Archive for the 'Economic Democracy' Category

Structural Reform: The Case for Public State Banks

by Editors @ Wednesday, January 4th, 2012. Tags: ,
Filed under Banks, Economic Democracy, Solidarity Economy, Wall Street

Meet Occupy Wall Street's Favorite Banker

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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The ‘Red Plot’ in a Green Trojan Horse

by Editors @ Saturday, November 26th, 2011. Tags: , ,
Filed under Climate, Economic Democracy, Energy, Green Energy, Green Industry, Socialism

Capitalism vs. the Climate

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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Noam Chomsky Speaks to Occupy Boston:

by Editors @ Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011. Filed under Economic Democracy, Global Justice, Organizing, Unemployment, Youth

If We Want a Chance at a Decent Future, the

Movement Here and Around the World Must Grow

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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Solidarity Economy and South Africa’s ‘Red October’ Campaign

by Editors @ Monday, October 3rd, 2011. Filed under Africa, Economic Democracy, Labor Movement, Marxism, Organizing, Solidarity Economy
Speech by SACP General Secretary Cde Blade Nzimande at the Launch of the Red October Campaign, October 2 2011:

Together Let Us Build Working

Class Power in our Communities:

The 2011 Launch of the

SACP Red October Campaign

We are in that time of the year when the SACP launches its popular Red October Campaign. Our Red October Campaign is inspired and seeks to take forward the spirit and the victories of the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 in Russia - ushering in the first workers' government in the 20th century.

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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Solidarity Economy Growing in Japan

by Editors @ Saturday, January 1st, 2011. Filed under Economic Democracy, Japan, Solidarity Economy

Japan’s Lost Decades and a

Women-led Socio-Solidarity Economy

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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Taunton, Mass: Worker and Local Government Alliance vs Low-Road Capital

by Editors @ Thursday, December 16th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Globalization, Organizing

UE and Taunton, Mass. Set Own Course

in Fight Against Job Outsourcing

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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UE Workers Want to Takeover Gasket Plant

by Editors @ Tuesday, November 30th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Labor Movement

Boston-Area Union Will Block

Factory Auction to Save Jobs

By Jane Slaughter
solidarityeconomy.net

via Labor Notes

Nov. 29, 2010 - In a move to save factory jobs that evokes shades of the ’30s, the United Electrical Workers [1] are asking supporters to block a December 14 auction of presses and equipment from a plant south of Boston. The UE is calling for mass picketing and blockading of entrances to the 80-year-old plant if necessary.

Esterline Technologies Corp. of Bellevue, Washington, has refused to hold off on selling the equipment till another buyer can be found. The union’s request to buy the closed plant, which would create an employee-owned factory, has been ignored.

“They told us a year ago they did not want the presses or equipment,” said UE Local 204 President Scott Marques. “But they would rather junk them than sell them to us.”

The plant makes crucial door-seals and silicone gaskets for aircraft. Esterline is consolidating operations in Southern California and in Mexico.

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Why Worker Factory Takeovers Are Good for Us

by Editors @ Saturday, November 13th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Labor Movement, Socialism

Worker-Run Factories in Argentina Continue to Thrive,

Boosting the Economy and Influencing Workers in Other Countries


By Marcela Valente

SolidarityEconomy.net

viaIPS News, Nov. 12, 2010

After the late 2001 financial and political meltdown in Argentina, thousands of companies were abandoned by their owners in a sea of debt. But some of them were taken over and reopened by their employees. Today, as the economy continues to grow, these worker-run factories are still going strong.

There are now 205 "recovered" companies, with a total of 9,362 workers -- up from 161 companies with 6,900 workers in 2004, according to a study published in October.

"How has a phenomenon that emerged as a kind of life raft after the 2001 economic collapse grown rather than faded away during a period of economic boom?" asks the lead author of the study, Andrés Ruggeri.

"The workers learned that running a company by themselves is a viable alternative, to keep a company operating," he tells IPS. "That was unthinkable before."

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The Common Good: Emerging Theme for a New Progressive Majority

by Editors @ Sunday, October 17th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Global Justice

How the Common Good

Is Transforming Our World

By Douglas LaBier

Huffington Post

In my previous post I wrote about a rising social psychosis that's visible in three areas of our society. It's likely to prevail for some time, but I think it's like a wave that's crested and will crash to the shore. The reason is that the social psychosis is a backlash against a steadily growing consciousness and behavior that refocuses personal lives and public policies towards promoting the common good.

