community, curiosity, play, and wonder over academic rigor, and--

Teaching, explicitly and through modeling, the skills of emotional and social intelligence to everyone.

Recruiting/hiring/equipping an army of ‘mental health nurses’ to adopt classrooms or children in classrooms to be a positive, regulating presence in the child’s life. I imagine lots of retirees would love to be part of this.

Stopping the giving of unhealthy, food-like substances (and creating terrible eating habits and bad mental and physical health) to children. Serve them healthy, delicious, made-from-scratch, whole foods in order to build good eating habits and health.

And continuing this approach through the rest of their schooling, adding the opportunity to engage in real work, starting cottage industries, working with hands, negotiating a life plan. . . One example: bring aquaponics into the schools, gradually releasing responsibility to students: it’s real work, and it’s interdisciplinary (biology, chemistry, culinary, construction, business(?)).

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Sadly, producing healthy children only to send them into an unhealthy world is cruel. So we need to change the world we have created into a world that meets our universal human needs. We need to transform the coal mine.

We live unnatural lives in a profoundly unnatural civilization. In the following chart, the first column describes how humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years; the second describes how we now live:

County recommendation

Make this the vision of Dane County: walkable neighborhoods filled with locally-funded, locally-owned businesses selling locally- produced goods and services, all connected by rail-based public transportation. (Like every great metro area in the world).
Use the gems of Dane County as a model of development: Willy Street, Monroe Street, State Street, Atwood Avenue, downtown Sun Prairie. . . all places that create community, create wealth, and are worth caring about.
Immediately stop approving auto-based developments. No huge, single-family houses on windy streets or huge apartment buildings that sentence each resident to an isolating, alienating, auto-based future and whose maintenance is massively expensive.
Immediately stop approving franchises and transnational businesses, the companies that extract wealth from a community instead of developing the wealth of a community.
Start developing walkable neighborhoods filled with locally-funded, locally-owned businesses selling locally-produced goods and services, all connected by rail-based public transportation.
Establish a local investment exchange, so all citizens of Dane County can invest in locally-owned businesses.
Establish a ‘make-up-the-difference fund’ so everyone can afford to buy locally-produced goods and services, especially food.
Establish a rail-based transportation system today.