Gar Alperovitz's Blog, page 6
April 2, 2015
It’s Time to Get Serious About Systemic Solutions to Systemic Problems
Originally published on Huffington Post on April 1, 2015.
Co-Authored By James Gustave Speth
It’s getting harder and harder to be an optimist. A deep economic crisis has given way to a profoundly unequal recovery. Climate catastrophe is steadily unfolding across the globe. And the work of building a racially inclusive society appears to be stalled — indeed, in many areas, to be losing ground. All of this in an age of unprecedented technological progress, which has manifestly failed to keep its promises. If there is one saving grace, it is that the pain caused by these interconnected failures make it possible — for the first time in modern history — to pose the question of system change in a serious fashion, even in the United States, the faltering heart of global capitalism.
To pose the system question means first and foremost to point out that long, failing trends are anchored far more deeply in political-economic structures than conventional political debate suggests. It is to ask how the system is built, for whom, and how it operates to recurrently produce the decaying outcomes we are experiencing. There is, in fact, no shortage of people today to tell us that something is wrong, that things are built to work for the wealthy, for the white and for those far from the frontlines of climate and social calamity. Such diagnoses are increasingly commonplace and harder and harder to contest.
It is no major leap from such anguished complaints to recognition that the system itself –American corporate capitalism — is generating the outcomes we witness; that we do, indeed, face a systemic challenge, one manifestly not responsive to traditional political approaches and strategies.
But if defining the system question is easy, answering it remains much harder. For decades, the only options for many have seemed to be state socialism, on the one hand, or corporate capitalism, on the other. If we reject the authoritarian and bureaucratic centralism of the former, but find it increasingly difficult to believe that the latter will be able to nurture equality, liberty and democracy, or even able to keep our planet livable, is there any alternative besides cynical resignation and despair?
The traditional strategies that once seemed capable of winning equitable and sustainable social, economic, and ecological outcomes simply no longer work. Labor unions, the core of the traditional progressive power base, have been radically weakened, and could well continue to decline still further under political attack. Corporate power and concentrations of great wealth dominate the democratic process, widening massive gaps in wealth and income, and severely limiting the capacity of the occasional progressive administration to use taxation to meaningfully redistribute wealth or to seriously regulate corporations in many areas. Publicly listed, large-scale corporations, for their part, have little choice but to grow or die, putting more and more pressure on ecological limits.
Efforts to cobble together “solutions” to these challenges for the most part draw upon and reinforce the very same institutional arrangements that caused them in the first place. Virtually none challenge underlying institutional power structures. In short, we face a systemic crisis, not simply political and economic difficulties. Accordingly, we need to discuss, debate and mobilize to achieve systemic solutions.
It is time to begin a real conversation — locally, nationally and at all levels — about what a genuine alternative beyond corporate capitalism and state socialism would look like, and how we would build it. Not too long ago, it was easy to dismiss any talk about “changing the system” as frivolous or impractical, a luxury or a distraction. What we are seeing today is that increasing numbers of people understand that this task has become absolutely necessary. What’s become frivolous and distracting is continuing to assume that business as usual is still an option.
It’s rare that ideas matter in politics. Usually, what matters is simply the momentum of entrenched power. But every so often, history gives us an opening to something new. When the old stories no longer explain the world around us, when it is obvious to everyone that something is deeply wrong, new ideas can matter, and matter a great deal. Our present time in history appears to be one of those moments. Unless we can seize it, and come together to develop and implement a plausible alternative system, the current downward trajectory of pain and decay will only continue.
There are real alternatives. In precisely those places where the current system has reached a dead end, we see a steadily-building explosion of new proposals and new experiments, new ideas and new activism, and above all a new basis for hope. Worker-owned firms are being developed in many parts of the country. In Boulder, Colorado a powerful movement to take over and municipalize the private utility holds out the promise of actually dealing with local sources of global warming. In several cities variations on the inspiring Mondragón cooperative network approach are being developed.
Strikingly, the recent financial crisis brought de facto nationalization of General Motors, Chrysler and A.I.G, once the largest insurance company in the world. Although all were re-privatized after public bailouts saved them from collapse, what might happen in the next crisis — or the one beyond — is by no means a closed question. Our task is to bring together (and extend and expand upon) the growing number of experiments and new strategies, and then forge a coherent new systemic direction that can help guide us as we build what comes next.
A tall order? Certainly. But history reminds us that easy pessimism is both dis-empowering and often wrong. The Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement and the movement for marriage equality all began at moments when very little seemed possible. Nor was the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, or the apartheid regime in South Africa, expected or predicted by conventional views of what was possible at the time.
