Archive for the 'High Road Economics' Category

High-Speed Rail - Why We Need a Green Industrial Policy

by Editors @ Sunday, January 17th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Green Industry, High Road Economics

 

China's High-Speed-Rail Revolution:

Dedicated lines are the key

to record-breaking speeds.

By Peter Fairley
MIT Technology Review

Jan. 11, 2010 - China has begun operating what is, by several measures, the world's fastest rail line: a dedicated 968-kilometer line linking Wuhan, in the heart of central China, to Guangzhou, on the southeastern coast. In trials, the "WuGuang" line trains (locally built variants of Japan's Shinkansen and Germany's InterCity Express high-speed trains) clocked peak speeds of up to 394 kilometers per hour (or 245 miles per hour). They have also recorded an average speed of 312 kph in nonstop runs four times daily since the WuGuang's December 26 launch, slashing travel time from Wuhan to Guangzhou from 10.5 hours to less than three.

WuGuang's speed blows away the reigning champion: France's TGV, which runs from Lorraine to Champagne and averages 272 kph. It also bests China's first high-speed train, the Beijing-to-Tianjin trains that average 230 kph, as well as Shanghai's magnetically levitated airport shuttle trains that can hit 430 kph but average less than 251 kph.

(more...)

email2friend

Worker Coops and Their Requirements for Capital Within Limits

by Editors @ Tuesday, January 12th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, High Road Economics, Socialism
 
Photo: Punching machine at MCC factory

The Instrumental and

Subordinate Nature of Capital:

Looking Deeper at the

Mondragon Principles

A series on the core principles of
the Mondragon Cooperatives in Spain

 

By John McNamara

“We do not aspire to economic development as an end, but as a means.”

–Don José María Arizmendiarrieta, spiritual founder of Mondragon

This Mondragon principle, in practice, operates more closely to the Identity Statement principle of Member Economic Participation. I included it in this side road of the over all series because I believe that Mondragon presents a nuance all too often lost in the co-operative movement and, in the 'silo-ed' environment of the US worker co-operative movement, we often tend to forget the role of capital in our organizations is significantly different from that of our industry and capitalist competitors.

The role of capital in a worker co-operative should be two-fold:

1) ensure the on-going operations of the co-operative

2) allow the co-operative to maintain the highest level of safety and quality of work-life.

Thus, this principle presents the balancing act of worker co-operatives. As the opening quote suggests, if we are just in it for the money, what are we really trying to accomplish? However, DJMA has also said, “Cooperativism without the structural capacity to attract and assimilate capital at the level of the requirements of industrial productivity is but a temporary solution, an invalid formula.”

(more...)

email2friend

Yankee Doodle Ecologist: Tom Friedman and the Green Revolution

by Editors @ Tuesday, December 15th, 2009. Filed under Economy, Environment, High Road Economics, Socialism

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

by Thomas Friedman.

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

$27.95. Pp. 438.

 

By Jerry Harris

SolidarityEconomy.Net

Thomas Friedman is always the head cheerleader for the next big thing. At first it was globalization and now it’s the green revolution. Friedman’s instincts are good, it’s just his analysis and politics are lacking. There are certainly valuable and interesting insights in his work, but his adolescent enthusiasm for capitalism often turns his critique to shallow propaganda.

The book’s title, Hot, Flat, and Crowded is a good indicator as to how Friedman understands environmental problems. Underline that word crowded because the book takes us on a Malthusian ride through the Third World. It’s overpopulation, not capitalism and its need for every expanding accumulation that is destroying the world’s environment.

Friedman marches us through China, India, Brazil and Nigeria offering a myopic view that only occasional refers to the developed countries and their use of energy and resources. When it comes to energy markets transnationals such as Exxon and Shell disappear as does any discussion of imperialism and its history in the Middle East. Instead Friedman targets “petrodictorships” and “Sheikhs…with bags of cash” indoctrinating madrassa students to “breed like rabbits” and “swarm” over the Islamic world. (p. 88)

(more...)

email2friend

Food for Thought Dept: Tennessee’s New Wave of High-Road Green Jobs

by Editors @ Monday, December 7th, 2009. Filed under Economy, High Road Economics, Organizing

 

Green Tide: State

taking big steps toward

energy-efficient future

 

By Ed Marcum

Sunday, December 6, 2009

A modest zero-energy project has multiplied into a major career change for one-time software developer David Bolt.

