By Circles Robinson
Havana Times, Feb 26, 2013
Vicente Morin Aguado interviews non-Marxist US socialist Grady Ross Daugherty
HAVANA TIMES — Over several weeks of difficult back and forth emails (it’s hard to imagine the slow speed and high cost of Internet in Cuban hotels), I attempted to clarify the thinking of Grady Ross Daugherty [2], the leader and founder of the “modern cooperative socialist movement” in the United States and who is a regular reader of HT.
HT: What place do you see for cooperatives in the current reform process taking place within Cuba’s socialist experiment?
Grady Ross Daugherty: Thanks for characterizing Cuba’s half-century post-capitalist period as an “experiment.” An experiment is a way of testing a reasonable hypothesis. If we look at the Cuban model as an experiment, as a modifiable work in progress, its performance can be altered to achieve greater prosperity and progress.
In our discussion, we need to keep in mind that most types of cooperatives require a certain basis of legal private ownership, assuming we want them to be functional. For example, agricultural cooperatives require the ownership of cultivated land and the families homes — not usufruct rights — if we hope them to be effective and make Cuba self-sufficient in production.
HT: Regarding the issue of ownership, I began to understand your non-Marxist position prior to our exchange. It may seem like a digression, but it’s good to point out something as controversial as your self-declared non-Marxist yet socialist position.
GRD: Since its origins in the nineteenth century, the socialist movement was mutual and cooperative. This was something notable in France and England, where workers and farmers were eager to own land and the instruments of production as their property. They didn’t want ownership in the hands of private capitalists or government officials.
I think that if Cuba’s political leaders can clear their minds about the theory of state monopoly and its consequent personality cult, typical of the founders of Marxism during the nineteenth century, Cuba will be a socialist country in the long term.
Marx and Engels instilled prejudice against private property, pointing to it as a cause of society’s ills and as something antithetical to their aim of “scientific” socialism. Nevertheless, for cooperatives to be real they require ownership, which supposedly would be “capitalist” – as opposed to state-run or scientific forms like “socialist” ones.
Despite this, harsh reality has led Cuban politicians to take a fresh look at cooperatives. They’re beginning to look at socialism as an ongoing experiment.
HT: Of course Marx criticized Proudhon, the father of French cooperative and mutualist socialism, considering him petty bourgeois for all his vacillation and wavering, which is typical of his social class.
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By John Quiggin
SolidarityEconomy.net via Aeon Magazine
Sept 27, 2012 - I first became an economist in the early 1970s, at a time when revolutionary change still seemed like an imminent possibility and when utopian ideas were everywhere, exemplified by the Situationist slogan of 1968: ‘Be realistic. Demand the impossible.’ Preferring to think in terms of the possible I was much influenced by an essay called ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,’ written in 1930 by John Maynard Keynes, the great economist whose ideas still dominated economic policymaking at the time.
Like the rest of Keynes’s work, the essay ceased to be discussed very much during the decades of free-market liberalism that led up to the global financial crisis of 2007 and the ensuing depression, through which most of the developed world is still struggling. And, also like the rest of Keynes's work, this essay has enjoyed a revival of interest in recent years, promoted most notably by the Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky and his son Edward.
The Skidelskys have revived Keynes’s case for leisure, in the sense of time free to use as we please, as opposed to idleness. As they point out, their argument draws on a tradition that goes back to the ancients. But Keynes offered something quite new: the idea that leisure could be an option for all, not merely for an aristocratic minority.
Writing at a time of deep economic depression, Keynes argued that technological progress offered the path to a bright future. In the long run, he said, humanity could solve the economic problem of scarcity and do away with the need to work in order to live. That in turn implied that we would be free to discard ‘all kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital’.
Keynes was drawing on a long tradition but offering a new twist. The idea of a utopian golden age in which abundance replaces scarcity and the world is no longer ruled by money has always been with us. What was new in Keynes was the idea that technological progress might make utopia a reality rather than merely a vision.
Traditionally, the golden age was located in the past. In the Christian world, it was the Garden of Eden before the Fall, when Adam was cursed to earn his bread with the sweat of his brow, and Eve to bring forth her children in sorrow. The absence of any discussion of the feasibility of an actual golden age was unsurprising. As Keynes observed in his essay, ‘From the earliest times of which we have record — back, say, to 2,000 years before Christ — down to the beginning of the 18th century, there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilised centres of the earth'. The vast majority of people lived lives of hard labour on the edge of subsistence, and had always done so. No feasible political change seemed likely to alter this reality.