Many progressives today also forget how marginal today’s right-wing ideas were in the decades before 1980. Indeed, the ideas and beliefs currently dominating American politics were once regarded as ridiculous by the mainstream press, politicians and most serious scholars. Serious conservatives, however, saw their opening, and worked self-consciously to develop and propagate their ideas over the long haul. If we can roll up our sleeves and get organized and serious about really tackling the system question, about building a new system of political economy, there are grounds for optimism that deep and far-reaching change is possible.
Recent surveys of public opinion indicate a radical openness to something new just below the surface of conventional media reporting. People between the ages of 18 and 29 slightly favor the word “socialism” over the word “capitalism” (49 percent to 46 percent). In 2012 Merriam Webster, publisher of the widely used online dictionary, noted that the two most looked-up words that year were “socialism” and “capitalism.”
Today’s young people, of all races and national origins, increasingly recognize that if nothing changes they will likely be worse off than their parents were. Even as the elderly and the middle-aged begin to stir, there’s no stronger ally imaginable than a generation realizing that without a next system, they may not have a future.
The post It’s Time to Get Serious About Systemic Solutions to Systemic Problems appeared first on Gar Alperovitz.
March 11, 2015
Inequality’s Dead End—And the Possibility of a New, Long-Term Direction
Originally published in the Nonprofit Quarterly on March 10, 2015.
It is easy to be distracted by what passes for economic news these days, focused as it is on short-term fluctuations and assurances of recovery and revitalization. The simple truth, however, is that year by year, decade by decade, life in the United States is steadily growing ever more unequal.
Statistics illuminating this historical trajectory are easy enough to come by. For a start, the income of the top 1 percent has more than doubled in the past two decades, from roughly 10 percent of all income in 1980 to more than 22 percent in 2012.1 Meanwhile, wages for the bottom 80 percent of American workers have been essentially stagnant in real terms for at least three decades.2
The growing gaps in income inequality are matched or even exceeded by gaps in wealth. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have recently demonstrated, for instance, that American economic life is as unequal now as it was at the outset of the Great Depression. Wealth—and with it, political power—is concentrated more and more in the hands of the richest of the elite.3 From 1962 to 2010, the top 5 percent of Americans increased their share of national wealth from 54.6 percent to 63.1 percent, while the bottom 40 percent’s nearly insignificant 0.2 percent share actually declined to a negative 0.9 percent, as mounting consumer debt outpaced stagnant wages.4 The top 400 individuals have more wealth than the bottom 180 million Americans taken together.5
Read the rest of the article here.
The post Inequality’s Dead End—And the Possibility of a New, Long-Term Direction appeared first on Gar Alperovitz.
February 23, 2015
These Cities Built Cheap, Fast, Community-Owned Broadband. Here’s What Net Neutrality Means For Them—and All of Us
Originally published in Yes! Magazine on February 23, 2015.
Just before his State of the Union address last month, President Obamashowed up in the small city of Cedar Falls, Iowa, to highlight the work of Cedar Falls Utilities, a publicly owned utility that operates an Internet network in the city. Cedar Falls has one of the oldest community-owned networks in the country and, with recent upgrades, is now one of the fastest. In addition to having higher-speed connections than neighboring communities in Iowa, the publicly owned network’s more than 11,000 subscribers pay around $200 less per year.
While in Cedar Falls the President stated his opposition to the spread of corporate-backed state laws banning local communities from operating their own networks. An accompanying White House report highlighted several community broadband success stories, including efforts in Chattanooga, Tenn., Wilson, N.C., and Lafayette, La.—all of which further document the possibilities of a forward-looking community broadband strategy.
Something important is brewing here: In his subsequent State of the Union address, Obama declared that he intends to “protect a free and open Internet, extend its reach to every classroom, and every community and help folks build the fastest networks…” In addition to community broadband, he was talking about opposition to the attempt by corporations to fundamentally change the way the Internet works and his support for “net neutrality”—the concept that all legal content or data on the web should be treated equally.
These two issues—local community-owned Internet networks and “net neutrality”—are intimately related, and on February 26, the FCC willvote on the future of both.
The struggle over community broadband and “net neutrality” has far-reaching implications—not only for the Internet in general, but for the future of a democratic “new economy” built, first and foremost, from the level of local community concerns. The question is: Who will control this critical technology, the nation’s largest corporations or the American people?
Net neutrality: How we got to this week’s vote
Ever since its widespread adoption in the 1990s, the Internet has been largely run on principles that benefit the public, widely referred to as “net neutrality.” For many years big corporate Internet service providers (ISPs) like Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T—which provide most Americans’ access to the Internet—have been fighting for a different principle sometimes referred to as a “tiered service” model. This is the idea that different users should pay for different content at different rates. In practice, this means corporations will offer fast access to certain content for those who can pay, while everyone else has to settle for restricted access to data and slower speeds.
