Editor’s Note: This book was featured May 12, 2013 in FDL’s Book Salon with Mr. Alperovitz, hosted by David Dayen.

If you’re like me you’ve read several books that list inspiring examples of worker owned businesses and co-ops, suggesting that expanding on such models might begin to right the wrongs of an incredibly unequal society that is growing even more unequal by the day.

Gar Alperowitz’s What Then Must We Do?

The best such collection I’ve found is in a new book by Gar Alperovitz called What Then Must We Do?  This book also offers a powerful argument that radical change is needed, albeit an argument with some possible flaws.  First the inspiring examples:

Workers own and run factories in Cleveland, Atlanta, Washington DC, Amarillo, and many other cities.  Labor unions that once opposed worker ownership, including the Steelworkers and several others, now create worker-owned companies.  Forty percent of Americans are members of cooperatives, including credit unions.  People moved hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, from large banks to credit unions and small banks in 2011 and 2012.  (That should continue!)  Then there are community development corporations and land trusts, alive and thriving.  There are even corporations redesigned, and labeled B Corps, chartered under new laws in 12 states to allow them to legally pursue the social good as well as profits.

Employee stock ownership plans make U.S. workers owners of their businesses in great numbers — three million more than are members of unions in the private sector.  Federal tax incentives (don’t tell Congress!) encourage business owners to sell to their employees.  Worker-owned firms are becoming more common.  They are also more profitable than other similar companies.

It occurs to me that we need a Union-Label type operation to label and catalog the products of worker-owned companies so that we can put our support there.

Local governments are investing in local businesses and land development.  A quarter of U.S. electricity comes from publicly owned co-ops.  These power companies are more efficient and tend to be greener.  The model is being followed by public broadband service.  Proposals that meet the textbook definition of socialism are alive and growing in red and blue states alike, and at the local and state levels.

This matters because the national government in the United States is so thoroughly corrupted.  I’m not sure Alperovitz ever directly answers the question of how a national plutocracy will be prevented from halting local and state progress on the ownership question, as it has halted local and state progress on other matters.  If the trend toward democratizing ownership is happening under the radar, how can it possibly be kept there while succeeding on the necessary scale?  If this approach to economic justice is somehow more inherently “American” than other more foreign ideas, how exactly does that protect it?  Weren’t family farms and free elections and the Fourth Amendment deemed very American at one point too?  Alperovitz recommends a state-by-state approach to single-payer healthcare, but the refusal of California legislators to enact it has come at the bidding of those in Washington.  None of which is to suggest that Alperovitz is wrong to promote this strategy — just that it may be very difficult, and some other strategies may help too.

Alperovitz frames his discussion within an understanding of serious systemic failure.  Persistent long-term trends toward income and wealth inequality, monopolized corporate power, mass incarceration, and environmental devastation churn ahead in the face of elections, activism, lobbying, and reform legislation, not to mention flip-flopping between Republican and Democratic so-called “leadership.”  Alperovitz paints these as even longer term trends than we often suppose by dismissing the gains of the middle of the 20th century as an aberration produced by the Great Depression and World War II, and as gains that could not have come without a large labor movement — something he now deems virtually impossible.

Most activist groups, Alperovitz points out, react to cuts in public services by demanding no cuts.  This is purely defensive.  Alperovitz acknowledges that some also advocate for progressive taxation, but deems this “obviously inadequate” although the obviousness of its inadequacy is not apparent to me, except in the sense that (just like the worker-ownership model) it hasn’t succeeded yet on a major scale. Yes, the plutocrats buy the elections.  The system is rigged against tax reform.  But the goal of advancing the taxation (and elimination) of billionaires as power is gradually obtained seems critical.

Alperovitz seems at times to buy into the notion that there just isn’t enough money around, even if the billionaires were to be taxed at 90 percent.  But this is wrong, of course.  The nation is rolling in money, and the money is piled up in the hands of several hundred people.

It’s somewhere else as well, somewhere Alperovitz doesn’t propose to look for it.  President Obama’s proposed budget for 2014 devotes 57% of discretionary spending to an illegal, immoral, counterproductive, and economically destructive operation known as war and preparation for war.  While Alperovitz suggests that World War III could save the U.S. economy (were a new world war possible, which he says it isn’t), economists say military spending as it exists does less for the economy than other public spending and even less than tax cuts for working people; that is to say, it is worse than nothing.

