The Occupy movement: Wall St, Colombo St - and junk food joints

Subway and McD's are next to each other at the southern end of Colombo St, the main street of Christchurch. They survived the earthquakes of the past year. The locally-owned, independent diners and cafes they undercut and shoved aside were gone long before the quakes.



The Occupy Wall St movement does not seem to have had any impact on McDonald's stocks, which were trading on the New York Stock Exchange on October 28 at around US$93. Nor on Starbucks stock, traded on the NASDAQ. Subway is a  private company that opened its first NZ store in 1995 (the same year that it opened its first stores in China and eight other countries). Now all three chains have premises on the main street of Christchurch, although the Starbucks one is temporarily closed due to quake damage.

I can't say that the fish and chip shops and other local cheap food places driven out of business by the transnational junk food joints served haute cuisine, but I can say that they served locally-produced and prepared food, and also that they did not say things like 'We bake our own bread' unless it was actually true. (The truth about the Subway chain's claim to do this is that they 'bake' frozen dough which is shipped to Australia and Asia from a factory in Taranaki. How authentic - and sustainable - is that?)

Every time I drive past the Colombo St Subway and McD's (which I do often, as they are on my way to and from the city) I think about what this main street - like main streets everywhere - has lost to the global corporations. The Occupy Wall St movement inspired me to write about it, as follows...

Occupy Main Street!

The 'Occupy' movement currently sweeping the world is an enormously hopeful and encouraging sign that millions of people want real democracy instead of the current version, in which self-serving elites have parasitised the body politic, eating it away from the inside and leaving only a lifeless exo-skeleton which looks like democracy but does not think, breathe and move like democracy.

Yet we should not mistake form for substance in the Occupy movement either. Nine months after the occupation of Tahrir Square the military is still in charge of Egypt, while it will take more than central city camping to clean up the financial services sector in the USA and elsewhere. If the Occupy movement is to fulfil its promise it has to move from occupying Wall St to occupying Main Street. That is to say, it must move from the symbolic centres of power over the people to the actual centres of power to the people. It must go from words of freedom and political democracy to acts of freedom and economic democracy.

The place to do this is on every Main Street, because Main Streets are currently where sustainable economies and real democracy are bleeding to death. I can't walk the length of Colombo St, the main street of my home town of Christchurch, New Zealand, at present. A lot of it is in ruins due to the earthquakes that have been hammering the city over the past year. The form of my main street has gone – but the substance had already been ruined. Some of the ruined buildings still had the name of the original owner/occupier carved into their fabric, but with very few exceptions none of those firms are still in business, and their place has been taken not by other locally-owned and operated businesses which bank locally, pay taxes locally, and support local charities but rather by transnational chain stores, from fast food franchises to global accountancy firms. There are no real names of real people left on the storefronts and sign boards of my main street, only the names of distant corporations.

My main street could be any main street in any town or city that has consented to the corporate occupation of public space. It is hard not to, because these businesses are all legal, even though very few of them are good. They did not use military or political force to take over our towns, but economic force. In No Logo Naomi Klein describes the cut-throat tactics they use to destroy locally-owned independent businesses, which are also legal if not moral.

Did anyone protest this corporate occupation while it was happening? I did. With a handful of others who saw the writing on the wall I stood outside the first Starbucks store in Christchurch on its opening day twelve years ago, holding placards and handing out leaflets. Passers-by were either bemused or amused. It takes a lot of time and effort to unravel the connections between drinking a cup of stale corporate coffee (the beans are roasted in America) in New Zealand and not having enough money in local purses to properly fund civic amenities like libraries and swimming pools, or public services like schools and hospitals, so that all citizens can benefit from them. Or not enough adequately-paid, socially-useful jobs to keep the next generation employed at home.

The Occupy movement is saying No to all this, but what is it saying Yes to? To the things all good revolutions say yes to, of course – liberty, equality and the siblinghood of humankind – but beyond that, what is it doing to make a real difference? Here are some things that lots of the occupiers are already doing, and want to share. Their basic message is - vacate the corporation; occupy Main Street! Corporations that produce consumables only have the power and money we give them. So stop shopping with corporations. This is easy with things like healthy food; harder with things like electronic goods – but it can and must be done. Exit the corporation and enter the range of community-based alternatives. Keep your money in a community-owned bank, support independent locally-owned stores, join or start a co-op (worker, consumer, housing), grow food for yourself and others at a community garden or farm, join a Time Bank to give and get free services.

Will this be inconvenient? Not necessarily – within zero to five miles of Wall St there are twenty community-owned bank branches. I bank with New Zealand's one remaining community-owned bank, which is hundreds of kilometres away in the North Island, and I get excellent service via phone, mail and internet. Will it cost more? Not necessarily – my bank charges less interest on credit cards and loans than the foreign-owned corporate banks, pays more interest on savings accounts and term deposits, and charges no fees on accounts over $5000. But even if it is less convenient and costs a bit more upfront – that is the price of freedom.