A popular graphic distributed by net neutrality supporters shows the hypothetical effects of such an approach. A basic Internet plan with 500 MB of data access to certain websites at full speed would be offered for $29.95. After 500 MB of usage, speeds would be slowed down to 128 kbps.
Furthermore, in order to access search websites (such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing), customers would have to pay $5 extra per month; international websites such as the BBC would be another $5 per month; media sites such as Netflix, Youtube, and Hulu would be another $10 a month (as an introductory rate, which then goes up to $15 a month); and so on and so forth. Moreover, because in many areas corporate ISPs operate as a monopoly and do not compete with each other, millions of Americans would have no alternative to paying the extra—and rising—costs.
The public impact of such an approach could be severe. Community-supporting institutions—like schools and libraries—and the millions of Americans who rely on them for Internet access would also be placed at a disadvantage—likely forced to pay more for less at the expense of other services.
“School, public, and college libraries rely upon the public availability of open, affordable Internet access for school homework assignments, distance learning classes, e-government services, licensed databases, job-training videos, medical and scientific research, and many other essential services,” Barbara Stripling, president of the American Library Association, wrote in Wired. “By allowing ISPs to preferentially charge and premium price access…public libraries—and the communities we serve—will be the ones to lose.”
“Ultimately,” Wired’s Sonal Chokshi reminds us, “‘pay to play’ only benefits the privileged.”
In January the companies got their wish—or at least so it seemed: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in a case brought by Verizon that the FCC was not authorized to enforce certain net neutrality principles against ISPs—unless it reclassified Internet service as a “public utility” and regulated ISPs as “common carriers” (similar to telephone companies).
Following the Court’s decision, the FCC decided not to appeal andproposed new rules that would have essentially scrapped some of the core components of net neutrality by using vague language “banning commercially unreasonable practices”— thus leaving the door open to tiered service.
That, however, was only step one. The proposal quickly drew the fire of consumer groups, activist organizations, and millions of citizens. Back in September, the FCC finally closed the public comment window, having received 3.7 million responses—by far the most in the agency’s history. Two-thirds of respondents reportedly supported reclassifying ISPs and preserving net neutrality.
Also, some major corporations that benefit from net neutrality—such as those that would have their content restricted or slowed, and/or be required to pay (and possibly charge) more under a tiered model— weighed in heavily. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, AOL, Expedia, and a host of others, through their trade group (The Internet Association), called on the FCC to “to create strong, enforceable net neutrality rules and apply them equally to both wireless and wireline providers.” Finally, in late 2014 President Obama signaled his support.
Sometimes when politics works, it really works: On February 4th, Chairman of the FCC Tom Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the cable and wireless industry, reversed field, announcing that instead of abandoning net neutrality, he would be suggesting “the strongest open Internet protections ever proposed by the FCC.” He would do this by reclassifying Internet service and banning ISPs from blocking content and prioritizing access.
On Thursday, the FCC will vote on these new proposed rules. With Wheeler’s reversal it seems likely the reclassification will happen and net neutrality will be preserved—at least for a while.
This, however, is probably going to be fight that goes on for many rounds, one that reaches into much deeper issues brewing in American communities—and to what many now are calling the “new economy.”
Confronting Internet apartheid
Inevitably, when giant corporations like Comcast and Verizon own and operate local cable or wireless systems, they control a community’s access to the Internet—including costs, speeds, and availability. In the modern information-driven economy, this often means that a town, city, or county’s economic prosperity and future is in the hands of these corporations.
More than 51 million Americans. especially those in rural areas, cannot access high-speed broadband networks, and Internet service in the United States is considerably more expensive than in most advanced countries—all of which further contributes to unequal access between richer and poorer communities. Moreover, since large corporations have money, lobbyists, and lobbying power they tend to find different ways to influence regulators and public officials at all levels in order to increase profits at the expense of local needs.
The answer, increasing numbers of communities are beginning to recognize, is for Internet systems and infrastructure to be owned and operated locally.
More than 450 communities now have full or partial publicly owned networks—often referred to as municipal or community broadband—including 40 (in 13 states) that offer high-speed, 1 gigabit services.
In Chattanooga, the city’s publicly owned Electric Power Board, for instance, has been operating a fiber network since 2009, and was the first location in the United States to offer a 1 gigabit service. The emergence of a community broadband network in the city has also forced the corporate provider, Comcast, to invest in upgrading their service—even as EPB provides faster speeds and lower costs.
In Wilson, the community broadband network became profitable nearly a year ahead of schedule, ensuring that Time Warner keeps its prices down in order to compete. Between 2007 and 2009 Time Warner raised its rates in “non-competitive” neighboring jurisdictions (where it exists as a monopoly) as much as 52 percent, but kept prices stable in Wilson.