It was only with the Industrial Revolution, and the Enlightenment that preceded it, that the idea of a future golden age, realised as a result of human action, began to seem possible. By the end of the 18th century incomes had risen to the point where radical thinkers such as William Godwin could propose that, with a just distribution of wealth, everyone could live well.
The novel idea of progress — that the natural tendency of human affairs was to get better rather than worse — became part of ‘common sense’
(more...)By Bill Ivey
SolidarityEconomy.net via Alternet.org / Nov 28, 20102
The following is an excerpt from Handmaking America: A Back-to-Basics Pathway to a Revitalized American Democracy by Bill Ivey.
The Perpetual Workday
Jill Andresky Fraser’s book ‘White-Collar Sweatshop’ details the movement of factory floor, scientific-management-style techniques into the office.
Overall real wages scarcely budged in the 1990s, and earnings for college-educated workers actually declined by more than 6 percent. We might surmise that the lack of salary increases were offset, in part, by noncash benefits, but these too were extracted from the compensation package. “Lunch hour? An anachronism. Commuting time? A good chance to return phone calls. Sleep? Never mind if you were up until 2am on the phone with a client across the globe. Be at the office at eight.
"These days, workers are expected to be on call 24/7—24 hours per day, seven days per week,” writes Fraser. Seen in this light, innovations like flex time or working from home are in fact strategies to bring new sorts of workers—think women—into the job market and to subject them to a new set of (frequently electronic) rules and controls.
Think about it. Fifteen years ago, would you have taken a job if you had to be available every day, respond to messages from your boss late at night, and maintain contact with the office while on vacation? You would probably have taken a pass. But today just about any job, especially the good ones, exhibit precisely this oppressive 24/7 character.
It’s a corrosive double whammy: At the same time as technology has redefined labor by converting craft occupations into assembly line piecework, new gadgets have allowed our less inviting piecework tasks to follow us home, invading our bedrooms, filling family time, distracting us on holiday. This change in the character of work took place very quickly. As technology critic Jaron Lanier observed, “It’s as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole village before you can even rise to your feet.”
Americans are suckers for new technologies. We cheerfully purchased the Sony Walkman (how quickly we forget!) and embraced digital cameras, cell phones, plasma TVs, smart phones, and now iPads. Just as we’ve consumed high-tech gadgets at home, we welcome electronic devices in the workplace; won’t they save precious time by making us more efficient? Our enthusiasm for innovative machines obscures the truth that all they do is bind us more tightly to our jobs while forcing us to work longer hours.
For centuries, work has been the arena of accomplishment in which learning and insight combined skills of mind and hand to solve problems, bringing forward something useful, beautiful, or both. Back when women entered the workforce in big numbers at every level, it seemed the importance of labor as a source of meaning and identity only increased. But the financial collapse of 2008 produced profound, perhaps lasting, changes in American labor markets. As Clive Crook argues, there exists a real “likelihood that lengthening spells of unemployment [will] become self-perpetuating, as skills erode or grow irrelevant.” State governments are attempting to balance budgets by sacking teachers, nurses, and police officers, and underwater mortgages have made it impossible for millions of workers to sell houses to relocate in search of new jobs. As Tyler Cowen writes, “We need to be prepared for the possibility that the growth slowdown could continue once the immediate recession is over.”
We know that real wages have been flat for more than two decades. Technology-enabled productivity increased, but that hasn’t helped workers. Productivity per person-hour increased by 5 percent between 2009 and 2010—postrecession—but productivity went up because the number of hours worked went down. So for the past 10 years, workers substituted charge cards and home equity loans for stagnant wages to maintain what seemed to be a middle-class lifestyle. That era of self-delusion is over and has been replaced by doubt, disappointment, pessimism, and a deep suspicion of financial and political power. In an unprecedented development, millions of newly minted college graduates are moving directly from the classroom to the unemployment lines and sometimes to the encampments of Occupy Wall Street. American workers now compete in the much-touted global market; it is a distinct irony that not Marxists but corporate leaders urge the workers of the world to unite in a drive toward efficiency—efficiency that can be best defined as low wages.
