Sunday, January 1, 2012

Gar Alperovitz on DemocracyNow- Co-operatives

A search today turned up this little nugget from DemocracyNow on Dec. 15, 2011.  It's the first piece on co-ops that I know of from this excellent news source.  I'll search for Alperovitz's NY Times op-ed shortly....
      I've also taken a look at Amazon.com and found a nice collection of books on the co-operative model of enterprise.  Berkeley, CA John Curl's book of his longstanding research paper is a hefty account worth looking at closely.  More on that later....

....AMY GOODMAN: Alperovitz finds that 130 million Americans are members of some kind of cooperative, and 13 million Americans work in an employee-owned company. He says the U.S. may be heading toward something very different from both corporate-dominated capitalism and from traditional socialism.
Gar Alperovitz is a professor of political economy at the University of Maryland. His op-ed is called "Worker-Owners of America, Unite!" It’s out today in theNew York Times. A new edition of his book, America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy, has also just been published.
So, what’s the evidence for this, Gar?
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Well, it’s piling up right beneath the surface, that the press, the normal press, hasn’t been covering. You know, 130 million people, that’s 40 percent of United States, involved in credit unions, co-ops all over the country, that don’t get any publicity. And roughly 13 million people, in one kind or another, have worker-owned companies—again, five or six million more people than are involved in labor unions. And several states are attempting to set up state banks, like the existing Bank of North Dakota. A number of cities are trying to set up city banks. San Francisco and Portland are the latest ones on the list. So, if you look deeper, you find wonderful experiments going on. One really interesting one in Cleveland, where there’s a group of cooperatively owned businesses by—in the community that are building a hydroponic land kind of greenhouse, producing three to five million heads of lettuce a year, a gigantic laundry—all this worker-owned. And again, the press hasn’t been covering it, but there—it gives you a sense of what could happen if the Occupy movement gets serious about simply building on what’s already out there.....

see DemocracyNow.org for full article....

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