By the "common good" I'm referring to a broad evolution beyond values and actions that serve narrow self-interest, and towards those guided by inclusiveness -- supporting well-being, economic success, security, human rights and stewardship of resources for the benefit of all, rather than just for some.

It's like a stealth operation, because it hasn't become highly visible yet. But polls, surveys and research data reveal several strands of change that are coalescing in this overall direction. I describe each of them below. They may appear to be unrelated, but I think they're driven by an underlying perspective that we're all like organs of the same body, and the body doesn't thrive if any of the organs is neglected or diseased.

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Green Structural Reform Success: Maine’s Community Coop Ownership of Wind and Heat

by Editors @ Sunday, September 5th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Green Energy

Excess wind power finds home on Maine islands

Thermal storage heaters also offset

the area's high cost of petroleum

By Tux Turkeltturkel@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer, Porland Press Mail

Via SolidarityEconomy.net

The futuristic idea of heating buildings and powering cars with electricity from wind farms off the Maine coast is being tested on a small scale, on two islands that are home to a community-run wind project and some of the highest energy bills in the state.

More Power than needed, working on noise problem

Organizers of the Fox Islands Wind Project say the three turbines that began turning last fall on Vinalhaven generated more power this winter than residents needed, putting the community on a path toward stable energy costs. But attempts to lower noise levels that are disturbing some people who live near the towers have yet to make a difference, according to Cheryl Lindgren, one of the residents.


“They say it’s going to take time, and that may be,” she said. “We’re always hopeful.”


Remedies are still being studied, according to Bill Alcorn, who serves on the Fox Islands Wind board. Turbine speed has been turned down a bit at night to comply with state noise standards. Sound insulation may be upgraded around the turbines, and a sound engineer is analyzing data collected by neighbors, although some abutters have declined to return the logs, he said.

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Inside the Third Wave: Knowledge Workers as an Engine of Economic Growth

by Editors @ Tuesday, August 31st, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Education, High Road Economics

Where the Super-Brains Are

 
By Richard Florida

SolidarityEconomy.net via The Atlantic Monthly

Last Friday, my list of America's Brainiest Cities ran over at The Daily Beast. Boulder topped the list, which comprised a mix of larger knowledge-intensive metros like Washington, D.C., Boston, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle, and college towns like Ithaca, Charlottesville, Madison, Iowa City, and Durham, North Carolina, among others.

The map above, prepared by Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute, shows the performance of all U.S. metros on our Brainiest Metros Index developed with my colleague Charlotta Mellander. The index is based on three variables:

  • The share of adults 25 years of age and older with a PhD, master's, or professional degree (from the U.S. Census American Community Survey).
  • Computer scientists and mathematicians as a share of all employment.
  • Scientists (physical, biological, social) as a share of total metro employment (both from Bureau of Labor Statistics).

The Index weights all three variables equally and covers 339 U.S. metro regions.

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Why Not Add Another Weapon in Our Arsenal? Labor Veteran on Mondragon

by Editors @ Saturday, August 28th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Trade Unions

Why Can’t  American  Labor  Build

Its Own Cooperative ‘Mondragon’?

By Harry Kelber

SolidarityEconomy.net via Labor Talk

If you are looking for a model where  workers in a company are also the owners of what they produce, the finest example is the   Mondragon Corporation, a federation of  worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of northern Spain.


Founded in 1956 in the Basque town of Mondragon, the cooperative, now the largest in the world, has developed a new way to organize a company’s production that  is based on   workers’ rights and needs. It now has 40 enterprises employing 100,000 worker/owners,  manufacturing a large variety of products, from  washing machines to microchips,  from world-class bicycles to bullet trains, to building the titanium-covered Guggenheim  Museum in Bilboa, the Basque Country’s largest city.


The  Mondragon cooperatives  have developed a humanist concept of business, and a belief in worker participation and solidarity. There is no discrimination of any kind toward workers who are or become members.  In the General Assembly,  all workers take part in  policy decision, with each person having one vote.

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Shared Coops: Spreading and Controlling the Wealth at the Grassroots

by Editors @ Monday, August 16th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, High Road Economics, Organizing

A Different Kind of Ownership Society

Innovative strategies for cooperative local ownership

make it possible for prosperity to be shared as well as sustainable.