America is stumbling into the abyss of unheard-of income and wealth disparity. The lack of jobs and the offensive distance between the wealth of Wall Street and the plight of the 99 percent are pressing down on a workforce that includes both displaced industrial labor and unemployed educated professionals who still feel entitled to lucrative posts in what Richard Florida calls “an idea-driven knowledge economy that runs more on brains than on brawn.” We’re learning that while this “knowledge economy” exists, in reality it’s present for only the few who can serve the esoteric and rapidly changing demands of high-tech industries. Facebook might ultimately be valued at $50 billion, but it makes no product and employs only a few thousand workers. As Richard Waters wrote in the Financial Times, “While the jobs of the future have yet to be revealed, the job losses and disruption to working lives from accelerating technological change are already apparent.”
Reconfiguring Work in Democracy
It is tempting to imagine—even to recommend—changes in the character of labor and the workplace that would restore satisfying, meaningful work as a central part of life: the way Ruskin, Marx and Morris envisioned it a century and a half ago. But that would be naive. As historian Jackson Lears said in a recent interview, “Whatever the color of your collar, your job may still be ‘proletarian’ to the extent that management controls the pace, process, and output of your work.”
Lears is right, and I think the march of management efficiencies in the direction of increased productivity cannot be rolled back. Apart from a handful of artistic careers, the sad truth is that deeply satisfying work for pay is squeezed-out toothpaste that can’t be coaxed back into its tube.
My suggestion is this: that Americans recover the satisfaction of artisanship by stepping to the side, building the kind of meaning found in craft work outside the office, classroom, or factory. More than anything, the pursuit of meaning in the contemporary market-defined environment requires time. Technology in the workplace holds out the promise of more time, but as we have seen, increased productivity— more output; fewer hours—benefits only the bottom lines of corporate profits wrung from the decreased cost of labor. Unions and concerned, engaged citizens must press for public policies that enable workers to capture time, benefiting from efficiencies generated by piecework and automated devices. But I don’t believe our modern workplace can be reconfigured from the outside, and the corporate world has exhibited little interest in resisting global pressures on hours and wages to give American labor a better quality of life.
Here’s an alternative: A properly configured and fairly implemented four-day workweek would shift at least some of the time-saving benefits of high-tech devices to workers. And given an imaginatively assembled array of possibilities, the extra time attached to a weekend will offer a pathway to a life of quality and meaning.
Where the four-day workweek has been tried in the United States, results have actually been encouraging. Utah launched a four-day, 10-hour-day week for state employees in 2008. Seventy percent of workers liked it, mostly because the extended personal time facilitated volunteer work and closer contact within families. Although the statewide program ended in the fall of 2011 (anticipated savings on energy never materialized), cities such as Provo retained the policy. Google has established a four-day week for some engineers, specifically to enable opportunity for creative thought.
It’s important to remember that experiments with short workweeks have to date been advanced only as money-saving strategies. (Are you surprised?) However, given the acceptance of these early efforts, it seems certain that a four-day workweek (perhaps featuring nine-hour days) focused not on cost cutting but on enriching quality of life would be even more welcome. And it’s important to a handmade America; extra time in which to connect with politics, new knowledge, community heritage, religion, and family will lay the foundation for an American lifestyle less slavishly ensnared in consuming and debt.
Technology and Education
Our ability to live well in a progressive, handmade society depends on what we know and believe; much of that knowledge must be applied to placing the transformational impact of technology in perspective.
True, Americans have enthusiastically welcomed new devices at home and at work. But today technology is generating powerful imbalances in society and government, transforming the place of Americans in a global economy. We have both a right and an obligation to challenge the effect of automation, software, robotics, and the Internet on how we labor and live.
Former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich gets one thing absolutely right: “Modern technologies allow us to shop in real time, often worldwide, for the lowest prices, highest quality, and best returns.” Unfortunately, “these great deals come at the expense of our jobs and wages, and widening inequality.”
Stated most simply, high-tech machines enable fewer workers to do more while transforming complex artisanal tasks into piecework. Americans love to shop for bargain commodities, of course, but corporations also shop for labor, and modern technology and communication force workers to compete with lower-paid counterparts in Singapore, India, and China. Even here in the United States, an auto assembly job that pays $28 an hour in Michigan will pay half that in South Carolina.
