My Story about how top-down wealth redistribution controls local cultural economic choice.
I am a baby boomer. I live in a town which is said to be the grayest town in the grayest county in the grayest state in the USA.
A habitual economic development talking point of local politicians is that the community needs to attract youth. It is transparent by observation that the only measure of economic development success used by local politicians is increasing property values. Many millennials and generation X’ers feel that they will never be able to afford a home, and so, there is a disconnect between the practicing goal of economic development and goals in local political rhetoric.
A current article in our local paper makes it sound like our planning board is a local planning board. While there is a local face for the planning board, I have little doubt that the local planning board is not a sovereign entity but it is controlled by the strings that reach all the way to the federal government. Based on what is written in the Maine statutes, the local board negotiates with the State on a quid quo pro basis, in exchange for municipal grants, the board serves as an instrument of the State. This is not spoken as a proven and established fact, but as an extrapolation of what is codified in the Maine statutes.
In 2013 Industry Partnerships was enacted as a design in which all the resources of government will be used in the interests of the targeted industries favored by the state. In so doing, the State functions as a development corporation, pursuing its agenda, rather than a government serving the interests of the people.
The language found in the Boothbay Comprehensive Plan of 2015 includes a section about home businesses which read, at that time, as cut and pasted from Industry Partnerships. The word for word duplication of what was in Industrial Partnerships to the Boothbay Town Plan, gives the appearance that the Town is demonstrating its willingness to cooperate with the State by directly taking words from the States development plan and placing them in town ordinances, using the businesses in a home culture as a pawn in the game.
Today I cannot find these paragraphs in Industry Partnerships but this is a screen shot from my old blog:
Shortly after publishing this comparison on my blog I ran into a local representative of the Department of Community and Economic Development in the grocery store. The representative approached me and announced that I had to stop writing about the JECD, our local so-called “economic development council”, which I call Spendaholics Anonymous because all they do is spend public money on consultants and advertising for the downtown dining and entertainment industries.
The representative proclaimed that the Town plan was not coordinated with Industry Partnerships, as appearances suggest. I was “wasting my time!” and I had to stop writing, seemingly not cognizant that she is a representative of my state government attempting to censor my speech. The representative acted as if it was within her authority to tell me what I am allowed to write about on my blog.
The Department of Community and Economic Development, for whom the representative is employed, is the planning board for the Financial Authority of Maine Corporation, where concentrated public wealth is held before being distributed. The DECD decides who gets the re-distributed wealth. I interpreted the representative’s comments to mean that I would not get funded. What else would “you are wasting your time” mean? I wasn’t applying for funding or even thinking about it. The DECD representative has no insight into why I write my blog. There was a void in the Maine media missing a voice and I decided to be that voice. By my intentions, I am not wasting my time. Look who is reading my blog!
My family’s business was established as one of the first businesses in a home in the region in 1952. A business in the home is a uniquely holistic integrated lifestyle, which can make affording a home more accessible. Artists in residence zoning, a specialized version of a business in a home, has been successfully used to bring life back to neighborhoods such as the Soho and Tribecca in New York city, which were deserted streets filled with old factory buildings in the 1960’s when I attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. By the 1980’s there were more art galleries per square foot in Soho, NYC than in any other place in the world.
And yet in my hometown, where politicians claim they want to attract a younger generation and families and year round jobs, the town ordinances put into place in recent years are designed to drive out businesses in the home and individual makers of every sort from shipbuilders to artists wanting to teach a small four student class in his home.
Why? This story examines the forces involved in driving a micro-economic sector out of a rural Maine peninsula.
My town is a rural area with many wide open spaces. Today town ordinances are aimed at breaking apart the integrated life style of running businesses in the home, intent on relocating the business half of the whole to industrial zones, in accordance with ordinances created by those with little understanding of the culture and the reasons why location matters in a working environment.
I became aware of the agenda to eliminate the home business culture by happenstance. It is not a subject of conversation that takes place openly in the public realm, that conversation is controlled by the same people that control everything else.
