Antidote to Trump’s Gilded Age: Packernomics
The current gilded age of Trump too often evokes despair among Progressives. It’s understandable. When corporate tax breaks lead to stock buybacks instead of wage increases, or when Republican lawmakers ignore illegal corruption in the White House because deep down they really support financial deregulation, one could assume that all is lost, the Plutocrats won, and economic fairness evades us. At times like these, Progressives should draw strength from an unlikely source: the Green Bay Packers. Applying Packers Economics — or “Packernomics” — means fighting to expand the number of non-profits and consumer-owned enterprises in the U.S. economy, to the benefit of consumers, businesses, and society at large. The story of the Green Bay Packers explains why.
The Packers are the only non-profit, fan-owned team in professional sports. They also happen to have won more championships than most other NFL teams, play for the smallest city of any team in the league, and consistently produce league MVPs. These things all go together. As a non-profit, the team can plow all revenues into football operations, facilities, and other critical elements of a good team, rather than watch some billionaire owner siphon off profits to pay for his new private jet or yacht. As employees of a fan-owned team, the Packers’ coaching staff and management do not have to answer to the whims of a single egocentric owner, but rather must answer to the ultimate consumers of the product, the fans. And fans never have to worry about the team being sold and moving to another city. The team’s owners will not allow it. The Packers conduct their shareholder meetings at Lambeau Field — imagine 80,000 shareholders in a stadium shouting “aye!” in response to whether the proposed slate of directors should be approved. And it all started because in the 1920s, when the team was going bankrupt, Curly Lambeau converted the organization to a non-profit and sold shares to the people of Wisconsin, with no single shareholder allowed to take control. Packernomics set the stage for remarkable success on the toughest of playing fields.
For all the reasons that a non-profit, fan-owned professional football team benefits fans and the local community, more non-profit firms owned by consumers or employees would enhance Americans’ lives in multiple ways.
Consider the poster-child of profiteering run amok to the detriment of average Americans: the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. Needless price increases of life-saving drugs and deliberate scarcity in the name of padding profits no doubt costs lives and causes pain. The profit motive in this context undermines effective health care delivery.
The solution? A non-profit pharmaceutical company.
Hospitals exasperated with generic drug companies raising prices by upwards of 1,000%, or simply creating artificial shortages in order to increase revenues, are establishing a non-profit pharmaceutical firm. Intermountain Healthcare leads a consortium of hospitals, including Ascension, SSM Health, and Trinity Health — together representing more than 450 hospitals — to establish Project Rx, a new generic drug supplier. The new firm will contract with manufacturers to produce essential generic drugs at lower prices and greater availability. Hospitals often are the biggest consumers of generic drugs. In this case, they decided to take their business elsewhere.
Like the Packers, Project Rx is a non-profit, consumer-owned enterprise. Also like the Packers, it will produce a better product because it will put the customer, not profits, first. Just as important, Project Rx will bring much needed competition to a highly concentrated market in which a few suppliers can set prices with impunity. Packernomics lowering costs and improving accessibility in health care.
Recently, I applied Packernomics to another highly concentrated, consumer-punishing sector of the economy, pay-TV and broadcasting. On January 11, 2018, Locast.org launched in New York City. Locast is the brainchild of a non-profit I co-founded in 2009 called Sports Fans Coalition (we’re the ones who got the FCC to end the Sports Blackout Rule against massive lobbying from the NFL and broadcasters). Locast streams NYC local broadcast TV stations to people located within the stations’ viewing area. It is the first-ever, non-profit, user-supported local broadcast streaming service.
Ordinarily, taking a broadcast signal off the air and streaming it online would be a copyright violation. But a federal copyright statute enacted in 1976 says that non-profits can retransmit a local broadcast signal. Once again, this is an example of a non-profit playing a critical role where multi-billion dollar for-profit corporations failed. Locast applies an old statute to modern internet video, allowing cord-cutters to view online their local broadcast TV stations, which were supposed to be available for free to everyone in the first place. Non-profit Locast infuses competition into a highly concentrated market where people have to pay too much for cable or do without a service that their property (FCC spectrum licenses) facilitates. Packernomics at work to reduce the cost of video and make local broadcasting more available to the public.
Even a for-profit enterprise can show signs of Packernomics wisdom, as proven by Vermont’s Switchback Brewing Company when the firm sold 100% of its stock to its 30 employees last year. Consummating the deal through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan backed by GreatBanc Trust Company, Switchback founder and brewmaster Bill Cherry said that he wanted the company to be “Vermont-owned forever.” That sounds a lot like Curly Lambeau selling shares to fans and keeping the Packers in Wisconsin forever. What better way to honor the Packers tradition than through a craft brewery.
Progressives’ despair in the Gilded Age of Trump reflects the over-commercialized, oligopolistic, billionaire-dominated society in which we live. Resistance can take many forms but one thing sure to annoy and antagonize the billionaire class more than anything is promoting non-profit, consumer- or employee-owned firms outside the grasp of Trump’s cronies. Packernomics is the answer.