A similar situation occurred in Lafayette when the city began running its own fiber network in 2009. After raising rates six times in the four years preceding a 2007 vote on a publicly owned network, Cox Communications subsequently kept rates the same for three years (yet was still unable to match the lower cost publicly owned service). It is estimated that the publicly owned network in Lafayette will save consumers and businesses between $90 and $100 million in just its first 10 years of operation.
Legislative backlash
Recognizing the threat of efficient, lower cost publicly owned competitors, corporations have gone on the offensive. With supportfrom the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Republican lawmakers, 19 states have enacted laws banning or restricting local municipalities from engaging in such wealth and access democratizing initiatives. (ALEC’s position, of course, commonly disregards Republican talking points against “big government” and in favor of local control when big money is at stake.)
Communities, however, are challenging these pro-corporate laws. In the recent 2014 mid-term election, for instance, citizens in seven Colorado jurisdictions voted to opt out of state law and pursue publicly owned Internet networks.
On the same day it will consider net neutrality, the FCC will also decideon an important related proposal by Chairman Wheeler (acting on petitions from Chattanooga and Wilson) that would pre-empt the state laws limiting community broadband networks in Tennessee and North Carolina. Should it rule favorably, petitions from localities in other restricted states are likely to follow.
“If the people, acting through their elected local governments, want to pursue competitive community broadband, they shouldn’t be stopped by state laws promoted by cable and telephone companies that don’t want that competition,” Wheeler recently wrote after meeting with Chattanooga’s mayor, Andy Berke.
A turnaround is possible
Even if the FCC votes this Thursday to support community broadband, the story is by no means over. Lawsuits and legislation from Internet service provider corporations and their backers in state and national government are all but certain. Moreover, there are unresolved tensions between net neutrality and community broadband supporters. For other reasons, certain municipal broadband networks like the one in Cedar Falls oppose being reclassified as “common carriers” and will likely seek an exemption from the FCC for smaller ISPs.
Community broadband and net neutrality—an abstract term that doesn’t quite get to the political red meat of the issue—are far more important than those not fully engaged in the question understand. More than just how fast or slow our Internet access will be and how much we pay for it in the new technological era, these questions are at the heart of whether the nation’s economic life is held back by the narrow interests of a few corporations seeking higher profits no matter the public cost.
The Internet is key to the entire information economy and to the future of both the old and new economy. In just a few short decades we have seen its enormous power to decentralize production, connect and empower small-scale producers and consumers, and facilitate the spread of ideas and innovations. Publicly owned broadband offers the opportunity for local communities to control this vital economic resource rather than leaving their jobs, stability, and prosperity at the whim of a few monopolistic private corporations.
What recent developments demonstrate is that with enough energy and political will a turnaround is possible at the national level; that when citizens get really active and involved in an issue of popular concern, something can actually happen.
The struggle to protect an open Internet and community choice is clearly important—and a demonstrably powerful indication of what an expansion, perhaps one day an explosion, of serious organizing around other issues of immense political-economic concern can achieve.
The post These Cities Built Cheap, Fast, Community-Owned Broadband. Here’s What Net Neutrality Means For Them—and All of Us appeared first on Gar Alperovitz.
January 14, 2015
New York Police Slowdown and the Classic Challenges of Alternatives to Capitalism
Originally published in Truthout on January 14, 2015.
Quite apart from the political challenges it represents, the current New York City police slowdown illuminates a classic general issue that must be faced by those concerned with how to structure a next system that moves us beyond the problems of both traditional corporate capitalism and traditional state socialism.
While we may enjoy some satisfaction in the NYPD’s attempt to enrage its critics by giving them exactly what they’ve been asking for – i.e. a drastic reduction in the criminalization of the lives of poor communities of color – it’s important to confront the additional question of who should be able to make these kind of decisions and how, both now and in serious system-changing discussions. (If every decision about how the NYPD operates were left up to its workers, that would certainly not further the goal of real justice.)
A common position among some theorists is that the answer to the failures of state socialism, for instance, is simply to encourage worker-ownership and self-management of virtually all industry, instance by instance, case by case. Historically, this position was commonly termed “syndicalism.”
The traditional “socialist” alternative placed ownership and control in a “community-wide” institution rather than in one that yielded power to “the workers” within any functioning unit. This meant municipal, state, regional or nationalized ownership and control. For syndicalists critical of the kind of top-down bureaucracy that has all too often been associated with socialist experiments, self-management by the workers presents what seems to be a compelling alternative based in freedom and participation.
One thing that is illuminated by the police slowdown is that the interests of the workers in any specific unit of production or social administration are not the same as those of the community as a whole – and that different situations require different structural solutions. In the extreme worker-ownership model, the police would, in fact, be in control of the police industry – a model which, of course, very few would affirm. Even to assume total self-management by the police within the context of a “socialized” institution like municipal government raises obvious problems.