It’s obvious that the average “working Joe” needs a better understanding of how the workplace is being transformed by technologies deployed by corporations in the pursuit of efficiencies, increased productivity, and increased profit. A couple years ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks worried about these effects in a piece cleverly and accurately titled “The Outsourced Brain.” What does it mean for society if we don’t know where we are, where we should eat, or whether or not it’s raining without looking at our telephones? And it’s a special problem in the workplace; a cab driver who can navigate only with a GPS is a qualitatively different professional than the London artisan cabbie who’s memorized streets from Paddington to Elephant and Castle. In addition, “Productivity Hits All-Time High” may be a mogul-pleasing headline, but less-in/more-out is scarcely good news for workers. And as we’ve seen, automation, digital devices, and software-driven menus not only displace jobs but change the very character of work itself.
Of course, technological change has been a feature of civilization since before the printing press, and the destruction of the old has always accompanied progress; illuminated calligraphy is pretty much a thing of the distant past. However, the digital age is unusual, if not unique, in that it has been advanced by the tag team of powerful corporate interests aided by massive advertising campaigns, supported by a cohort of intellectual apologists who praise every new device and vigorously attack any Luddite bold enough to question the real value of the newest netbook, iPhone, or online music service. This combination—big advertising supported by reasonably big minds—is something new, and it’s enabled digital advocates to pretty much have their way in the workplace and at home. Who has critiqued computers in the classroom? Evidence of helpful results is scarce, but as one ex-marine teacher put it, “This technology is being thrown on us. It’s being thrown on parents and thrown on kids.” Americans need a general understanding of the way efficient technologies affect the availability of jobs and the meaning of labor, and an understanding that society can rightly use the levers of government to blunt the most troublesome transformations in a defining human activity—work.
So here’s the second, and more specific, point: American education must better address the needs of our present-day economy. Early in 2012, I heard an NPR All Things Considered piece on the burgeoning Montana firearms industry. The segment interviewed the president of Montana Rifleman, a small manufacturing firm that, responding to a U.S. firearms boom, was then shipping up to 1,000 rifle barrels per day. He indicated that there “are plenty of workers, but he still struggles to fill certain jobs,” adding, “Finding skilled machinists is one of the hardest things for us to do right now.” This problem is widespread.
Tyler Cowen has identified a “fundamental skills mismatch” in the relationship between school and the workplace. American secondary education has drifted toward precollege for all, an objective memorialized in a commitment to standardized testing. Yes, we need mathematicians and good readers, but we need high school graduates skilled in information technology, high-end machining, and a range of other technical manufacturing skills that fit the new economy. This is not rocket science; it’s not test taking either.
President Obama has underscored the role of community colleges in providing high-end workplace skills. On its face, this seems a good idea; community colleges are affordable, are open to just about anyone, and are often hardwired into the demands of a local economy. But as
Thomas Bailey has written in the American Prospect, community institutions are filled with first-generation college students who often work full-time while attending school at night. Their preparation for college work is frequently subpar; it’s no surprise that graduation or certification rates after six years are well below 40 percent. Community colleges are also especially dependent on state funding and despite increased federal support are suffering as states slash budgets in this postrecession decade. Rethinking the high school curriculum may be smarter, more affordable, and more effective than a buck-pass to two-year colleges.
I do believe there’s a need for a better match between secondary education and the apparent needs of the workplace. But to be honest, I’m uncomfortable with arguments that talk about improving education— especially public education—entirely within the context of the economy and America’s workforce. The values and needs of corporations have thoroughly invaded the conversation about education, and you don’t have to scratch the surface of most reforms very hard before a narrow agenda shows up: math plus reading plus multiple-choice tests produces graduates perfectly suited to technology-enabled, rule-following piecework.
Despite the desires of corporate oligarchs, education can’t be only about popping out capable worker bees. Our very democracy depends on the maintenance of a citizenry capable of critical engagement with technology and change, society and democracy; an engagement with context and precedent—an understanding of history, society, finance, and power—sufficient to permit smart choices. We do not get the wise citizens we need if schools do nothing but train workers for our voracious corporate maw.
It’s clear that we went too far back in the 1960s, when experts determined that every student should experience some version of a college preparatory curriculum. When I attended Calumet High School a half century ago, the program offered three tracks: academic, vocational, commercial. “Academic” was pretty much what secondary education looks like today. “Commercial” trained secretaries and bookkeepers; my recollection is that the commercial track was mostly populated by girls. “Vocational” was as distinctly male, its trainees spending half days sequestered in noisy wood and machine shops in the basement of the school. But vocational training at Calumet High was dead serious; the program was hardwired into the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, and graduates could anticipate immediate employment in the (admittedly fading) multifaceted corporation that dominated northern Michigan’s copper mining industry back then.