The Occupy movement has grasped the truth that we send a message and create change much more powerfully through what we do than by what we say. Protest on the streets is a good start, but we're not stopping there. It is only by action - supporting economic alternatives and vacating the corporation – that we both bring down the existing rotten system and put a much better one in its place.

Burger your health - it's all about private equity

I really like the way the trans-fats and sugars glow in this bacon cheeseburger image.

Last month the Ministry of Health released the final results of its 2008/09 New Zealand Adult Nutrition Survey, a survey of 4,721 adults carried out between October 2008 and October 2009. This is a self-reporting survey into dietary patterns, so it is hard to know how accurate the results are, given the tendency of respondents in such surveys to tell researchers what they think they ought to be doing, or would like researchers to think they are doing, rather than what they are actually doing. There is also the issue of how representative even a large sample is of actual behaviours across the population.

For this reason I find some of the results rather hard to believe, such as the one that 66% of female respon dents and 60% of male respondents choose whole-grain bread 'most often', when these breads do not make up even 50% of all the breads available in supermarkets, let alone the cheapest ones. This seems to be a 'tell them what they want to hear' answer, and I think retail sales patterns would give a much more accurate picture of how often these breads are really chosen. For the same reason I also wonder whether the dire rates of fruit and vegetable consumption reported (41% of males and 28% of females reported that they did not eat the recommended three or more servings of vegetables per day, while 45% of males and 33% of females did not eat the recommended two or more servings of fruit per day), may be even worse than this.

However, there can be no doubting that the population weight increase figures cited in the survey are accurate. The mean weight of males surveyed in 1997 was 80.4 kg, and in 2008/09 it was 85.1 kg. For females the figures were 68.7 kg and 72.6 kg. The mean height of New Zealanders did not change in this time, so all this growth was outwards, leading to an increase in obesity rates. The percentage of obese males went from 17% in 1997 to 27.7% in 2008/09 , while obese females went from 20.6% to 27.8% of the population.

Something else grew markedly in the same time frame, and that was the profits of fast food franchises. A month after the nutrition survey results came out, the business pages carried the news that the owners of the Burger King franchise in NZ, Australian private equity firm Anchorage Capital Partners, were about to sell it. According to the report of its purchase of the NZ Burger King franchise in 2009, ''Anchorage was formed in 2007, evolving from Interbank Capital Partners, a boutique private equity firm headed by Phil Cave AM, and targets underperforming businesses with enterprise values of between A$50m ($43.4m) and A$150m ($130.5m). The firm sold its investment in Australian fruit company Golden Circle following a share takeover by Heinz last December.''

In its first full year of owning and operating the franchise Burger King generated net profit of $6.8 million on revenue of $161.6m. Mark Bayliss, chairman of Burger King's immediate owner Antares Restaurant Group, was quoted as saying that the ''The important thing is it's now on a sustainable growth platform...We're passionate about building sustainable businesses that continue to grow sustainably in future, and to do that you need to really invest in the business.''

On October 17 the Blackstone Group announced that its private equity funds had agreed to acquire Antares Restaurant Group in New Zealand from Anchorage Capital Partners. According to its media release on the transaction, ''Blackstone is one of the largest private equity investors in the world with US$38 billion in capital committed or invested in 160 separate private equity transactions. Blackstone currently has US$17 billion of available equity capital to invest in further private equity transactions.'' Blackstone is a New York Stock Exchange listed company and considers itself to be ''one of the world’s leading investment and advisory firms''.


While Blackstone/Antares/Burger King are 'growing sustainably', something else is growing unsustainably, and that is the cost to the public purse of dealing with the damage caused by junk food consumption. A year ago the Associate Health Minister, Tariana Turia, professed herself to be delighted that public funding had been made available for an additional 300 'weight loss' operations (aka gastric bypass or 'stomach-stapling') over the next four years. This is to cost 8 million dollars. She did not say how many publicly-funded operations were already taking place, and how much they cost.

Commenting on the move, Dr Elaine Rush, Professor of Nutrition at the Auckland University of Technology, said that an Australian assessment of the cost effectiveness of obesity interventions for children and adolescents found that reducing TV advertising of high fat and/or high sugar foods and beverages directed at children was much the cheapest of the effective options, while gastric banding was by far the most expensive. (She also mentioned the really unpleasant side effects  associated with this operation, and how it could contribute to nutritional deficiencies.)

The reason why advertising restrictions cost the public almost nothing is that not only do they not involve high tech surgery, but any costs associated with them are borne by the user (the advertiser), not the taxpayer, whereas taxpayers fund the extra gastric bypass operations. Meanwhile the foreign investors in Burger King and other fast food chains not only pay nothing towards mitigating the damage their products do, but even profit from making it easier for Kiwis to eat themselves to death. 
 

What do we value more – public health or private equity profits? Hooray to my friend Reihana who answered that question by joining the Occupy Wall Street movement to tell the profiteers what she (and thousands of others) think of their anti-social behaviour. Here she is in Liberty Plaza, New York, with the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping.