Our economy is going to shrink. Both nationally and locally.
Rent has increased in this town in recent years, and now many tenants have dramatically decreased incomes. Many local businesses are either closed, or operating at a loss, with a reduced base of customers. And yet, as of early April, there are no long-term plans being proposed, on either the state or local level, to address these problems.
A few short years ago, before England fully embraced reactionary isolationism, its Labor Party put forward a plan for exactly this type of situation. Its proposal was to offer the workers of businesses declaring bankruptcy the “right of first refusal” to purchase the business and convert it into a worker-owned co-op. The funds to do so would be provided in the form of zero-interest, government-backed loans. Finding financial institutions willing to assume such risk to support local workers and the local economy may be hard, but the situation we are in is going to require outside-of-the-box thinking for any abject disaster to be mitigated.
The Labor Party program may or may not be an exact blueprint we can draw from, but if a revived culture of local ownership and investment doesn’t emerge from this crisis, people will lose the ability to afford to live here, and the local institutions we know and love will fold. Franklin County has a strong culture of cooperative business, lots of local agriculture, an abundance of natural resources, and many out of work people looking for some form of income other than the bare minimum offered through government dependency. All of the pieces for a sustainable post-virus economy exist here, are we creative enough to put them together?
Wylie Earp
Greenfield