Archive for May, 2012

Put Public Ownership ‘On the Table’

by Editors @ Thursday, May 31st, 2012. Filed under Economic Democracy, Green Energy, Organizing, Socialism, Solidarity Economy, Urban Problems

Beyond Corporate Capitalism: Not So Wild a Dream

Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M. Hanna
SolidarityEconomy.net via The Nation

May 22, 2012 - It’s time to put the taboo subject of public ownership back on the progressive agenda. It is the only way to solve some of the most serious problems facing the nation. We contend that it is possible not only to talk about this once forbidden subject but to begin to build a serious politics that can do what needs to be done in key sectors.

Proposals for public ownership will of course be attacked as “socialism,” but conservatives call any progressive program—to say nothing of the modest economic policies of the Obama administration—“socialist.”

However, many Americans are increasingly skeptical about the claims made for the corporate-dominated “free” enterprise system by its propagandists. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that a majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of corporations—a significant shift from only twelve years ago, when nearly three-quarters held a favorable view.

At the same time, two recent Rasmussen surveys found Americans under 30—the people who will build the next politics—almost equally divided as to whether capitalism or socialism is preferable. Another Pew survey found that 18- to 29-year-olds have a favorable reaction to the term “socialism” by a margin of 49 to 43 percent.

Public ownership in certain sectors of the economy is the only way to solve some of America’s most pressing problems. Take the financial arena, where the current recession was hatched. Today, five giant banks control more than one-third of all deposits. Wall Street claims this makes it more efficient; but even if the Big Five banks were efficient (which is open to question—how “efficient” are institutions that didn’t know they were carrying a huge backlog of underwater loans?), they were all deeply involved in creating the meltdown that cost taxpayers billions in bailouts, and the overall economy trillions. Numerous economists, left and right, believe that these unbridled operations will inevitably lead to another crisis. JPMorgan Chase’s recent speculative loss of at least $2 billion should be fair warning.

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Strangling the New Working class in Its Crib

by Editors @ Tuesday, May 29th, 2012. Filed under Debt, Unemployment, Wall Street, Youth

College Dropouts are Drowning in Debt

By Suzy Khimm
The Washington Post

WASHINGTON, May 29, 2012 -- As the nation amasses more than $1 trillion in student loans, education experts say a vexing new problem has emerged: A growing number of young people have a mountain of debt but no degree to show for it.

Nearly 30 percent of college students who took out loans dropped out of school, up from less than a quarter of students a decade ago, according to an analysis of government data earlier this year by think tank Education Sector. College dropouts are also among the most likely to default on their loans, falling behind at a rate four times that of graduates.

That is raising new questions about the wisdom of decades of public policy that focused on increasing access to higher learning but paid less attention to what happens once students arrive on campus. And some education experts have begun to argue that starting college -- and going into debt to pay for it -- without a clear plan for a diploma is a recipe for disaster.

"They have the economic burden of the debt but they do not get the benefit of higher income and higher levels of employment that one gets with a college degree," said Jack Remondi, chief operating officer at Sallie Mae, the nation's largest private student lender.

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Anti-Capitalist Meet-up’s Mondragon Series—All Three Parts

by Editors @ Monday, May 28th, 2012. Filed under Economic Democracy, Mondragon, Solidarity Economy

Mondragon Miracle, Part 1 of 3:

Building the Road We Travel

by TPauFollow
SolidarityEconomy.net via DailyKOS

1941, Office of the Archbishop of Spain:

"They just released you?" Archbishop Balbino Oliver eyed the priest standing before his desk with suspicion. Something about the young man unsettled him.

"I believe it was in error. They did not realize I had written so much against Franco. When God spared my life, I enrolled in the seminary."

He possessed humility. Good. Yet something about the eyes... "Even under the care of the church, Franco may not let you go so easily."

"Yes, it is best if I left Spain. I could continue my writing in Belgium. I think I can..."

"God granted you a precious gift, my son." The Bishop leaned back, considering. His left eye. That was it. "It would be unwise to waste the gift with further agitation of forces beyond your control." Yes, his left eye stared back slightly wider, giving him a permanently quizzical expression. Father Bertolli had mentioned him losing his eye in an accident.