Now, Calumet’s old three-track system was rife with real and potential inequity. Lip service was applied to the way eighth-graders were slotted according to test scores and individual aptitude and ambition, but there existed plenty of room for ethnic and sexual stereotyping, for making nonacademic tracks way stations for kids who just didn’t fit in. Once placed, nobody ever “got out” by making the transition from commercial or vocational into the (somewhat) exclusive and (slightly) refined reaches of the academic path. But despite obvious flaws, the system wasn’t entirely without value. While academic students were pointed toward college (and an inevitable extension of adolescence), our vocational and commercial peers were destined to grasp their diplomas and immediately head off to work.
(more...)By April Dembosky
SolidarityEconomy.net via Financial Times
Business cycle: co-op member Brian Drayton mends a bike at Spokes, one of the co-operatives setting up in the Californian city of Richmond, home of the second world war’s emblematic ‘Rosie the Riveter’
August 27, 2012 - James Johnson’s father was a garbage collector. His mother worked in the cafeteria of the local school. They now are both unemployed, making ends meet through government subsidy programmes. Mr Johnson, 21, has different plans for his career, building a business where he can never be laid off.
Richmond Spokes, the bike shop where he works, has no boss and no owner. It is just months away from becoming a fully-fledged worker-owned co-operative, where all six employees have an equal share in the company and an equal say in how it is run. That sense of power and purpose is something Mr Johnson never had at his previous job doing computer repairs. “The computer store was just another job,” he says. “Every day when I was going to work for the man, I had to keep repairing my bike just to get to the job. I thought, why not just focus on fixing the bikes.”
The shop is one of several co-operatives in the early stages of forming in Richmond, California, a city suffering from high crime and poverty rates. Unemployment among the population of just over 100,000 people has hovered around 18 per cent this year, well above the current national average of 8.3 per cent. City officials have recently pinned their hopes on co-ops as a key strategy for shifting the local economy and stemming social problems. They believe co-ops can create more, better jobs and stimulate spending at other local businesses.
“It’s really about creating democracy in the workplace and giving workers a sense that they own their own jobs,” says Marilyn Langlois, a former assistant to the city mayor who is now running for city council. “They can collectively make decisions that will benefit the business, and keep the money in the local community.”
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By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
SolidarityEconomy.net via Freedomroad.org
This article was originally published on the website: Philosophers for Change, philosophers.posterous.com.
June 28, 2012 - A discussion of the future of socialism and social transformation must be grounded in two realities. The first reality is the broader economic, environmental and state-legitimacy crises in which humanity finds itself. In other words, the convergence of these three crises means that the necessity for a genuine Left capable of leading masses of people is more pressing than ever. It means that while one cannot sit back and wait for the supposed “final” crisis of capitalism to open up doors to freedom — since capitalism is largely defined by its continual crises — it is the case that the convergence of these three crises brings with it a level of urgency unlike any that most of us have experienced. Not only is there a need for a progressive, if not radical set of answers to these crises at the level of immediate reforms, but the deeper reality is that capitalism — as a system — is incapable of providing legitimate, sustainable answers to these crises, whether individually or collectively.
The second reality, and the central focus of this essay, is that any discussion of a progressive post-capitalist future must come to grips with the realization of the crisis of socialism in which every trend in the global Left has been encased. This has been a crisis at the levels of vision, strategy, state power and organization. It is a crisis that cannot be avoided by either a retreat to pre-Bolshevik Marxism or slipping into the abyss of post-modernism. The reality of the crisis of socialism can only be avoided at our own peril.
The crisis of socialism can be said to have emerged in the context of the Stalinist hegemony over the international communist movement, creating challenges for the global Left (and not just the orthodox communist movement) at multiple levels. One level has been that of the question of the post-capitalist socialist state. The revelations regarding the authoritarian rule of the Stalinist Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) shattered the sense of a genuine socialist democracy, even if one applauded the social accomplishments of the Soviet Revolution and its courageous sacrifices in the struggle against fascism.
