SolidarityEconomy.net

A Green ‘High Road’
for Venture Capitalists

By Andrew K. Burger
EcommerceTimes.com

(Nov. 8, 2006) When it comes to alternative, renewable energy, European companies and countries have been leading the charge. “We see several trends concerning financial investments into solar energy,” said Edwin Koot, the founder and principal of Solar Plaza.

Making the Case for Enterprise Mobility: Wireless Management and Spend Control. Find out how AT&T was able to reduce spiraling enterprise mobility costs and boost the efficient use of assets.

Venture capital (VC) and private and public investments in alternative energy continue to grow at their highest rates since the OPEC crisis of the 1970s.

Around the world, the persistence of much higher fossil fuel prices, heightened power demands — particularly in the fast-developing economies of China and India — national employment trends, security concerns, and growing evidence of sharp climate changes are contributing to what amounts to a clean technology boom. (more…)

You have probably heard the story of the scorpion that convinces a frog to carry it across a river. Halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog, which means both will drown. The frog does not understand; the scorpion explains, “I couldn’t help myself. It’s my nature.”

In the abstract, worker-owned enterprises and labor unions would appear to have much in common. Both share the goal of improving pay and working conditions. Both aim to give workers a say in the workplace. And both belong on any progressive’s short list of strategies for building a more just economic system.

But when unions and worker-owned businesses actually interact, they sometimes act more like the fabled arachnid.

The Ohio Employee Ownership Center at Kent State, where I work, provides preliminary technical assistance on worker buyouts. I once met with a group of employees exploring a worker buyout of a failing paper mill in southwest Ohio. When I (more…)

Every day more people realize the current global system is unsustainable: cheap energy is over; climate change, pollution and loss of habitat are wiping out many species; and while resources are being stretched to the limit, billions still live in poverty, and the gap between global rich and poor continues to grow. Even in the industrialized world life is increasingly difficult, more stressful with less meaning.

But in the major media, while problems of energy, global warming, poverty and disease get covered, the success many people are having in living more sustainably are rarely mentioned. And even those who agree with the need for change are left to think that the current global model of industrial production and consumption, however flawed, is the only way there is. This emphasis on problems without solutions is a recipe for despair and inaction.

(more…)

Tenants’ Bid Among a Dozen for Complexes (original title)

A group aligned with tenants of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village submitted a $4.5 billion bid yesterday to buy the 110 apartment buildings overlooking the East River in the hope of retaining the complexes as middle-income housing.

Their offer was neither the highest nor the lowest in one of the biggest real estate auctions of all time. Metropolitan Life, the company that built Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town in 1947 for returning veterans, got roughly a dozen offers by its 3 p.m. deadline yesterday, ranging from $4.3 billion to slightly more than $5 billion, according to real estate executives.

(more…)

Ford Motor Company’s new restructuring plan, calling for layoffs of 30,000 workers, once again reminds us of America’s economic conundrum. Put simply, the United States confronts the ‘one-price law.’

Whenever identical items sell for different prices, the one-price law tells us that people will buy in the low-priced market and sell in the high-priced one until prices converge at a single point for the two markets.

Since our workers receive relatively high wages compared with much of the rest of the world, this rule implies that America can preserve its wages only if it has better goods and better workers, or protects itself with market barriers such as tariffs.

If, in our zeal to maintain competitiveness, we rely primarily upon market forces, we will surely hasten economic decline for the two-thirds of our workers who have become the visible manifestation of the one-price rule in global labor markets.

(more…)

This article is from the July/August 2006 issue of Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice. Original available here

Can thousands of diverse, locally-rooted, grassroots economic projects form the basis for a viable democratic alternative to capitalism? It might seem unlikely that a motley array of initiatives such as worker, consumer, and housing cooperatives, community currencies, urban gardens, fair trade organizations, intentional communities, and neighborhood self-help associations could hold a candle to the pervasive and seemingly all-powerful capitalist economy. These “islands of alternatives in a capitalist sea” are often small in scale, low in resources, and sparsely networked. They are rarely able to connect with each other, much less to link their work with larger, coherent structural visions of an alternative economy.

(more…)

Waving the banner of “global competitiveness,” corporate and government policymakers are running the U.S. economy into the ground. We are becoming a nation of Scrooge-Marts and outsourcers - with an increasingly low-wage workforce instead of a growing middle class.

We are living the American Dream in reverse.

The minimum wage buys less today than it did when Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton opened his first Walton’s 5 & 10 in Bentonville, Arkansas in 1951.

It would take more than $9 in 2006 to match the federal minimum wage peak reached in 1968, adjusting for inflation. At today’s $5.15 an hour, it takes nearly two minimum wage workers to earn what one made 38 years ago.

The minimum wage sets the wage floor. When the minimum wage is stuck in quicksand, it drags down wages for workers up the pay scale as well. Hourly wages for average workers are 11 percent lower than they were in 1973, despite rising worker productivity.

(more…)