"But the work I've been doing..."

"Is against Church official policy." The Archbishop leaned forward to study the documents the priest had presented him. "You are Basque, no?"

"Yes, but in Belgium..."

"Father Tillous requested an assistant in Mondragon, only 50 miles from where you grew up. Franco is unlikely to bother you, there."

"Out there, he is unlikely to need to." The young man bowed his head curtly, murmuring the obligatory goodbye.

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Defeating the Political Police Efforts to Derail ‘Occupy!’

by Editors @ Friday, May 25th, 2012. Filed under Civil Liberties, Organizing, Repression, Youth

The US Government Is Running A Massive

Spy Campaign On Occupy Wall Street

The main antidote is serious and disciplined organization on our part, and on all levels

By WhoWhatWhy
SolidarityEconomy.net via BusinessInsider.com

May 24, 2012 - Remember the Occupy Movement? Since last November, when the NYPD closed the Zuccotti Park encampment in downtown Manhattan –the Movement’s birthplace and symbolic nexus—Occupy’s relevance has seriously dwindled, at least as measured by coverage in the mainstream media.

We’re told that this erosion is due to Occupy’s own shortcomings—an inevitable outcome of its disjointed message and decentralized leadership.

While that may be the media’s take, the U.S. Government seems to have a different view.

If recent documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) are any indication, the Occupy Movement continues to be monitored and curtailed in a nationwide, federally-orchestrated campaign, spearheaded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

In response to repeated Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by the Fund, made on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild, the DHS released a revealing set of documents in April.  But the latest batch, made public on May 3rd, exposes the scale of the government’s “attention” to Occupy as never before.

The documents, many of which are partially blacked-out emails, demonstrate a surprising degree of coordination between the DHS’s National Operations Center (NOC) and local authorities in the monitoring of the Occupy movement. Cities implicated in this wide-scale snooping operation include New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Denver, Boston, Portland, Detroit, El Paso, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, San Diego, and Los Angeles.

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Labor Rising and the Role of the Young

by Editors @ Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012. Filed under Organizing, Trade Unions, Unemployment, Wall Street, Youth

Why a Growing Movement of Young People

Could Ignite a Workers' Revolution

By Michelle Chen
SolidarityEconomy.net via The New Press

‘What Labor Looks Like: From Wisconsin to Cairo, Youth Hold a Mirror to History of Workers' Struggles’ originally appeared in Labor Rising: The Past and Future of Working People in America edited by Daniel Katz and Richard A. Greenwald, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.

May 23, 2012 - Every revolution needs two essential ingredients: young people, who are willing to dream, and poor people, who have nothing to lose.

Yet the social forces that make movements strong also incline them toward self-destruction. Hence, over the past few decades, uneasy intergenerational alliances have melted away as impatient young radicals bridle against the old guard of incumbent left movements.

At the same time, when it comes to organizing, without patronizing, poor folks, activists continually struggle just to find the right language to talk about systemic poverty in a sanitized political arena that has largely been wrung dry of real class consciousness.

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Solidarity Farming for the Future

by Editors @ Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012. Filed under Green Industry, High Design, Technology, Urban Problems

A Rooftop Fish Farm for Every Family?

(Or Batch 'Em for Urban Cooperatives)

By James Holloway
SolidarityEconomy.net via GizMag

May 11, 2012 - It may look nothing more than an oddly shaped greenhouse.

But the "Globe (hedron)", a collaboration by food futurists Urban Farmers AG and and designer Antonio Scarponi of Conceptual Devices, is a concept for a self-contained rooftop aquaponics dome that its designers hope will help address global food security. The company is seeking funding to turn the concept into a prototype.

Aquaponics is a marriage of aquaculture (farming aquatic animals, like fish or prawns) and hydroponics (growing plants in water). Effluents from fish (and their food) accumulate in the water. When channeled to plants these are consumed as nutrients, purifying the water in the process before it becomes toxic to the fish. In the Fishy Farm, we saw the principle applied to fish tanks, and though obviously not aquaponic, the veggie-roof chicken coop works on a similar symbiotic idea.