The Roane County resident may be on the cutting edge of an industry wave that could mean valuable jobs for an East Tennessee economy hungry for new investment.

Bolt grew interested in sustainability - also known as energy and environmental conservation - as he was renovating his family's 2,400-square-foot home in Harriman. Through various energy savings features, he modified the house to become a "zero energy" home - one that creates as much energy as it consumes.

Then in 2005, Bolt founded Sustainable Future, an online company that does turnkey design and installation of solar energy systems to homes and businesses.

Bolt may be the tip of a trend that area economic developers pray will lead to widespread employment opportunities in the near future.

By many estimates, a wave of green jobs is about to wash over Tennessee. But some observers question whether the swift current will lift all boats.

(more...)

email2friend

Mondragon in the US: Background to the United Steel Workers Agreement

by Editors @ Sunday, November 1st, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, High Road Economics

Photo: High Tech Tools from

Mondragon headed for China

[Editor's Note: Written before the new collaboration between Mondragon and the United Steel Workers was announced, this article still gives some valuable background.]

Mondragon Cooperatives:

What Relevance for US

Cooperative Development?


By Bernard Marszalek

Oct.27, 2009 - A recent weeklong conference in Sonoma, California – The Economics of Peace – featured a day devoted to lectures and workshops on the cooperatives associated with the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC). This event marks the third occasion in the last six months where representatives from the MCC, located in the Basque region of Spain, appeared in the US. Previously both Cleveland and Detroit hosted discussions with the MCC. While US developers of worker cooperatives have toured the Mondragon complex since the 80’s, these recent visits are noteworthy as first for the MCC. 


In each case the MCC representatives were returning a visit from a US group, so we can’t presume that the frequency of visits will be maintained. Nonetheless the increased public exposure to the cooperative enterprises founded over 50 years ago in the city of Mondragon is significant. The raised profile of Mondragon in the US prompts some thoughts of MCC’s role within the worker community. I am hoping that the following comments, from someone with only a tangential relationship to co-op development (I consider myself an activist, not a “developer”) will generate a discussion about the future of worker cooperatives in a world that increasingly shows signs of complete collapse.

 
But let me begin noting the amazing success of an experiment (the term the MCC uses) begun by a poor parish priest over sixty years ago. Today, the MCC is a complex worth 24 billion dollars and employing 100,000 in 120 enterprises all over the globe. It comprises factories, banks, insurance agencies and a network of retail stores throughout Spain. Globally the MCC invests in industries located all over Europe, Latin America and Asia.

(more...)

email2friend

Putting the Obama Stimulus Toward Green Manufacturing

by Editors @ Sunday, October 4th, 2009. Filed under Economy, Environment, High Road Economics

Green Power Revives

Defunct Battery Plant

By Dennis Spisak

Mahoning Valley Green Party


NEW CASTLE, Pa. - Just outside this town in the western part of the state,
famous for its chili dogs and fireworks, a low-rise battery plant sits along a
side road named Clover Lane.


To miss it is to miss a back-from-the-dead story, one that Gov. Rendell hopes
will inspire a manufacturing revival across Pennsylvania.


With a workforce of 59, Axion Power International is no industrial giant. But
its resurrection - from a shuttered lead-acid battery plant to one now turning
out lead-carbon batteries for use in electric cars, among other eco-friendly
applications - is cited by Rendell and his representatives as evidence of the
green economy's transformative powers.

(more...)

email2friend

The High Road in Detroit - New Electric Car Battery Plant

by Editors @ Sunday, September 13th, 2009. Filed under High Road Economics

  100 Jobs? It Looks

Good to Michigan

By NICK BUNKLEY and BILL VLASIC

DETROIT — Sept 10, 2009 - The announcement of a new plant employing just 100 workers might seem like a long shot to attract the chief executive of General Motors, two senators and a raft of state and local officeholders from across Michigan.

But in a state that has lost 800,000 jobs this decade, 18 percent of its work force, the Aug. 13 official opening of a G.M. factory to build electric-car batteries in Brownstown, about 20 miles southwest of Detroit, was a can’t-miss event.

