I learned two things in my 20s and early 30s that are useful to remember.
- Bad leaders can ruin an otherwise exemplary organization.
- All organizations need good written rules that reflect the way they actually do things.
The first one I learned when I went to work in the general counsel’s office at the National Consumer Cooperative Bank (now the National Cooperative Bank). That bank, established in the late 1970s, was the dream of the consumer cooperative movement – a funding source for food and housing co-ops (and, despite the name, for some worker co-op businesses).
The people initially hired – I started there in 1980, when it was just staffing up – included many people who, like me, had worked in the weeds establishing food and housing co-ops across the country, but it also included people who had come from other kinds of development banking. They were all very smart and committed to the project.
The initial president of the bank, Carol Greenwald, was appointed by President Jimmy Carter. (The bank was funded by federal money, though set up to eventually be independent.) I am sure she looked good on paper – a banking regulator from Massachusetts with a strong Democratic Party and general progressive background.
But she had a major flaw: she didn’t trust anyone who didn’t suck up to her. At the time, her behavior made me furious. In retrospect, I am sure some of that came from the misogyny she must have experienced as she built her career – she was older than I, meaning that the blatant sexism was even worse than I put up with and I saw plenty of it.
(The nonsense that the man Republicans want as vice president puts out about childless cat ladies was pretty much par for the course back when second wave feminism came along. It was harder to mock back then.)
But if you have a staff of people who know much more about both co-ops and development banking than you do, you need to listen to them even when they tell you you’re wrong. And she refused to.
We even started organizing a union there – in the early 80s when unions were disappearing – not because our working conditions were bad (they weren’t), but because we were a bunch of activists who knew what the purpose of the bank was supposed to be and wanted to make it happen.
The National Co-operative Bank still exists, but it did not become the transformative institution it was intended to be. The truth is that most co-ops are still small and locally funded. And yes, I blame Carol Greenwald and bad leadership for that.
The second I learned doing food co-ops and other community groups in the early 70s. Because most activist sorts – actually most people – hate law and lawyers, the general attitude was that if you had to incorporate something, just do the minimum and ignore your charter and bylaws.
That works fine until you have a dispute. And you will have a dispute – human beings are social creatures, but they rarely agree with each other all the time.
Here’s the thing: the rules of your charter or your bylaws or your partnership agreement or your contract are what is going to govern when things get out of control. So if, for example, the bylaws require a formal annual meeting with decisions made by a majority, occasional informal meetings with decisions made by consensus are not going to be accepted. (And that doesn’t even get into the myriad definitions of consensus.)
I got hired at the Co-op Bank to review bylaws for co-ops seeking loans and to require them to write effective bylaws and use them in their operations. That protected them from losing their charters and also when they had inevitable disputes.
It was my dream job, because I got to incorporate my knowledge of what organizations needed with my desire to build healthy democratic businesses. Alas, bad leadership turned it into a nightmare job.
As we’re facing another major presidential election, both of these points seem important. It’s obvious that the convicted felon is a lousy leader – we had him around for four years and he proved that. He punishes people who don’t suck up to him enough, so that few are willing to tell him the truth. That would be dangerous enough if he were otherwise competent, but of course he’s not.
It appears to me that Vice President Kamala Harris is willing to listen to people who disagree with her. I recall her years as California Attorney General, because I covered some of the nationwide actions by state attorneys general that she led. She got a fractious group of people behind some solid settlements for people during the mortgage crisis, just as an example.
But the political situation in the United States is a clear example of why governments (as well as co-ops) need good rules. In recent years, it has become very obvious that our Constitution has significant flaws. It has also become obvious that some of what we rely on to keep our government on an even keel are norms of behavior that cannot be enforced by law.
An example of each: the electoral college, which gave the presidency to a person who did not win the popular vote twice in sixteen years (and saddled us with the criminal grifter for four years), and the insurrection on January 6, 2021.
The electoral college system means that no one even bothers to campaign in the two most populous states in the union (California and Texas) because everyone is confident where their electoral votes will go. That’s 70 million people who don’t really matter.
And we count on norms, not rules, to get the losers of elections to step down gracefully.
Now there are many more problems. Most of the ones I see right now are with the Supreme Court, but a lot of those were created by abuses in the Senate, which is an example of another bad part of our constitution.
I used to live in the District of Columbia, where I had no senator despite living in a jurisdiction with more people than a couple of states. I have also lived in Texas and California – again, the two most populous states – each of which have two senators, as do states with under a million people. The U.S. Senate is heavily tilted toward a minority of the population.
We need a better constitution. We need to codify certain norms.
To do any of that, we need to elect better leaders.
I have some hope for better leaders. This time, if we pull that off, I hope we start in on the hard work of changing the rules so that people who want to overturn democracy cannot undermine our country.
As I keep saying, I’m very tired of having “the most important election of our lives” every two years. We have other work to do besides blocking fascists.