Thanks, happy to speak with you also — I’m a reader of Ownership Matters.

If you go back to the end of the Second World War, unemployment fell to a low of 2%, which set the stage for the growth that followed through the late 1960s. But by the early 1970s, corporate profits were declining. From a corporate perspective, this was a problem. The corporate neoliberal “solution” involved restoring profits by knocking down the place of labor in what had been thought of as the New Deal, Keynesian order.

This policy shift was thoroughly bipartisan. It was, after all, President Carter who signed into law a bill that lowered capital gains tax rates and who deregulated trucking and airlines. Reagan’s policies, such as lowering individual income tax rates and attacking labor (such as by firing air traffic controllers) consolidated this shift.

Yes, although it remains to be seen what the next stage looks like. It might be reform within capitalism, but we might also find a way to transcend the existing economy, in part because the condition of the planet might require it.

You know, I haven't read her book, but I am certainly familiar with the argument that the New Deal had state and local precedents. I did a lot of research myself at one point regarding this. For example, there were pension systems at the state level in the 1910s and 1920s that were rudimentary forms of what would become social security. There was unemployment Insurance built off of things like workers compensation, which came in the aftermath of the horrible 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City. Yes, you can go through the New Deal and find state and local precedents. So that much of the argument is true.

And what are we seeing today? You're seeing efforts at the state and local level to create public banks. The last public bank in this country was created in 1919 and it’s still around: the Bank of North Dakota.

It’s very telling how politics has shifted over time. The reason why North Dakota got the public bank back then was because of this political group called the Nonpartisan League, which of course was actually socialist. And it won control of the state legislature and the governorship in North Dakota. That's why you have the Bank of North Dakota, dating from a time when North Dakota was a center of U.S. radicalism. Hard to believe now.

But similar things could happen in other states today. You might soon have public banks in New York or California or New Mexico.

You could also have a public reconstruction bank at the federal level. There is actually a precedent for that. There was an agency called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation back in the New Deal that lasted through 1957.

With all the organizing around public health insurance right now, maybe there is a chance to achieve universal health care in the US, as happened decades ago in Canada. And, if you look at Canadian history, here too, the argument that local efforts often precedes national policy is borne out again.

It’s notable that getting universal health care in Canada involved considerable political struggle. It began In Saskatchewan. Tommy Douglas, who was leader of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a social democratic party outside the dominant Liberal and Conservative parties, became Premier (their equivalent of Governor) and got the first publicly funded hospital insurance for any province launched back in 1947. Federal legislation didn’t come until decades later. Success didn’t come easy — once the doctors went on strike and community health clinics were formed as a response to that.

So I take it as true that most often there are state and local precedents to federal policies, and that the federal government rarely invents things out of whole cloth. That being said, the broader account about the New Deal is really complicated and probably doesn’t fully fit the bottom-up story that Sarah wants to tell. Still, there was a strong mutualist tradition at that time and a number of features of the New Deal (such as credit unions and rural electric co-ops) did build on that tradition.

Our name, admittedly, is not very helpful. I mean, we’re neither quarterly (we do have a quarterly magazine as one of our publications, but we also publish online nearly daily), nor are we only about nonprofits. But if you go to our mission page, we say we aim to foster an “active, engaged and sometimes disruptive civil sector.” And what is that sector?

Remember that in the 1930s civil society was not primarily about nonprofits: it was mostly labor unions, right? They were the center of civil society at the time. In the 1960s, you could say it was the Black church, in which Martin Luther King Jr. was a pastor, like his father before him. NPQ was founded in the late 1990s, not a time of great social activism, even though you did have the anti-globalization movement. At the time, arguably nonprofits were a reasonable approximation of the center of civil society.

Today, however, with the rise of Black Lives Matter and a number of other social movement organizations more generally, you’d have to be blind to not realize that the center of civil society has shifted once more. Today our editors all have backgrounds with various social movements. For me, my background is in community wealth building. We’re all writers but we weren’t hired because we’re journalists.

This shift at NPQ dates from the election of 2016, after which our board decided we needed to build out our capacity in certain ways. The writing of NPQ at the time was not adequately addressing the struggles for economic justice and racial justice. We wanted to build an organization to meet this moment, to shift the coverage to the conversations we need to be having, to be a platform for that.

We need to look at where philanthropy got its money. And then you will understand its core interest. So the idea that somehow philanthropy will save us, I think, although widely held, is fundamentally mistaken.

That said, not only are there some very good people in philanthropy, there is an actual, radical philanthropic wing. And we're very grateful for it — it provides some of our funding. But also, far more importantly, it is supporting social movement organizing and institution building.

And I want to emphasize the latter, because ultimately independent institutions are what is needed to shift power. If you think about labor unions back in the day, they generated their own revenue from member dues. They weren't dependent on outside funders. They were outside philanthropy. They have even at times become a source of philanthropy, like when the UAW, often a pretty flawed organization, did offer financial support to civil rights organizers in the 1960s.

Employee-owned firms also are capable of generating their own revenue, independent of philanthropy. That’s why employee ownership is so important.

We need a strategy by which ordinary people can amass capital and revenue in order to have an effective, politically independent voice. This is why I cover cooperatives and community land trusts, and so on. If you can get ownership of land or of a business and be generating your own revenue, that exponentially increases your social, economic, and political power to effect change.

Now that does not in the least mean that philanthropy is unimportant. And we do, as you say, “speak to philanthropy” from time to time.

An example from back in March 2020: One of the first calls we saw about philanthropic responses to the COVID crisis was from Vu Le, the former executive director of RVC (formerly Rainier Valley Corps). He had just written a blog post to say this is the moment philanthropy had been waiting for: Everyone needs to double their funding, and double their grants in this emergency period.

And it was clear what was happening was horrifying, both the virus itself and tens of millions of people who found themselves out of work overnight. Within a couple of days, we at NPQ echoed that call. I'm not going to say that Vu Le and NPQ alone shifted hundreds of millions or even billions of grant dollars. But we did have an effect, and many other people in the field did join that call, with a significant number of foundations responding. It did make a difference.

So we are in dialogue with philanthropy, certainly. We encourage philanthropy to center equity in all their grant making, to make the shift toward supporting anti-racist organizations, etc. And, but again, I think it’s important to keep in mind that whatever successes we have, it’s with the idea of helping movements to build self-sustaining capacity.