Urban Farmers has set up a crowd funding page on Kickstarter-alike IndieGoGo, seeking US$15,000 to turn the idea into a prototype. According to the page the rooftop domes would have skeletons made from renewable materials (bamboo is proposed). Perhaps the biggest surprise on the page is the claim that a single Globe could feed a family of four year-round, providing it with all the fish, vegetables and herbs it needs. Unrealistic? It sounds a very optimistic estimate at any rate.

And the effectiveness of the approach to crowd sourcing adopted here aside (Urban Farmers is merely offering prints of its designs - why not offer a full-fledged prototype for $100,000?), the idea of a modular rooftop farming system founded upon aquaponics seems perfectly reasonable, concept or no.

Source: IndiGoGo page, Urban Farmers AG, Conceptual Devices



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Dynamic Duo: Green Energy and Cooperatives

by Editors @ Wednesday, May 9th, 2012. Filed under Economic Democracy, Energy, Green Energy, Solidarity Economy

Renewables Rise at the Grassroots

By Aaron Bartley
SolidarityEconomy.net via Huffington Post

May 7, 2012 - While the oil and gas lobby dominates at the federal level, communities across the United States are making great strides in gaining control of energy production.

They are doing so by advancing an impressive range of commercial-scale renewable projects that are heating homes and powering local businesses from Massachusetts to Oregon.

Municipal utilities, community-based co-ops, universities and other nonprofit institutions in both rural and urban settings are executing wind, solar, geothermal and biomass developments.

When combined with the innovative grassroots efforts to retrofit existing buildings for conservation purposes, these renewable energy production programs are placing community-led efforts at the forefront of American innovation. In the process, they are creating a blueprint that could be used to scale-up nationally when and if we develop a rational Federal energy policy fostering both the growth of the renewable sector and democratization of production on the German model.

In Hull, Mass., residents began a campaign to build large-scale wind turbines in 1996. The first turbine was completed in late 2001 and has produced more than 12 million kilowatts to date. A second, larger turbine, known as Hull II, was erected on top of the town's former landfill in 2006 and in its first year produced enough electricity to power all of the Hull's street lights while providing the town with an additional $150,000 from the sale of excess electricity. Hull's two turbines now generate enough electricity to power 1,100 homes as well as the town's street and traffic lights.

Similar community-controlled wind projects have sprouted up across the state of Iowa, placing seven municipalities and about a dozen school districts in control of their energy destinies. The 1.65 megawatt wind farm at Iowa Lakes Community College is among the largest of these community-developed projects, built in conjunction with the ILCC's launch of the first accredited wind turbine training program in the nation.

The Iowa Lakes Electric Cooperative, which operates independently of the college, provides power to more than 12,000 member-owners in eight rural Iowa counties and has developed two wind farms that generate more than 21 megawatts, projects for which it was named wind cooperative of the year by the DOE.

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Noam Chomsky on the Tasks Ahead

by Editors @ Tuesday, May 8th, 2012. Filed under Economic Democracy, Environment, Labor Movement, Solidarity Economy, Unemployment, Youth

Working Toward Factory Takeovers:

Plutonomy and the Precariat

By Noam Chomsky
SolidarityEconomy.net via The Nation

May 8, 2012 - The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead—because victory won’t come quickly—it could prove a significant moment in American history.

The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.

I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s—although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today—nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it,” even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that “it will get better.”

There was militant labor union organizing going on, especially from the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are frightening to the business world—you could see it in the business press at the time—because a sit-down strike is just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. The idea of worker takeovers is something which is, incidentally, very much on the agenda today, and we should keep it in mind. Also New Deal legislation was beginning to come in as a result of popular pressure. Despite the hard times, there was a sense that, somehow, “we’re gonna get out of it.”

It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

On the Working Class

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back. If you’re a worker in manufacturing today—the current level of unemployment there is approximately like the Depression—and current tendencies persist, those jobs aren’t going to come back.

The change took place in the 1970s. There are a lot of reasons for it. One of the underlying factors, discussed mainly by economic historian Robert Brenner, was the falling rate of profit in manufacturing. There were other factors. It led to major changes in the economy—a reversal of several hundred years of progress towards industrialization and development that turned into a process of de-industrialization and de-development. Of course, manufacturing production continued overseas very profitably, but it’s no good for the work force.

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