The late social ecologist Murray Bookchin focused on the general importance of this problem in one of his last essays criticizing “revolutionary syndicalism,” because it “emphasized factory control by workers’ committees and confederal economic councils as the locus of social authority, thereby simply bypassing any popular institutions that existed outside the economy.”
Clearly the answer to the classic worker-control syndicalist challenge to socialist or communitarian positions is to recognize the fundamental distinction between situations that require a common, collective resolution of critical issues – and situations best left exclusively to those who work in the sector – and, finally, situations where joint or more complex resolutions of the challenges are possible.
The well-known modern anarchist theorist David Graeber offered similar thoughts in a recent dialogue: “There is a subtle question that we all have to handle in any sort of democratized society,” he pointed out, “which is how do you square the problem of one principle that says all those people engaged in a project should have say over how that project is done, and the second principle, which is that all those people affected by a project should have some say in how that project is done. One of them, if you take it exclusively, leads to pure workers’ control, the other leads to a sort of general direct democracy on every level. Well clearly some compromise between the two principles has to be worked out . . . ”
In the case of small- and medium-scale firms, in more straightforward industrial and other economic sectors, full worker ownership and control seems self evidentially important and appropriate. This is the world of worker cooperatives and self-managed firms of all kinds, whose current accelerating growth is justly celebrated.
What is appropriate at larger scales and different sectors is probably best considered case by case. Would it make sense, for instance, for full worker ownership and control to prevail in the case of nuclear energy production? Or are we here in another area where the “socialist” or communitarian position of community-wide ownership and control is essential – with various forms of worker self-management as an important counter-force to the problems of top-down statism?
What of education? A fully developed “syndicalist” or worker-dominated socialism would yield all authority to teachers, with little or no residual authority to the “state” – i.e., in this case mainly the municipality. An alternative might involve tripartite control: the municipality, the teachers, but also the parents and even students, in different forms at different levels from kindergarten to college.
There are also other economic and equity issues to consider: Full worker ownership and control of the oil industry would likely create worker political interests at odds with society’s larger climate concerns. And it might also create high degrees of inequality in a society that might hope one day to move in the direction of genuine equality. The oil workers’ interests in their own economic gains, again, may not be the same as the broader equity interests of society as a whole.
On the other hand – as Tom Malleson has recently urged – if the state were to simply nationalize such industries and turn them over to the workers, it would create massive inequalities between the new worker-owners of multi-million-dollar enterprises and the rest of society. In his model, significant scale enterprises – “oil, steel, auto, pharmaceuticals, etc.” – must be state-owned, but in ways that implement some form of broader comanagement. His solution is for the state to take ownership and for management to “be divided between representatives of the internal workers and representatives of the community.”
Further issues concern the relationship between different forms of ownership and control and the reconstruction of a more communitarian culture. So, too, the development of more thoroughly social conceptions of 21st century socialism – and, in particular, the approaches urged by Marxists theorists like István Mészáros add additional dimensions of inquiry and concern to the problem of structure – and to classic syndicalist versus communitarian/socialist debates.
The intensifying problems of corporate capitalism have begun to generate an increasingly thoughtful discourse about how to structure a next system that takes us beyond the difficulties of state socialism. The realities of the NYPD remind us that worker self-management cannot be simply and automatically equated with political justice in all situations. The slowdown helps focus some of the genuinely challenging issues any system must grapple with at various levels if we are ever to create a genuinely humane and democratic next system.
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January 12, 2015
A guaranteed income for veterans
Originally published in Aljazeera America on January 12, 2015.
Whether or not one agrees with the decisions taken by our political leaders who sent them off to war, it’s undeniable that the veterans of the various post-9/11 wars are suffering. The nearly three million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who have returned to civilian life are afflicted with an official unemployment rate of around 9 percent — substantially higher than the overall rate of 5.6 percent. Another half million have the left the labor force entirely. Many struggle with poverty, foreclosure and homelessness brought on by an anemic and uneven recovery and compounded by the mental and physical scars of war.
The plight of veterans of recent wars who continue to fall through the social safety net offers a unique opportunity to reimagine the way government provides for the welfare of its citizens. Too often discussions concerning the provision of basic needs for Americans get tied up in questions of desert: The “undeserving” poor see their lifeline slashed to incentivize them to pull harder on their own bootstraps. But only the most callous among us would find it easy to disown the obligation we owe to those who have demonstrated willingness to put their bodies in the line of fire on our behalf. Veterans offer a chance to think clearly about how best we can help those in need — and if the primary problem we must solve is that far too many veterans lack an income to support themselves, why don’t we just provide it to them?