“The phrase ‘new plant’ isn’t one we’re used to hearing these days,” said John Cherry, Michigan’s lieutenant governor, as he stood inside the sprawling, empty building in this industrial town about 20 miles south of Detroit.

(more...)

email2friend

Solidarity Economy Comes to Cleveland

by Editors @ Wednesday, August 12th, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, High Road Economics, Organizing

Photo: Solar Panels on Cleveland Roofs

 Cleveland, Ohio’s

Worker-Owned Boom:

A Path from Rust-Belt

to Recovery


By Gar Alperovitz, Ted Howard, Steve Dubb
Yes! Magazine

This June, the doors opened at the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, a state-of-the-art, nearly $6 million facility in Cleveland, Ohio.

What’s so special about this laundry? In a word, ownership. The business will be 100 percent owned by its 50 employees, virtually all of whom live in the surrounding community. Life is tough in this neighborhood, where the poverty rate exceeded 30 percent and thousands of homes lay stripped and abandoned even before the current recession began.

In the midst of this urban distress, the Evergreen Laundry employee-owners will earn a living wage and health benefits. As members of the co-op, they will enjoy greater job security than workers at more traditional businesses, and, after seven years on the job, they will have built an ownership stake of as much as $65,000.

(more...)

email2friend

Women’s Coop Occupies Factory, Starts Production

by Editors @ Saturday, July 18th, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, High Road Economics, Organizing, Women


Stitching a Future Together:

Women and the Solidarity

Economy in Uruguay

 

By Luis Alberto Carro

Inter-Press Service

ROSARIO, Uruguay, July 5 2009 (IPS) - The group of women cross this Uruguayan town every morning, some on bike and some on foot, on their way to CODEMUR, a women’s cooperative that resurrected a garment factory abandoned by its owners. The women, all between the ages of 40 and 60, are former employees of the once vibrant textile firm Sirfil y Drymar. After the companies closed the local plant without paying the employees the back wages and holiday and severance pay they were owed, some of the women created CODEMUR (Rosario Women’s Cooperative).

After the factory workers were laid off in 2007, the owners began to cart off the merchandise, fabrics and other materials. So the women decided to occupy the plant, and informed the Labour Ministry that they would attempt to get it running again, following in the footsteps of other worker-run factories.

(more...)

email2friend

Green Reconstruction vs. Speculative Capital

by Editors @ Thursday, May 21st, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Environment, High Road Economics

How a Green Economy

Is an Antidote to

Casino Capitalism


By Robert Pollin

New Labor Forum

April 2, 2009 - The convergence of a profound economic crisis and the inauguration of Barack Obama as President has created both tremendous challenges and opportunities for progressives in the United States. Two of the overarching economic issues around which progressives will need to struggle are: first, how to build a clean energy economy, creating millions of good jobs in the process; and second, how to create a financial system focused on channeling money toward productive investment as opposed to destabilizing speculation.

In fact, the link between these matters becomes clear once we pose the simple question: how can we pay for the transition to a clean energy economy? Realistically, there is no way to construct a clean energy economy -- driven by solar, wind, and geothermal power and biomass fuels, and operating at dramatically higher levels of energy efficiency -- unless trillions of dollars are channeled into this project over the next 20 years.

(more...)

email2friend

A Better Plan: Forget Wall St, Fund Local Credit Unions Directly

by Editors @ Sunday, May 17th, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Financial Crisis, High Road Economics

 

Graphic: Ptolemy, the Earth Centric

 

Team Obama's Flawed Cosmology:

A Universe Revolving Around Banks

By Arianna Huffington
Huffington Post

A series of recent meetings with members of Barack Obama's economic team (including running into Larry Summers on my way to an appointment in the West Wing, leading to a spirited back-and-forth that made me feel like I was back at Cambridge, debating the smartest kid in the class), left me with a pair of indelible impressions:

1) These are all good people, many of them brilliant, working incredibly hard with the best of intentions to solve the country's financial crisis.

2) They are operating on the basis of an outdated cosmology that places banks at the center of the economic universe.

