Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age [Paperback]

As a person who embraces -- make that relishes -- change, Im not sure I fully agree with his assessment. But as a person who has lived for most of my adult life in an area that was decimated in the 1980s when the all-important steel industry fell on hard times and today struggles with the threat of losing still another industry on which we have become economically dependent -- car production at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio -- I understand the point my uncle was trying to make.

So does Michael H. Shuman, attorney and author of Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age. In his book, he advocates that local communities must regain control over their own economies by a variety of means including investing not in outsiders, but in locally owned businesses like credit unions, municipally owned utilities and community development corporations and focusing on import-replacing rather than export-led development. Doing so, he maintains, will reduce or eliminate the need to offer excessive tax abatements and other incentives to entice huge corporations upon which the communities stand to become dependent. The growing power and will of corporations to move without notice or warning has presented many communities with a terrible dilemma: Either cut wages and benefits, gut environmental standards and offer tax breaks to attract and retain corporations or become a ghost town, Shuman writes. Almost every U.S. town or city has learned that capital flight is not just a hypothetical danger.

Urging cities to be just as friendly with rootless corporations as with its home-grown businesses, Shuman says, is like telling a loyal wife to accept the inevitability of philandering by her husband and to appease him by buying more sexy lingerie and cooking nicer dinners. If a community is reduced to a link in a global chain, it will be dragged wherever the corporation controlling the chain wants.

As long as corporations are free to move from place to place, the author argues, No jurisdictions efforts to target production toward basic needs, or protect its work force or environment, can succeed. Once regulations become onerous, a profit-maximizing firm will move on.

This does not mean, however, that communities should circle the wagons and lock the gates. It means nurturing locally owned businesses which use local resources sustainably, employ local workers at decent wages and serve primarily local consumers, Shuman writes. It means becoming more self-sufficient and less dependent on imports. Control moves from the boardrooms of distant corporations and back to the community where it belongs.

All things considered, Shuman offers a point of view thats worth considering by government and economic development leaders throughout the country.