Around the world today there is a growing discourse of a guaranteed annual income, but the idea is hardly new. The concept of a basic income — whether as an unconditional payment or a guarantee that would top off whatever is earned to a level adequate to meet basic human needs — has enjoyed surprising support from both ends of the political spectrum. The free-market evangelists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman both endorsed it, as did Martin Luther King, Jr. and liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith. In 1976 Hayek, for instance, wrote, “There is no reason why in a free society government should not assure to all protection against severe deprivation in the form of an assured minimum income.”
In his final book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote that “the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” Galbraith, for his part, argued in the mid-1960s that we can easily afford an income floor and pointed out that this was “not so much more than we will spend during the next fiscal year to restore freedom, democracy and religious liberty, as these are defined by the experts, in Vietnam.”
Veterans are an obvious place to begin for other reasons as well: The Veterans Pension already guarantees a modest minimum income to returning servicemen and servicewomen unable to work due to disability or age. Currently, to qualify, a veteran must have served on active duty (including at least one day during wartime), be older than 65 or disabled and have an income of less than approximately $13,000 (for a single veteran without dependents). The road to a guaranteed income would begin by revamping this system. Simply removing the age and disability requirements from the existing pension system could guarantee a minimum income that would bring all the veterans of recent wars above the poverty line at a maximum cost of roughly $5.5 billion a year.
This is a mere one-thirtieth of the roughly $170 billion spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan each year from 2007 to 2011 (the height of those conflicts) and one-twelfth of what was spent to bail out the insurance company AIG during the 2008 financial crisis. Even topping off the salary of the veterans of all the various wars on terror to a comfortable $50,000 a year would cost at most $70 billion (with actual costs being considerably less). Moreover, as the income floor rises, the need for other social services decreases, further reducing costs — a key point emphasized by conservative advocates for basic income legislation.
If some are uncomfortable paying veterans for “doing nothing, ” an alternative proposal for a sensible contemporary safety net would be to implement a job guarantee, with unemployed and underemployed veterans paid living wages by a federal government willing to act as an employer of last resort. Cash-strapped municipal governments or local non-profits could easily find ways to put the labor of hundreds of thousands of otherwise unemployed veterans to use rebuilding America’s communities.
Seeing veterans struggle to keep themselves and their families housed and fed in the wealthiest country in the history of the world is a tragic reminder of our failure of will and of compassion. It’s time to get serious about real alternatives, the kind thoughtful conservatives and liberals once were willing to demand. In the welfare of veterans, conservatives and liberals might even find a tiny bit of common ground to stand on in the new year.
The post A guaranteed income for veterans appeared first on Gar Alperovitz.
November 10, 2014
Playing the Long Game
Originally published in TruthOut on November 9, 2014.
There have been endless post-mortems on the 2014 midterm elections, complete with explanations proffered as to why Democrats and their allies failed so spectacularly, and projections of doom and gloom lasting until the next election cycle. However, in a profound sense this election changes very little. The dominant reality we face is one of substantial ongoing political stalemate and decay, and this sets the terms of reference for those serious about long term, more fundamental change.
First things first: There is little indication that, even when elected, Democrats employing traditional liberal strategies will have the capacity to change most of the deteriorating or stagnating economic, social, and environmental trends – including, among others: rising inequality, high levels of poverty and child poverty, continued discrimination against women and minorities, declining corporate taxation, staggering levels of incarceration, increasing corruption of the political system and a rapidly changing climate.
Nonetheless, holding the line nationally and in state legislatures whenever possible is an obvious necessity. Progressive “victories” will likely most often be limited to resisting Republican efforts to roll back the limited successes of the Obama era – including Obamacare and financial reform – and protecting important Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food assistance from further attack.
The real action must inevitably be at the local level. “The mayoral and council class of 2013,” Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson writes, “is one of the most progressive cohorts of elected officials in recent American history.” In cities like New York (de Blasio), Boston (Walsh), Pittsburgh (Peduto), Minneapolis (Hodges), Seattle (Murray) and Santa Fe (Gonzales), opportunities for advances on minimum wage, universal Pre-K, paid sick leave, unionization of low-income workers and other issues are opening up.
In a sense, however, even this is still mainly about modest efforts around the long decaying trends. In a much larger sense, it is clear that we no longer face a political problem that can be solved by electing the right people in the next local, state or national election. The deeper trends indicate that we face systemic problems – problems that can be solved only by building a movement that embraces a long-term vision of alternative systemic arrangements in addition to achievable short-term goals.
Importantly – and precisely because of the stagnation and stalemate now endemic to the system – we are beginning to see the emergence of elements that begin to suggest such a long-term vision. Over the last several years – since the 2008/2009 financial crisis in particular – new departures suggest possibilities in many potential areas.
Some cities, for instance, are beginning to look beyond traditional progressive policies to experiment with ways to democratize wealth and ownership in order to help stabilize the local economy. Recently, Santa Fe mayor Javier Gonzales announced that the city was moving forward with a study on how to create a public bank, explaining that the city’s existing provider of financial services, Wells Fargo, “take[s] city revenues, taxpayer dollars, and [uses] those dollars as part of a loan portfolio for folks outside of Santa Fe and New Mexico.”