Talking about our financial crisis with them is like beaming back to the 2nd century and discussing astronomy with Ptolemy. Just as Ptolemy was convinced we live in a geocentric universe -- and made the math work to "prove" his flawed theories -- Obama's senior economic team is convinced we live in a bank-centric universe, and keeps offering its versions of "epicycles" and "eccentric circles" to rationalize their approach to the bailout. And because, like Ptolemy, they are really smart, they are really good at rationalizing.

(more...)

email2friend

Prairie Power: Iowa Communities Own Wind Power Farms

by Editors @ Thursday, May 14th, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Environment, High Road Economics

  Community-Owned

Is Business Model for

Two Wind Farms in Iowa



By Apollo News Service

4/21/2009 - The farmland of Iowa’s Emmet and Dickinson counties will soon be home to the nation’s two largest community-owned wind farms. Red Rock Wind Energy LLC and Emmet County Energy LLC, both based in Estherville, Iowa, announced in December their intent build 300 and 200-megawatt wind arrays respectively near Estherville, a northwest Iowa agricultural community of 6,000 residents east of Sioux Falls near the border with Minnesota.

Both projects are much larger than Minnesota’s 100-megawatt Trimont array, currently the country’s largest community-owned wind farm.

(more...)

email2friend

‘Solidarity Economy’ Emerging in North Carolina

by Editors @ Friday, April 10th, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Economy, Environment, Global Justice, High Road Economics

The 'Plenty':

Local Currency Is One Tool

of Local Coop Economy

 

From Democracy Now

April 9, 2009:


AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to look now at how one North Carolina town is trying to become more self-sufficient by moving towards, well, being able to feed, fuel and finance itself. The town of Pittsboro, North Carolina—we just passed it yesterday—it houses the nation’s largest biodiesel cooperative, a food co-op, a farmers’ market and, most recently, its own currency, the Pittsboro Plenty. Pittsboro is one of a number of communities across the country printing their own money in an attempt to support local business.


We’re joined right now by community activist, entrepreneur and author Lyle Estill. He is also the author of Small Is Possible: Life in a Local Economy, and he’s founder of Piedmont Biofuels. He is also author of another book, as well.
We welcome you to Democracy Now! It’s good to have you with us, Lyle.

LYLE ESTILL: Thanks.


AMY GOODMAN: Plenty—where is that currency? I had it here somewhere. How could I lose that? Ah, here it is. Here it is. This is a—looks like—a little bit like Monopoly money. And tell us about Plenty. What does it stand for?

(more...)

email2friend

Skip the Gas Guzzlers, Leapfrog to the Green Car

by Editors @ Sunday, April 5th, 2009. Filed under China, Environment, High Road Economics

 BYD electric car

China's E6 Electric Car:

Seeking a Great Leap

in Clean Transportation

By Jonathan Watts

The Guardian, UK

When BYD Auto launches one of China's first mass produced fully electric sedans later this year, it will be trying to conquer the world rather than save it. But such is the explosive growth of China's car market and thirst for petrol that the two goals are likely to become ever more synonymous.

The E6 plug-in is currently under wraps at the company's sprawling industrial complex in Shenzhen, but it will soon be at the vanguard of a company's -- and a nation's -- plans to dominate the global market for "clean-transport".

(more...)

email2friend

Economic Justice from the Bottom Up

by Editors @ Wednesday, April 1st, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Economy, High Road Economics, Organizing, Youth

 

The Solidarity Economy Movement

Emerges in Its First U.S. Conference

By Carl Davidson
SolidarityEconomy.Net

Nearly 400 organizers and activists gathered at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst March 19-22 for the first national gathering of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, exceeding the expectations of its organizers.

The deepening economic crisis made the meeting quite timely. The overall theme was 'Building Another World,' and drew participants  from the East Coast, South and Midwest of the US, even Alaska and Puerto Rico. Internationally, delegations came from Quebec, Venezuela, Peru, Mexico, and Canada. People represented economic justice and green jobs projects, food coops and credit unions, worker coops and labor unions, and peace and justice organizing efforts.

"Our diversity was very dynamic and creative," said Julie Matthaei, a USSEN coordinating committee member. "It served us well in affirming our unity, discussing differences, and helping us reach a deeper understanding of the solidarity economy in our context."

(more...)

email2friend
« Older Entries

[SolidarityEconomy.net is proudly powered by WordPress.]