A Strange Encounter at the Town Office
I was first made aware of the agenda to regulate income made within the home, on a day when I stopped by my town office to pick up a “Doing Business as Form”. I anticipated a quick errand. Instead I was sent to a window where the young clerk handed me a long document requesting all of my private information. The clerk told me to fill out three copies and bring it to the next selectmen’s meeting.
I was merely requesting a form to create a business name. This seemed highly inappropriate.
The form looked like it could be a zoning application. I told the young clerk that we had been homesteaded since 1958. She told me that she was there to educate me and said that I might want to do something that wasn’t included in our zoning. I thought to myself that it would be hard to think of something that wasn’t included, short of starting a completely unrelated business. Maybe she could wait to draw her conclusions until I was actually submitting a form rather than merely requesting one?
The clerk pushed me to take the document. I commented on the strong legalese at the top of the form. She told me not to worry about it, they just use that form because it is the only one they have, just take it and sign it, don’t pay attention to that legalese at the top!
The form did not look like the form I was requesting. By re-applying for a zoning status that I already had, would I be negating our existing homesteaded status? Suspicions rose as a bizarre drama unfolded over a request for a simple form. The atmosphere was turning hostile.
The young clerk told me that the selectman had to approve any income producing activity taking place in a home. I asked to see the ordinances in support of her claim. That is how I learned about local ordinances designed to regulate and restrict income producing activities in the home. However they were clearly impractical to enforce and so seemed to be in place to target specific individuals, such as myself.
The ordinance specifically states that it applies even if the activity has no effect on the neighborhood and so there is no conventional or reasonable case to be made for why the selectmen should have say over activity taking place in the privacy of the home. Municipalities do not collect income taxes. The State does, a case to be made that municipal planning boards have become instruments of the State, which in Maine is a development corporation, different from a private development corporation only in the fact that it writes the laws that govern us.
The ordinances assign authority to the selectmen, to grant or not, a resident’s ability to develop an income in one’s own home. In example, accordingly, if I should ever start to make an income from writing on Medium, I would be required by the ordinances to get permission to continue writing for Medium behind its paywall. Maybe the representative of the DECD would like me to stop saying what I have to say, and maybe she could make that part of the terms for the Town recieving a municipal grant. It sounds like a stretch but no more than being handed a three page legal document when all one is doing is requesting a one sentence form.
I recently ran into a former member of the planning board. Not realizing this to be the case, I commented that a new neighbor may be surprised when he finds out that he will not be able to have a gallery in his home. The former planning board member said “Oh he can have a gallery! He just can’t show anyone else’s work or hire anyone to help produce his own work!” stated as though it was perfectly reasonable to impose limitations on economic growth in the micro economy of a small rural community. Such rules would have stopped the growth of my parents business in about year one.
I also knew by word of mouth that the ordinances are now stopping people from having galleries, or at least from having one in which they hang a sign on the door indicating it is open to the public. Galleries of this type are present in the surrounding mid-coast area, but now dis-allowed in Boothbay.
My parents chose the slip casting method because they started their business with a mission to create a handcrafted product affordable to the middle classes.They hired women who once worked in the fish packing industry and taught them the skills of ceramics. Dad often remembered the way the women would sing on the job. Dad used to say that our business gave people jobs, jobs teaching others to make the designs my parents created, which would be outlawed by the ordinances today.
Today I run the business understaffed. When I say to people in economic development that we need to hire more people, I am usually told that I should be able to run a slip casting studio with over two hundred designs and many complex processes all on my own, which I am advised to do for an arbitrary two years, before I should consider hiring anyone, ignoring the fact that the business has been in operation since 1952 and I have been working with it since the early nineties and needing a larger staff all that time. When one works understaffed processes that should be done simultaneously are done consecutively instead. To run such a business to its full potential is an orchestration requiring many players. I know all the processes. I am ready to be the maestro.