In addition to the question of the socialist state, there emerged also the question of socialist strategy. There was the matter of strategy in what has come to be known as the “global South” and the “global North.” In the global South, the Left-led national democratic revolutions, based on the alliance of workers and peasants, represented a major breakthrough in what had been a very Eurocentric Marxism. The impact of the Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban Revolutions, to name only three, not only reshaped Marxism, but also had an impact on other Left as well as progressive nationalist political tendencies. Yet by the 8th decade of the 20th century, these revolutionary currents seemed to have stalled. The Chinese Revolution, with the death of Mao, altered course and ultimately embraced what can only be described, non-rhetorically, as a capitalist road. Movements and state systems that Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin has described as “national populist projects,” i.e., anti-imperialist projects led by elements of the nationalist petty bourgeoisie (and in some cases the national bourgeoisie) that never fully broke with capitalism, found themselves drifting either back toward the global North or following a cynical embrace of the Soviet bloc.
Strategy plagued Marxist-led movements in the global North. Parties and movements that embraced social democracy all but abandoned anything other than the rhetoric of socialism and quite comfortably assumed the role of guardians of the welfare state under democratic capitalism. In many cases such parties, e.g., the British Labour Party; the French Socialist Party, while championing progressive social legislation and popular rights in their respective nation-states, also advanced a rabid defense of ‘enlightened’ colonialism and imperial privilege for countries they came to govern.
Communist parties in the global North followed a different trajectory, but in general came to develop a strategy for achieving power based largely on a non-revolutionary interpretation of the theoretical approach of Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci. This interpretation, what the Maoists considered “revisionism” and what many other revolutionary Leftists saw as simply patently reformist, involved a protracted and largely electoral route to power. But this route, even when it involved the creation of alternative institutions, e.g., worker cooperatives, was very gradualist and rarely able to accommodate itself to sudden shifts in the mass movements. In fact, this approach placed a premium on the control of mass movements, and in many cases, the pacification of such movements, e.g., the French Communist Party in 1968. These parties, not always unlike those out of social democracy, while rhetorically anti-imperialist, were inconsistent in practicing anti-imperialism against their own state/empire.
Yet the radical challenges to reformist approaches to the struggle for power had their own sets of flaws. For much of what came to be known as the radical or revolutionary Left, there was a failure to distinguish the political vs. the ideological struggle. As a result, there was — and in many cases continues to be — a premium placed on purity. The anti-capitalist struggle is all too often seen as the articulation of the “correct” direction and the denunciation of anything that is perceived as inconsistently revolutionary (that is, articulation by one or another super-revolutionary group-let or self-important individual). Such an approach, even where it has gained appeal, has been temporary, grounded in subjectivism, and inevitably led to sectarianism, and ultimately marginalization.
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SolidarityEconomy.net via LaCrosse Tribune
CASHTON, WIS. — Wisconsin’s first community wind project is now up and running in Cashton.
A joint project of Organic Valley and Gundersen Lutheran’s Envision program, the Cashton Greens Wind Farm features two wind turbines expected to generate nearly 5 megawatts of energy for Cashton’s power grid — enough to power 1,000 homes each year.
The energy produced with the $10.5 million project will more than offset electricity used at Organic Valley’s Cashton Distribution Center and its La Farge headquarters facilities, and it represents about five percent of Gundersen’s energy independence goal.
As developers and owners of the wind farm, Organic Valley and Gundersen will receive income per kilowatt hour generated. Organic Valley will buy back its portion of energy to offset its footprint through a renewable energy contract with the villages of Cashton and La Farge.
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By Beth Buczynski
SolidarityEconomy.net via Common Dreams
The news that a city will be getting a new Walmart often evokes a mixture of dread, anger, and apathy from its residents.
The global giant has captured a huge portion of the discount retail market share, claiming it helps people "live better" thanks to absurdly low prices. Of course, Walmart's low prices are only possible because of low standards of living, low wages paid to those in its supply chain, and low levels of concern for it own employees, but I digress.
In recent years, there's been something of a grassroots backlash against Wal-Mart Inc., as people have started to realize the damage a single Walmart can do to the small businesses that make up a local economy. In a few cases, there's even been news of Walmart stores closing, effectively run out of town by citizens strongly opposed to its economic, environmental, and social practices.
While this represents a win for the citizens who organized the ouster, it creates an equally big challenge. Namely, what does one do with the cavernous commercial space left behind by an abandoned Walmart?
The citizens of McAllen, Texas, a city of about 130,000 located in the southernmost tip of the state, experienced just such a vaccum after Walmart closed and then abandoned a 124,500 sq. foot space. Instead of searching for another big box retailer to take it's place, the City decided to reclaim the space as a public library.
Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle, Ltd. of Minneapolis were selected to design the interior of the building which is about the size of 2 1/2 football fields. After stripping out all the old walls, shelves, and ceiling tiles, the space was given a fresh coat of paint and major upgrade.
