Roomin' House Blues

 I've been looking in this blog at different means of changing the social order, creating greater equality and less poverty other than the traditional massive federal interventions or classical state socialism.  I'm not opposed to all federal intervention, but the principle of subsidiarity indicates that other means should occur first. A lot of the things I have looked at are easily described with convenient labels like consumers cooperative or credit union, or municipal socialism, trade unions, etc.  But I heard an idea expressed in simple terms once by an old black woman in West Oakland who had grown up in Louisiana.  I was a community organizer there around the time of the 1989 Bay Area earthquake and it's aftermath. I don't remember her name, but I remember her house, which I had been too.  It was a large old house with a long flight of front porch steps.  The house sat on a high foundation and I imagine, although I had never seen it,...