The Deeming of A New Governing Philosophy circa 1976
Maine’s centralized economy was deemed into existence in 1976 under Governor Longley. The centralized economy moves ever forward towards total control. The new powers of my local board of selectmen is a predictable evolution of centralization which transforms all units of government into instruments of the state, each negotiating for their share of redistributed wealth, awarded as municipal grants.
Town Of Boothbay Ordinances
Home Occupation: Any activity performed for pecuniary gain in a dwelling unit, or other structure accessory to a dwelling unit, or directed from a dwelling unit by one or more residents of that dwelling unit that conforms to all requirements of this Ordinance.
Home Occupation, Homemaker/Office: Occupations including, but not limited to, computer/fax/typewriter worker, investor advice and service, tele-communicator, and dressmaker, that are conducted solely by occupants of the dwelling, have minimal customer traffic and use no process or equipment that could alter the residential character of the property or adversely affect neighboring property owners
Home Occupation, Other: All occupations, including Day Care not included in Home Occupation, Homemaker/Office.
The Birth of a Corporate State
In 1976, the Maine Legislature deemed that “centrally managing the economy is an essential government function”. This is true but only for totalitarian systems, which Maine was not, at that time. Arguably, the dominant standard of economic development used by Maine State Inc since the 1970’s is fatally flawed. Since the centralized economy was instituted, policies have targeted creating upper crust jobs, exclusively. Jobs that provide “higher than average wages and benefits” are referred to as “quality jobs” and are traded for taxpayer subsidization of a state targeted industry. Wealth inequality has been expanding ever since.
A well functioning free enterprise economy provides opportunities at all levels of the economy allowing anyone at any strata an accessible path toward improving his living through his own skills and talents. That is why it is a mistake to favor jobs paying higher than average wages over all others and to qualify them as “quality” jobs, implying that other jobs are NON-quality jobs. All work deserves respect. If an economy has stepping stones, people will use them. While some jobs may not pay “higher than average wages” for starters, they can provide opportunities to increase one’s standard of living through one’s one talents, including entrepreneurial talents and an individualistic and independent lifestyle. One makes one’s own way rather than expecting the state to arrange it for the individual as a regulated and tiered entitlement system.
State programs are creating communes for “startups” in which facilities and administration are provided by central management. These start up communes are usually connected to the University of Maine where the State has set up its claims to the ownership of intellectual property of original authors based on their use of facilities owned by the State.
Off The Grid
Locally, regional property values are increasing as former first homes are being bought up as second and third, forth or fifth homes. The community leaders support “affordable housing” of the same sort of over regulated grid community, my parents left in Ohio in 1952.
My parents sold their Levittown styled home in Ohio in 1952 and moved to the Boothbay Peninsula of Maine to follow their dream of starting a ceramic art and design business in their own home. They took the path less travelled , which I only became cognizant about later in life. The path less travelled was my norm, the lens through which I viewed the world. It was a world full of small entrepreneurs. The least desirable thing to do was to work for a large corporation, epitomized as the man in the grey flannel suit. Sometimes my Dad would say that maybe he should have gone the conventional corporate route, and I would say, “But then we wouldn’t have this !”
“This” was a successful small intimate working environment, integrated with the home. I loved it, but the facilities I was working in about twenty years ago, were too small for the size of our product line. Working in the small studio I had to rotate the production of the line. Many pieces have special individualized tricks that one has to remember when casting, which side to pour it from, at what angle, and so forth. By the time production cycle rotated back to a piece, it often required a couple of casts before I recalled the trick used for the individual piece.
As I was casting, I came up with an idea of how the production should be expanded through a network of small independently owned production studios. I was thinking that the line could be managed better if broken up into small segments by the specific skills required. I wondered if I could find people who would feel a sense of dedication similar to my own. I could not separate my dedication from the fact that my family created and owned the business and so I arrived at the idea that the individual casting studios in the network should be individually owned.