The Boulder, Colorado city council – with repeated support from local residents at the ballot box and in the teeth of tremendous opposition from the existing provider, Xcel Energy – has pressed forward with efforts to form a publicly-owned utility in order to increase environmental sustainability and the use of renewable energy. In Richmond, California – under the leadership of former Green Party Mayor Gayle McLaughlin and with support from local community groups – the city council voted twice in recent years to use eminent domain to force major banks to stop foreclosures and provide relief for struggling homeowners with underwater mortgages. (Notably, in one of the few bright spots in the recent election, McLaughlin’s progressive “Team Richmond” slate defeated Chevron’s extremely well-funded corporate challenge.)
Other cities are also beginning to take a more fundamental wealth-shifting systemic approach. In Jackson, Mississippi, the late Mayor Chokwe Lumumba intended to rebuild the city’s crumbling economy through a variety of cooperative enterprises and initiatives. While his untimely death limited some policy options, his supporters are continuing to pursue the agenda at the local level. In Jacksonville, Florida, Mayor Alvin Brown is moving ahead with efforts to develop a more equitable economy in several traditionally disenfranchised neighborhoods. And in Richmond, Virginia, Mayor Dwight Jones has created an “Office of Community Wealth Building” to coordinate multiple efforts to address critical issues such as housing, education, transportation, jobs, and economic development.
There is also ongoing development and experimentation around a variety of other strategies designed to democratize ownership, stabilize communities economically and geographically, and build institutional power. Even as labor union membership has steadily declined from 34.5 percent of the labor force in the early 1950s to just 11.3 percent today, the number of people working in worker-owned or partly worker-owned companies that “democratize capital” (commonly organized as Employee Stock Ownership Plans) has increased from 250,000 in 1975 to more than 10 million now. There is also steadily developing experimentation with worker-co-ops, and, in recent years, growing support for this form from labor unions.
The Cincinnati Union Cooperative Initiative (CUCI) is a union backed effort in Ohio that includes Our Harvest Co-op (an urban farm and food hub), Sustainergy (an energy retrofitting cooperative), a jewelry makers co-op, Yuki Cookies (a bakery cooperative), Renting Partnerships (a non-profit focused on housing rights), and Apple Street Market (a worker-community owned grocery store). Other important new directions include community wind and solar projects like the “Seattle City Light Community Solar” initiative which allows community members to invest in local solar arrays in public areas; and the Cashton Greens Wind Farm in Wisconsin – a community wind partnership between the Organic Valley Cooperative and the Gunderson Health System.
More complex models have also emerged in various parts of the country. In Cleveland, there is an impressive group of ecologically sustainable worker-owned companies, linked together with a community-building nonprofit corporation and a revolving fund designed to help create more and more such linked, community-building cooperative businesses as time goes on. Part of the design involves getting big hospitals and universities (local “anchors”) to agree to purchase some part of their needs from the worker-owned companies with the goal of not simply worker ownership, but worker ownership linked to a community-building strategy.
Further innovative wealth-democratizing strategies that begin to suggest possible elements of a longer-term systemic vision include community land trusts, social enterprises, benefit corporations, municipal ownership of land and utilities, community development financial institutions, local food systems and currencies, local investing, community development corporations and many more.
Nor should we forget the likelihood of further banking crises, given the loopholes lobbyists have left in the regulatory apparatus and the continued prevalence of Too-Big-To-Fail financial institutions. It is time to be prepared not only with proposals to break up the big banks in the event of another crisis, but for new attempts at public ownership along lines suggested by various analysts (including, notably, Lawrence Summers who, it has been recently revealed, argued in favor of bank nationalizations in 2008/2009).
There is also the prospect down the line that the auto industry or other systemically important large-scale sectors will again go into crisis – opening up possibilities to begin to put forth proposals for joint public and worker-owned companies instead of the kinds of nationalizations that return everything to the corporations that created the problems in the first place.
The history of the progressive era, the New Deal and the civil rights movement suggests that it is well within the range of possibility that a movement with a long-term vision based on innovative experimentation can successfully lay the groundwork for far-reaching national change. Such a movement could ensure that successful local developments become commonplace, thus disrupting current institutional economic and political arrangements and building constituencies and institutions as a base for a longer term transformation. Serious engagement with this challenge – rather than listening to endless, repetitive commentary on the election – is where a real response to the growing crisis is to be found.
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Pessimism about climate change does not justify inaction
Originally published in Al Jazeera America on November 10, 2014.
“Even if the United States deals with its carbon emission problem, the Chinese won’t. So what’s the point?”