Alperovitz seems unaware that roughly half of military spending is outside the Pentagon, in Homeland Security, in the CIA, in the State Department, in the Energy Department, etc.  So he uses the Pentagon budget alone to argue that military spending is low as a percentage of GDP.  This does not of course make it low in terms of actual dollars or as a percentage of global military spending or as a percentage of public spending in the United States.  Alperovitz believes there’s little money for spending on human needs, but seems not to notice where 57% of discretionary spending is going.

While Alperovitz raises the topic of healthcare because it takes up, he says, 20 percent of GDP, the war machine that swallows 8 or 9 percent of GDP from U.S. government purchases alone (U.S. companies also dominating international weapons sales) gets no consideration.  Leo Tolstoy, from whom the book’s title is borrowed, would have noticed the existence of the military industrial complex.  He would have considered the possibility of economic conversion.  Connecticut created a commission this month to pursue conversion from war to peace manufacturing.  I suspect Alperovitz would like that model if he took a look at it.

So, here’s where I come down.  We should be pursuing everything Alperovitz recommends, and then some.  We should create worker ownership, tax the rich, cut the military, invest in our society, and act strategically at the local, state, and national levels.  We should take very seriously long-term structural failures and stop imagining that another election will fix anything by itself.  And we should, as Alperovitz wisely recommends, be preparing the ground for the best possible activism when a moment of greater possibilities arrives, or when we have succeeded in creating it.

Posted by greydogg, 99GetSmart

Live streaming from Brussels: http://greenmediabox.eu/live/internet-and-social-media-as-tools-of-freedom

Starts TODAY 16:00

On 18th June in the European Parliament, MEPs Paweł Zalewski and Amelia Andersdotter will host a joint conference on “Internet and Social Media as Tools for Freedom”. The event aims at presenting the role of the internet and social media in building civil society and fighting with oppression.

The conference will focus on the recent events in Turkey, the revolution in Tunisia that was part of the Arab Spring, and mass protests against ACTA in Poland. All of these events have one thing in common – their participants, unhappy with their governments actions decided to act and used the internet to organize themselves.

Idea of using technical tools in spreading ideas is not new. Internet is just the latest, more complex and efficient way of transmitting information and providing access to conversation and thus creating shared awareness. What most important is the internet and social media ability to serve as a space for discussion because this is how civil society and political opinions are formed. This helps to strengthen public sphere, gives more opportunities to engage in public speech and enables to undertake collective actions. Also the coordination role of social media cannot be overestimated.

Using Twitter and Facebook the protesters can organize in a very easy way that does not require any formal organizations, helps to save time, and does not involve big funds.
The basic truth is that communicative freedom is good for political freedom. And the internet provides means to support civil society and the public sphere which will cause change in a long run.

Agenda:

18 June 2013 16:00-18:00 European Parliament, Room ASP A5G3

16:00-16:15 Opening remarks by MEP Paweł Zalewski

16:15-17:30 Panel discussion
Lina Ben Mhenni (blogger Tunisian Girl)
Gürkan Özturan (blogger from Turkey)
Amelia Andersdotter MEP
Katarzyna Szymielewicz (President od Panoptykon Foundation)
Jarosław Lipszyc (President of Nowoczesna Polska Foundation)
Paweł Zalewski MEP

17:30-17:50 Q&A session

17:50-18:00 Conclusion – Paweł Zalewski MEP

18:00-18:30 opening of the exhibition „From samizdat to Internet”

18:30 reception

More information about speakers:

Paweł Zalewski
http://www.pawelzalewski.eu/en/about-me.html

Amelia Andersdottter
http://ameliaandersdotter.eu/about-amelia?language=en

Lina Ben Mhenni
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Ben_Mhenni

Gürkan Özturan

Katarzyna Szymielewicz
http://panoptykon.org/ludzie

Jarosław Lipszyc
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarosław_Lipszyc

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Today’s US military operations in Africa set us up for tomorrow’s blowback.

The other day, Hamid Karzai, the U.S.-supported Afghan president who was once sardonically nicknamed “the mayor of Kabul,” had a few curious things to say about American policy in the Muslim world.  Karzai, of course, is a man whose opinions — whether on U.S. special operations forces and their (out of control) militias, U.S. night raids on Afghan homes, or U.S. air strikes on Afghan villages — Washington loves to ignore.  He is considered “volatile.”  Sometimes, however, it’s worth listening to what our subordinate allies, uncomfortable nationalists-cum-puppets, think and say about us.