I was not thinking about socialism, or capitalism or any other political ideology, I was thinking about how to grow and preserve the business into the future beyond my own life time. It was the lifestyle that I wanted to preserve. It had taken a lifetime to develop a line of over two hundred classic and market proved designs. Such assets should live on to benefit future life times. Society needs diversity to accommodate the diversity among people. Society needs to preserve the lifestyle option of being an independent maker. Ceramic art and design is not a mass industry providing employment to an entire region, but it is a necessary cultural alternative to the centralization of an economy, which leaves every one that does not serve central managements purposes by the wayside.
An Awakening
Then one day I embarked upon a long awakening journey exploring the larger context of a world governed and directed by corporatism. It wasn’t only private corporatism, it was a public-private corporatism, controlling and shapeshifting to its own advantage, being a public corporation when convenient and private at other times. The ability to shape shift is codified into the Maine municipal statutes in many different sections, what is presented below being but one example. In this example. one can see how shape shifting between public and private identities is enabled by the Maine statutes
Title 30-A: MUNICIPALITIES AND COUNTIESPart 2: MUNICIPALITIES
Subpart 2: ORGANIZATION AND INTERLOCAL COOPERATIONChapter 115: INTERLOCAL COOPERATION
§2203. Joint exercise of powers
Any power or powers, privileges or authority exercised or capable of exercise by a party to an agreement under this chapter may be exercised and enjoyed jointly or cooperatively with any other party to the extent that federal laws, when applicable, permit the joint or cooperative exercise. When acting jointly or cooperatively with any party, any agency of State Government may exercise all of the powers, privileges and authority conferred by this chapter upon a public agency. [2009, c. 636, Pt. D, §3 (AMD).] (emphasis mine)
§2203. Joint exercise of powers
8. Limitation. Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter:
A. No powers, privileges or authority may be jointly or cooperatively exercised unless each type of power, privilege or authority exercised is capable of being exercised by at least one of the parties within the entire jurisdictional area of the agreement, or by each of the several parties within each of their several jurisdictions if all of the several jurisdictions make up the total jurisdictional area of the agreement; or [2009, c. 636, Pt. D, §3 (AMD).] ( emphasis mine)-
Note the double negative. “NO powers-Unless” could be eliminated and stated more directly as “ privileges or authority may be jointly or cooperatively exercised by each type of power, privilege or authority capable of being exercised by at least one of the parties.” This is a example of a pattern which I have observed in the statutes, where in they are constructed to give an impression quite opposite to what they are actually saying, if one skims over them too quickly.
6. Notice to regional councils. Any agreement made under this chapter is subject to the reporting requirements of section 2342, subsection 6, if applicable.
Central command (Command Economy) controls everything it interacts with through wealth redistribution just like a river controls an ecosystem. The wealth is distributed down from the federal government to my small town where the anti-home business town ordinances have been in place since at least 2015, designed to restrain the growth of businesses in the home, a core value inspiring the idea that I thought of while casting ceramics in my own studio.
Keeping in mind that most economists agree that unequal distribution of wealth began to manifests in the seventies, let’s look at what took place in the 1960’s, that may have had the effect of setting the expanding wealth divide into action:
The River of Redistributed Wealth Flows from the Federal Government circa 1966
Maine Statutes Title 30-A: MUNICIPALITIES AND COUNTIES§2342. Planning and program review All applications for federal program grants affecting regional planning, coordination and development, including programs under Section 204 of the United States Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966, Public Law 89–754, and the United States Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1968, Public Law 90–577, and the objectives set forth in the United States Office of Management and Budget Circular A-95, shall be submitted to the regional council for review and comment. Subsection 5 applies to these grant applications.
Part 2: MUNICIPALITIES
Subpart 2: ORGANIZATION AND INTERLOCAL COOPERATION
Chapter 119: REGIONAL COOPERATION
Subchapter 2: REGIONAL PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT DISTRICT
The purpose of Section 204 of the United States Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966, Public Law 89–754 is to rebuild slum areas.