Wind turbines at dawn, photo by Brent Danley
Photo by Brent Danley.

By Marjorie Kelly and Shanna Ratner

solidarityeconomy.net via Yes! Magazine

Aug. 3 2010 - Drive across southern Minnesota near the city of Luverne, and you’ll see clusters of wind turbines poking up through the cornfields. Climb into one of these sleek, gleaming, white towers, and you’ll find sophisticated computer controls monitoring dozens of factors every moment (wind speed, pressure on the blades, and so on). Yet the way the turbines are funded and owned is just as innovative as the technology that runs them.

These wind developments were created by Minwind Energy, a limited liability company that is structured as a cooperative. Back when only corn was harvested in these fields, Minwind invited hundreds of local residents to make investments of $5,000 apiece, eventually raising $4 million to fund the turbines. In return, the residents became owners of the project—alongside the farmers on whose land the turbines stand.

With a policy that no individual can own more than 15 percent, the ownership design is aimed at spreading wealth widely and keeping it rooted locally. According to the Government Accountability Office, keeping a project like Minwind locally owned means that local communities get three times more economic benefit than if the project had absentee owners. Rather than flowing to Wall Street investors or major companies, the dollars generated by these wind farms will flow first through local communities, going to pay local workers, local investors, and local suppliers of all kinds. Wealth stays local.

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Worker Coops Are Growing as a Survival Tool for Tough Times

by Editors @ Tuesday, August 10th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Organizing

Worker-Owned Cooperatives:

The Work We Do is the Solution

From grocery stores and bakeries to bike shops and day care centers, worker-owned cooperatives are gaining popularity across the country. Unlike the profit-at-any-cost capitalist model, co-ops put people and the community first, and are democratically run and collectively-owned, allowing all workers to participate and benefit equally.

According to Go.Coop, "more often than you probably realize, co-ops play a vital part of your everyday life." More than 47,000 co-ops in the U.S. serve 130 million people or 43 percent of the population. There are more than 3,000 farmer-owned cooperatives in the U.S. Almost 10,000 credit unions provide financial services to approximately 84 million members. Nearly 1,000 rural electric co-ops operate more than half of the nation's electric distribution lines and provide electricity to more than 37 million people. Food co-ops have been innovators in the areas of unit pricing, consumer protection, organic and bulk foods, and nutritional labeling. More than 50,000 families in the U.S. use cooperative day care centers, giving co-ops a crucial role in the care of children.

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Workers Discuss ‘Workers Control’ and the Socialist Path in Venezuela

by Editors @ Thursday, July 15th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Labor Movement, Latin America, Socialism

from Venezuela Analysis

Workers’ Control and the

Contradictions of the Bolivarian Process

Interview with Gustavo Martínez

By Susan Spronk, Jeffery R. Webber

On June 10, 2010 we caught up with Gustavo Martinez, a union leader in the worker-controlled nationalized coffee company, Fama de América, in Caracas, Venezuela. The company has 350 workers at the national level, with two separate plants – one in Caracas and one in Valencia. We sat down with Martínez to discuss the centrality of workers’ control in the ongoing struggle to transition toward socialism and some of the most pressing contradictions of the Bolivarian process in Venezuela today.

To start off, can you tell us your name, how long you’ve worked in this coffee company, your job in the company, and your role in the union?

My name is Gustavo Martínez. I’m a union leader in Fama de América. I’ve worked here for nine years. I started in 2001. As you would expect, when I started there, Fama de América was a private enterprise, characterized by exploitation of the workers and rampant corruption. The owners of the enterprise, as capitalists, were only interested in extracting surplus; they didn’t care about the conditions of the workers. All of these characteristics we already know about capitalism.

There was a union at the time, first established in 1978, that was controlled by the [centre-right] party, Acción Democrática(Democratic Action, AD). Logically, as people on the left we were opposed to the union. I was one of those on the left. My parents are Colombian, and my father was a militant in the Communist Party in that country. He was pushed out of Colombia, displaced economically and politically, and therefore moved the family to Venezuela. He worked for a transnational and faced death threats for his political organizing in the workplace.

So I found myself here in Venezuela, working at the company, and there were others with a revolutionary background working here too.

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