As Josh Rogin reported at the Daily Beast, Karzai recently suggested that, starting in the early 1980s when the Reagan administration and the CIA buddied up with the Saudis and Pakistani intelligence and backed a set of extreme fundamentalist Afghan rebels against the Soviets, the U.S. has been, advertently or not, promoting Islamic radicalism in the Greater Middle East.  As Karzai said of that long-forgotten moment, “The more radical we looked and talked, the more we were called mujahedin. The consequence of that was a massive effort toward uprooting traditional Afghan values and culture and tolerance.”  In his speech at the 2013 U.S.-Islamic World Forum, he made a case for the ways in which Washington’s destabilization of the region has never ended, provoking ever more extreme blowback as it goes.

Without a doubt, the central event in the multi-decade fiasco that for a few years was known as the Global War on Terror was the invasion of Iraq, Washington’s preeminent act of folly so far in the twenty-first century.  Its disastrous effects have yet to be fully absorbed or assessed.  Yet without that invasion, it is hard to imagine a whole series of developments, including the present killing fields in Syria, the potential disintegration of Iraq itself, the Arab Spring, or the spread of extreme Islamic factions ever more widely in a vast region.  The irony, of course, is that the Bush administration and the neocon types who set so much of this in motion used to refer to the Greater Middle East from North Africa to the Chinese border disparagingly as “the arc of instability.”  Today, it increasingly looks like an arc of chaos and, as Nick Turse indicates, the process, far from ending, seems to be spreading — in this case, deep into Africa.

Turse, author of the recent bestseller Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, has been following the latest U.S. global command, AFRICOM, as it embeds American military power ever more fully on the African continent. (In the process, he has engaged in full-scale public debate with that command over the nature of what it is doing.) Today, he offers a magisterial overview of what can be known about the increasing American military presence in Africa and how it is continuing a now more than three-decade-old process of spurring destabilization, the growth of radical Islamic movements, and blowback in a new region of the planet. Tom

The Terror Diaspora
The U.S. Military and the Unraveling of Africa
By Nick Turse

The Gulf of Guinea. He said it without a hint of irony or embarrassment. This was one of U.S. Africa Command’s big success stories. The Gulf… of Guinea.

Never mind that most Americans couldn’t find it on a map and haven’t heard of the nations on its shores like Gabon, Benin, and Togo. Never mind that just five days before I talked with AFRICOM’s chief spokesman, the Economist had asked if the Gulf of Guinea was on the verge of becoming “another Somalia,” because piracy there had jumped 41% from 2011 to 2012 and was on track to be even worse in 2013.

The Gulf of Guinea was one of the primary areas in Africa where “stability,” the command spokesman assured me, had “improved significantly,” and the U.S. military had played a major role in bringing it about. But what did that say about so many other areas of the continent that, since AFRICOM was set up, had been wracked by coups, insurgencies, violence, and volatility?

A careful examination of the security situation in Africa suggests that it is in the process of becoming Ground Zero for a veritable terror diaspora set in motion in the wake of 9/11 that has only accelerated in the Obama years.  Recent history indicates that as U.S. “stability” operations in Africa have increased, militancy has spread, insurgent groups have proliferated, allies have faltered or committed abuses, terrorism has increased, the number of failed states has risen, and the continent has become more unsettled.

The signal event in this tsunami of blowback was the U.S. participation in a war to fell Libyan autocrat Muammar Qaddafi that helped send neighboring Mali, a U.S.-supported bulwark against regional terrorism, into a downward spiral, prompting the intervention of the French military with U.S. backing.  The situation could still worsen as the U.S. armed forces grow ever more involved.  They are already expanding air operations across the continent, engaging in spy missions for the French military, and utilizing other previously undisclosed sites in Africa.

The Terror Diaspora

Whistleblowers need to recognize the opportunities that abound these days and convert them into tangible rights and legal protections. Yes, the government is hostile to whistleblowers (especially those from the national security sector), but with sustained, effective, and forward-looking political action, it can happen, even if not right away.