The United States Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1968, Public Law 90–577 includes these definitions for units of government:
POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OR LOCAL GOVERNMENT SEC. 103. The term “political subdivision” or “local government” means a local unit of government, including specifically a county, municipality, city, town, township, or a school or other special district created by or pursuant to State law.
UNIT OF GENERAL LOCAL GOVERNMENT SEC. 104. “Unit of general local government” means any city, county, town, parish, village, or other general purpose political subdivision of a State.
SPECIAL-PURPOS E UNIT OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT SEC. 105. “Special-purpose unit of local government” means any special district, public-purpose corporation, or other strictly limited purpose
Enter the City-States
About forty five minutes away from the peninsula is is a former navy base transformed by the Maine Legislature into the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority. Back in the day the navy base defended our nation against totalitarianism. Today it serves as the premier court of the centralized economy as a corporate welfare city and a designated as a Pine Tree Zone, where a river of tax exemptions flows. MRRA is chartered as a municipal corporation serving as an instrument of the state with a name that declares it to be the designated authority to redevelop the entire Midcoast Region, including my local community.
A “municipal corporation serving as an instrument of the state” is inconsistent with the definitions posted above from The United States Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1968, Public Law 90–577. A municipality is a unit of local government. A Municipal corporation is an instrument of a municipality allowing it to act as a legal entity.
By definition, a municipal corporation, as an instrument of a unit of local government cannot be an instrument of the State. I believe that the Maine Legislature uses contradictory terminology to lend an impression of being consistent with an exception to the rule in Article IV Part Third , Section 14 of the Maine Constitution which prohibits the Legislature from chartering corporations by special acts of legislation. The terminology isn’t consistent with the exception since the language in the Maine Constitution is municipal purpose and not municipal corporation. An instrumentality of the state serves a state purpose, not a municipal one.
State Control of Local Ordinances
Subsection 5. Review of applications for state-aid programs. Within each planning and development district or subdistrict in which a regional council has been organized, the governing body of each governmental unit and special district shall submit to the regional council for review any applications to state agencies for loans or grants-in-aid before the application is made. The regional council shall determine whether or not the proposed application is properly coordinated with other existing or proposed projects within the district, as well as any district plans or policies where they exist. In making this determination, the council shall inform both the applicant agency and the granting authority of its opinion within 30 days.
[PL 1987, c. 737, Pt. A, §2 (NEW); PL 1987, c. 737, Pt. C, §106 (NEW); PL 1989, c. 6 (AMD); PL 1989, c. 9, §2 (AMD); PL 1989, c. 104, Pt. C, §§8, 10 (AMD).
Public-private corporatism is instituted by the state in partnership with private interests. Public private relationships are an oligarchy form of government but garbed in the copacetic language of “public-private relationships”, it becomes astoundedly socially acceptable with no evident opposition. I find this term repeated everywhere throughout the Maine statutes and in the larger culture. I, however, upon discovering its existence felt like Rip Van Winkle waking up from a long sleep, during which the world had been transformed into an oppressive corporate grid.
I try not to think much about the corporate grid of the corporate state these days because as all controlling as it might try to be, it actually isn’t. There will always be a larger world out there, filled with challenges and unexpected miracles. I’d rather be seeing the world outside the grid than the world within it, and yet it is important to be aware of creeping totalitarianism. It may be that one day, if darkness is allowed to grow by its own devices, it will become unavoidable to take a side in the age old battle between the forces of darkness and light. I like to think that if we grow the light of its own accord, which in this case is a metaphor for a vibrant free enterprise micro economy, in contradistinction to everything being controlled by large corporate grids, it will have a transformative effect on the advancing darkness, but still I raise my voice and say what I see when I know no one else will say it, and I do not even know if they see it, because they are not saying it. Tell it like it is. It might make a difference. Others might be feeling the same way. Can we make an alternative world?