The cavernous space now houses an auditorium, computers lab, classrooms and meeting rooms, and adult and teen reading lounges — not to mention hundreds of thousands of books -- earning it the title of the largest single-story library location in the U.S.
The best part of this entire transformation story is that following the re-launch of the library, new user registration increased by 23 percent. That means a lot of people were talking, learning, sharing, and supporting their community instead of simply buying a giant box of laundry soap or cheap patio furniture made in China. And that's what I call upcycling for the win. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Beth Buczynski is a freelance writer and editor living in the Rocky Mountain West. Stay in touch with Beth on Twitter as @ecosphericblog and @GoneCoworking
By Ellen Brown
SolidarityEconomy.net viawebofdebt.wordpress.com
Feb. 26, 2012 - Seventeen states have now introduced bills for state-owned banks, and others are in the works.
Hawaii’s innovative state bank bill addresses the foreclosure mess. County-owned banks are being proposed that would tackle the housing crisis by exercising the right of eminent domain on abandoned and foreclosed properties. Arizona has a bill that would do this for homeowners who are current in their payments but underwater, allowing them to refinance at fair market value.
The long-awaited settlement between 49 state Attorneys General and the big five robo-signing banks is proving to be a major disappointment before it has even been signed, sealed and court approved. Critics maintain that the bankers responsible for the housing crisis and the jobs crisis will again be buying their way out of jail, and the curtain will again drop on the scene of the crime.
We may not be able to beat the banks, but we don’t have to play their game. We can take our marbles and go home. The Move Your Money campaign has already prompted more than 600,000 consumers to move their funds out of Wall Street banks into local banks, and there are much larger pools that could be pulled out in the form of state revenues. States generally deposit their revenues and invest their capital with large Wall Street banks, which use those hefty sums to speculate, invest abroad, and buy up the local banks that service our communities and local economies. The states receive a modest interest, and Wall Street lends the money back at much higher interest.
(more...)By Ryan Holeywell
SolidarityEconomy.net via Governing Magazine
Jan 4, 2012 - Try to find a bank president that’s beloved by supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It’s not impossible. You’ll just have to travel to North Dakota.
Meet Eric Hardmeyer, who bears the unlikely distinction of being perhaps the only banker in America who, in addition to being embraced by Wall Street protesters, has been exalted by the likes of Michael Moore, Mother Jones magazine, and the Progressive States Network, among other progressive stalwarts.
That’s because Hardmeyer heads the Bank of North Dakota (BND), the country’s only publicly-owned state bank. The institution, located ironically enough in a solidly red state, has become the darling of progressives who have become frustrated with corporate banks they say helped cause the financial crisis and resulting credit crunch.
Now, state lawmakers nationwide are pushing for the North Dakota model to be replicated in their home states. Since 2010, state lawmakers in at least 16 states have introduced bills to create a state bank, something similar, or study the issue, according to a study by the National Conference of State Legislatures. So far, momentum is slow. The movement has yet to produce another Bank of North Dakota, but advocates are hoping to raise the issue again in 2012 legislative sessions. Their pitch: publicly-owned banks can help create jobs, generate revenue for the state, strengthen small banks, and lower the cost of borrowing for local governments by offering loans below market rate.
Hardmeyer, who was named bank president in 2001, hasn’t always been such a well-known figure. But his profile has been raised over the last year – including in Bloomberg BusinessWeek -- and now he regularly fields calls from state lawmakers and other officials inquiring about his institution. “There hasn’t been a big push anywhere that I’m aware of until recently,” said Hardmeyer in a late December interview with Governing. “They’re interested in how it works, why it works, [and] what the roadblocks are.”
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By Naomi Klein
SolidarityEconomy.net via The Nation, Nov 9, 2011
There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.
He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”
Here at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing climate scientists with nuisance lawsuits and Freedom of Information fishing expeditions, angles the table mic over to his mouth. “You can believe this is about the climate,” he says darkly, “and many people do, but it’s not a reasonable belief.” Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like a right-wing Anderson Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: “The issue isn’t the issue.” The issue, apparently, is that “no free society would do to itself what this agenda requires…. The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.”
Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is rather tame by Heartland standards. Over the course of this two-day conference, I will learn that Obama’s campaign promise to support locally owned biofuels refineries was really about “green communitarianism,” akin to the “Maoist” scheme to put “a pig iron furnace in everybody’s backyard” (the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels). That climate change is “a stalking horse for National Socialism” (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt). And that environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing countless people to appease the gods and change the weather (Marc Morano, editor of the denialists’ go-to website, ClimateDepot.com).
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By Noam Chomsky
SolidarityEconomy.net via AlterNet.org
Nov 1, 2011 - It's a little hard to give a Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture at an Occupy meeting. There are mixed feelings that go along with it. First of all, regret that Howard is not here to take part and invigorate it in his particular way, something that would have been the dream of his life, and secondly, excitement that the dream is actually being fulfilled. It’s a dream for which he laid a lot of the groundwork. It would have been the fulfillment of a dream for him to be here with you.
The Occupy movement really is an exciting development. In fact, it's spectacular. It's unprecedented; there's never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations that are being established at these remarkable events can be sustained through a long, hard period ahead -- because victories don't come quickly-- this could turn out to be a very significant moment in American history.
The fact that the demonstrations are unprecedented is quite appropriate. It is an unprecedented era -- not just this moment -- but actually since the 1970s. The 1970s began a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society with ups and downs. But the general progress was toward wealth and industrialization and development -- even in dark and hope -- there was a pretty constant expectation that it's 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, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that we're going to get out of it, even among unemployed people. It'll get better. There was a militant labor movement organizing, CIO was organizing. It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are very frightening to the business world. You could see it in the business press at the time. A sit-down strike was just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. Also, the New Deal legislations were beginning to come under popular pressure. There was just a sense that somehow we're going to get out of it.
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The Red October campaign has been an important platform in building and strengthening the SACP over the last 11 years. Through our Red October Campaign we have built an SACP that is closer to the workers and the poor of our country. Through this campaign we say to the workers and the poor of our country, take up struggles to change your lives for the better and be the masters of your own destinies. It is only the workers and the poor themselves, in struggle and in solidarity with all other progressive forces that will consolidate and deepen our national democratic revolution, and advance the struggle for socialism in our country.
Through these campaigns we have also exposed the failures of the capitalist system to address the needs of the overwhelming majority of our people, and particularly also the failures of the neo-liberal macro-economic policies pursued since 1996. Our Red October Campaign has also been an important organising tool to recruit more and more members to the SACP. The Red October Campaign has also been an important platform for the ideological development of SACP members, and generally to conscientise and mobilise the workers and the poor to be the makers of their own history.
Since its launch twelve years ago, the Red October Campaign has been an important campaigning platform led by the SACP, and has notched some important victories, including:
a. the roll out of banking services to the poor via Umzansi account
b. the transformation of the financial sector as a whole
c. The passage of the Co-operatives and Co-operative Banks legislation
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Yoko Kitazawa at ASEF II Tokyo November 2009
By Yoko Kitazawa
Asian Alliance for Solidarity Economy
The Burst of the Economic Bubble Since the bursting in 1991 of the bubble economy, which was a product of real estate and stock price inflation, Japan has experienced what is known as the “two lost decades,” with zero or minus growth and price deflation.
Consumers have stopped buying commodities except food and daily necessities with minimum amounts. Luxury department stores have few customers except just before the summer and winter holidays when people exchange gifts. Thus most of them have gone to either just bankrupt or merger with each other. In addition, small-scale shops have closed and nearly all the shopping districts have become shuttered streets with nobody wandering in the towns.
Small and medium-sized manufacturing factories, which were once a source of Japan’s economic vitality and technological innovation, have gone bankrupt. They acted as subsidiaries for the big corporations, and were forced to close when the big corporations scaled down their production
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By Roger Bybee
SolidarityEconomy.net via ZNet
Dec. 14, 2010 - The American economy increasingly functions like a high-tech machine that efficiently plunders money from the vast majority of citizens and shoots a jetstream of the cash upward into the bank accounts of the richest 1%. At the same instant, it sends family-supporting jobs zooming off to Mexico, China, India and other low-wage sites.
The Republican landslide, enabled by a weak job-creation strategy coming from the White House, might lead you to think that a majority buys into the notion of letting the economic machine run on, continuing to chew up lives and communities.
However, a growing number of restless and desperate Americans in places like Taunton, Mass., a factory town of 50,000 hard-hit by unemployment, are showing that they understand how disastrously the machine works for them.
They increasingly realize that they must fight to save every endangered job and do battle to preserve decent pay, benefits and union representation.
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