Consider the following:

• Pentagon Papers Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg says that he’s been waiting 40 years for Edward Snowden to come along.
• A Guardian poll found that 40% of respondents believe that Snowden is a hero.
• In an interview with The Huffington Post, Ellsberg noted that the term “whistleblower” is no longer synonymous with “traitor,” as it was 20 years ago.
• Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently tweeted the following: “why is media using sympathetic word “whistleblower” 4 Edward #Snowden, who leaked secret #NSA program? He broke the law & made us less safe.” While Haass ultimately disputes whether Snowden meets the definition of “whistleblower,” he concedes that it is a sympathetic one.
• The issue of whether Snowden (or any other national security whistleblower) has effective avenues to blow the whistle “appropriately” is getting airtime. This is good, and hopefully it means progress, because there is much evidence to suggest they don’t. One prominent lawmaker, who is in a position to provide whistleblowers with effective avenues (but did not when given the chance), said that if Snowden had only “raise[d] his hand. Under the whistle-blower law, he is protected. Yet he chose to go to China.” The public needs to know if these channels exist and if they work.
• Legal correspondents are beginning to ask how to make room for national security disclosures.
• There is greater collaboration, interest by broader political and media groups, and cross-spectrum ideological interest, even from unlikely sources, in Snowden, government accountability, and civil liberties, the likes of which I don’t believe we’ve seen for decades. These issues are not confined to a super-minority anymore. It may be fleeting, but for the moment we have support based on an idea whose time has come, rather than a personality.

Finally, I understand that, for whistleblowers and their advocates who have been in the fight for many years and have seen many false hopes shattered, it’s easy to become discouraged or to treat this moment with suspicion. I don’t pretend to know that “this time it will be different.” But I do know that now, more than ever, is the moment to tie public support for Snowden and what he stands for to “the rights of whistle-blowers or the issue of whistle-blowing.” Ultimately, that’s the goal we’re all fighting for, right?

Every Monday for the past month, North Carolina citizens from across the spectrum have gathered at the State House in Raleigh to protest the pro-corporate, anti-rights agenda of the legislature’s newly elected Republicans. The top priority of these Republicans is to pass every law imaginable to wreck the environment and strip away the ability of people to defend their communities — which is exactly why Reverend William Barber and the hundreds of dedicated people of North Carolina will be there again this Monday, singing, chanting, and raising their voices in every way they can to make sure the corporate right doesn’t win in North Carolina.

Greenpeace activists will be there alongside Reverend Barber and groups across issues, because this fight matters in a big way — not only for North Carolina but for everyone in the country who cares about voting rights and environmental protection.

Why?

Because the big money groups fighting the citizens of North Carolina are the same big money groups fighting across the country to disempower the majority who believe in the rights of communities to be safe and self-determined. If the corporate right sees it can win in North Carolina, it will take the same tactics to every vulnerable state in the Union in a full court press against people and the environment. We can’t let that happen.

For years, the people of North Carolina have struggled against the State House influence of big corporations like Duke Energy, which has had the state’s regulators and politicians on lockdown for decades but now sees its old, dirty energy business model barreling towards obsolescence. So Duke and other old economy behemoths are getting desperate, trying to hold onto all the power they can before demographics and history sweep them aside.

Art Pope, North Carolina’s self-appointed kingmaker and honorary Koch Brother, along with the right wing legislation factories ALEC, AFP, and State Policy Network are gleefully running amok at the state house, trying to ram through legislation that would fire all the state’s environmental regulators, restrict renewable energy, wish away global warming, and make sure disenfranchised voters stayed that way.

These guys don’t divide us into social justice groups and environmental groups — they see us as all one enemy, which is why in North Carolina we are one movement. They try to take away voting rights from people of color because they know those are the people that — if empowered — will fight to make sure that coal plants and toxic waste incinerators don’t end up in their back yards. Communities of color and low-income communities are hurt first and worst by Duke’s rate hikes for dirty energy. They are hurt first and worst by pollution, since companies usually site the coal plants and toxic waste dumps in their communities. They are the people who could benefit most from solar panels on their rooftops and the ability to free themselves from the regressive, costly, polluting electricity grid that Duke currently offers. Which is why we’re standing together to make sure the people are empowered. An attack by corporate interests against North Carolina’s working people, women, people of color, or any other vulnerable group, is an attack on North Carolina’s environment too, and we will stand with our allies to fight that corporate funded threat.

Good Morning, Dinerzens.  Today’s topic is domestic servitude, but it has international implications.

