President's Message
My path to adulthood led through the food co-ops of Burlington Vermont and Boulder Colorado where, as a young adult on a tight budget, I bought much of my groceries. In exchange for lower prices on quality food, I volunteered my time to stock the shelves, clean the floors or do anything else that needed to get done. While that experience helped me avoid eating generic peanut butter and instant noodles three times a day, it left me with a skewed view of the cooperative business model as a capitalist backwater – a withering vestige of the hippie communes some three decades earlier. I was wrong and it’s time to set the record straight.
My public service and professional experience in financial services and taxation opened my eyes to see that American cooperative businesses are neither communist nor socialist, but rather uniquely American. That is to say that these businesses still contend with natural market forces, unnatural regulatory pressure, and most of them compete fiercely with each other for market share and profit margin. This is far from a critique of this less-understood business model. Instead, the capitalist cooperative may emerge as one of the brighter spots in the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and here is why.
America is exhausted right now. Having borne decades of chronic partisan skirmishes, and months of acute economic and physical assaults from a wicked global virus, we are weary, divided, grieving. Through all this, Lady Liberty still stands in New York Harbor holding out the promise of opportunity to all. We often imagine her torch as a beacon to those searching the horizon for American soil, but her light shines in 360 degrees. Americans who need just a little more heat and light in these cold times can look to the Statue of Liberty. As the poem engraved at her feet declares:
“From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome…”
Every major American military action and each cultural sea change witnessed marginalization or persecution of some populations of Americans for the most superficial of reasons – skin color, national origin, religion, sex, gender and, especially now, partisan affiliation. And so it goes. We cannot expect in this moment that America will rise up in full unified cooperation to defeat this epidemiological enemy. How can we help? By choosing to support cooperative businesses big and small nationwide.
Cooperative businesses embody the welcoming nature of Lady Liberty. With “mild eyes” they offer opportunity because they do not treat the consumer as just potential revenue in human form. Cooperatives beckon us to join them in search of mutual benefit. Like a team of horses, cooperatives harness the power of affiliation to compete in the marketplace and, when they win, they share the progress with the very people that fueled the success. Because, if you think about it, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps is impossible. If that does not sound profoundly American, nothing does.
American cooperatives are beacons of financial hope that prove our economic resiliency. Cooperatives can be found across our economic spectrum, from agriculture to pharmacies and from energy to sporting goods. Financial cooperatives – credit unions – do not ask people to perform the impossible feat of pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. Rather, they allow their members to pool their deposits and lend that money out to their members. When there are no outside investors to divert the profits, the member wins.
This virus will pass and our economy will recover. As you consider where to spend your money in this time of recovery, consider where the profits go. For my part, I’ll be looking for a cooperative.
Cooperatively,
Bruce