Home, sweet home?

Some months ago, our County Commission gave a 32-year tax credit to a proposed “workforce housing” development in my neighborhood in Albuquerque. We didn’t have much information about the project in advance, but at one of the neighborhood meetings, the developer told those assembled that the financial partner for the building was Berkshire Hathaway. “You may have heard of them,” he said with a chuckle.

The project renderings available at the time did not appeal to many neighbors, but what rankled us the most were the tax credits and the lack of parking. The project is located in an area of downtown that has no parking requirements for any building, something the developer was totally hip to, but not the neighbors who will be impacted by the re-development of the former motel site. My county commissioner would not give me the time of day, and another said, “You progressives like transit-oriented development until it’s in your neighborhood, and then you say ‘Not In My Back Yard.’” The developer says the mostly young people who will live there “want to be green, so they’ll ride bicycles.”

“Workforce housing” is a euphemism for “low income housing” for workers earning 60% of median income. This project has 151 units, mostly studio apartments with just a few one and two bedroom options. There are 21 parking spaces that the tenants will pay extra to use. For 32 years, the property will contribute Not One Cent to fund streets and buses, schools and hospitals, among many services the residents will use. The citizens of Albuquerque and small business property owners will foot the bill for Warren Buffett’s financial investment. Low income workers will funnel more than a million dollars each year into the developer’s pockets. There are 4 employees needed for the completed project and construction jobs for some months, but most of the money generated from this operation will be electronically transferred to the home office in Portland, OR.

What I have been investigating since this project popped up is national housing policy and student loan debt, how they are interconnected and what this whole concept, cynical and planned or a result of on-going structural economic issues, portends for the generation of people who are projected to live in human filing cabinets under construction across the US.

This is where we talk about “micro-apartments.” Because it sounds so, um, urbane. And it is happening world wide, to the same young people. Every effort is being made to make it palatable. Of course 1% of the young will have it easy, but “workforce housing” will absolutely be needed.

Sallie Mae/the US Government, is making a handsome profit from a widening circle of people through student loans, and there are a variety of actions to square that off. Elizabeth Warren has taken a stab, perhaps insufficient, at the problem. Strike Debt is another option. David Dayen describes the result of student borrowing as indenture, but this is a global trend, the likely outcome of continued policies reinforcing the economic inequality and injustice our next generations face, coming of age in a time of economic hopelessness.

Student loans and “workforce housing” are structured government programs that may have broadly benefited previous generations but have now been re-written to create profits for a few by gouging the young. The government has outsourced debt-collection on student loans, and the squeeze is on.  Increasing numbers of the elderly are still paying their student debts. (Dayen’s article has many of these same links.)

Perhaps this next generation of workers will rise up. Maybe they will go back to the methods we used before social media, once so powerful in the hands of the many but now another government program gone so very wrong. It’s tragic: all the work of organizing for better living and working conditions was so 19 c.; a long time ago, and yet we are apparently doomed to repeat it.

It’s always a good day …

Boards of Canada just released their long-awaited new album Tomorrow’s Harvest. Here’s a fan-made video to the song “Reach For the Dead.” I like the use of glitch art to create haunting imagery of flight that matches the soaring sounds.

Some good news – The Guardian reports that Move Your Money UK succeeded in getting millions of customers to leave the top banks in 2012:

An estimated 2.4 million customers quit the UK’s five biggest banks in 2012 as people “voted with their feet” in response to a string of scandals, according to latest figures.

The Move Your Money UK campaign and website, which issued the figures, said they showed a “mass movement” away from the big banking groups: Lloyds, Royal Bank of Scotland/NatWest, Barclays, HSBC and Santander.

Laura Willoughby, Move Your Money chief executive, said: “The constant slew of scandals last year has opened the floodgates, and people are beginning to realise they don’t have to put up with the arrogance of the big banks.”

Housekeeping notes:

• Please review our About Us page if you need a refresher on site rules, and
• We encourage you to use our flag system — if you see an abusive comment, user or post, please flag it rather than replying. We review every flag and take the best action available to us.
• If you have questions or concerns about Firedoglake-specific issues, please limit their discussion to Watercooler posts rather than starting new posts or making off-topic comments in others. But remember,
• Firedoglake editors and staff are not allowed to comment on any moderation decisions.

What’s on your mind tonight? It’s an open conversation in the comments.