“You can’t condemn the entire global South to abandon energy development, and you can’t provide enough with solar and wind. So what’s the point?”
“Besides, the whole enterprise of trying to achieve a future sufficiently carbon-free to deal with the most important problems is politically hopeless.”
These challenges are sometimes spoken, sometimes not, but they commonly and powerfully weaken efforts to deal with the climate crisis. Despite the well-funded bluster of disingenuous or, at best, delusional skeptics and deniers, a majority of Americans believe the climate is changing in worrying ways, and many (PDF) also believe that these changes pose a threat to current and future generations. But this belief has not yet translated into action at a scale adequate to the problem we face.
One reason for this is that once we recognize the magnitude of the effort that will be required to avert disaster, we all too often discover our vested interest in pessimism. After all, if the situation is hopeless, why act? But it’s time to challenge the structure of feeling that mires us in pessimism and inaction.
We appear to be on a trajectory well past the 2 degree Celsius rise in average global temperature long considered by scientists the maximum allowable to sustain life on Earth as we’ve known it. As Naomi Klein documents in her new book, “This Changes Everything,” many experts — from climate change scientists to the World Bank to the International Energy Agency — are warning of temperature increases of 4 or more degrees. Changes of this magnitude will likely result in widespread flooding, collapsing water systems, decreases in agricultural production, increases in disease, massive migrations and social strife.
“Only mass social movements can save us now,” Klein writes. I agree. We must build a truly broad movement — one that encompasses those who aren’t already convinced of the need to act — and alongside it a new politics capable of reasserting the power of democracy at all levels. Such a movement and politics must not only confront slow-to-act authorities with appropriate civil disobedience but also build the new economic institutions that will be necessary to a world weaning itself off its addiction to carbon and to growth.
But faced with such a tall order, many still ask (or secretly feel), Why bother? Or, more specifically, is it really possible to make more than a small nick in the dire warming trends?
The simple response to the reasonable doubts offered by friendly questioners — and to the reasonable (often unspoken) doubts of even committed activists — is this: Doing almost anything significant can help save human lives. This is an obvious point, perhaps, but one that too often is lost in the big debates about trends.
Already, roughly 400,000 (PDF) people die from the effects of climate change every year. On our current path, we are likely to lose up to an estimated 500,000 lives per year over the coming decades. That is more each year than the 420,000 the United States lost in all of World War II. Most of these deaths will be due to diminished food production, increased disease, heat waves, loss of employment, fires, floods and storms. Almost any serious slowing down of the global temperature increases will lower this figure. It will save lives, whether or not others join in, whether or not the biggest challenges are met.
In other words, this is a life or death issue now, one in which even partial solutions matter.
A study (PDF) released recently by researchers at Harvard, Syracuse and Boston universities estimates that reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 25 percent could save up to 3,500 American lives per year by 2020, or an average of nine lives per day, and prevent up to 1,000 hospitalizations annually.
This also means that no matter the gargantuan nature of the overall task, what one person does, alone or in concert with others, may matter. This remains true whether or not China acts, the developing world chooses a low carbon future or our overall energy needs can be effectively sourced from renewables.
More sophisticated justifications for pessimism and resignation may be offered, of course. There is, after all, no easy linear relationship between the number of lives at risk and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Climate is a complex and chaotic system in which hitting tipping points may trigger positive feedback loops that compound the effects of emissions beyond anything we can control. Modeling such a complex system is an intractably difficult problem: We know that there are tipping points waiting for us as the temperature climbs, but we cannot say with any certainty where they are.
But this very uncertainty also strips away the alibi of those who believe that it’s not worth acting if there’s a chance we might fail or only partially succeed in slowing the warming of the planet. If we are unable to say with precision where the supposed point of no return lies, then there is little excuse for giving up.
This basic argument — that every action we can take to reduce emissions is of vital moral importance — may or may not coincide with arguments about the importance of adaptation and of erecting the physical and social structures that will save lives as climate changes begin to take hold. Either way, the bottom line is simple.
Next time you talk to your neighbor, colleagues or even fellow activists about climate, listen closely to the doubts — both expressed and unexpressed — that hold them back from acting with full confidence. They are reasonable doubts. But building a mass movement means we need everybody — even those who do not believe that global warming can be stopped. So listen to their doubts and remind them that whatever can be done is likely to help. The cost of inaction is measured in human lives.
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October 23, 2014
October 7, 2014
Forging a Transformative Vision
Originally published in Shelterforce on FALL/WINTER 2013/14.
Despite its great wealth, the United States today faces enormous difficulties, with no easily discernible answers in sight. Elections occur and debates ensue, but many of the most pressing problems facing ordinary citizens are only marginally affected. For the average American, the trends have been bad for a very long time. Real wages for 80 percent of American workers have been stagnant for decades. At the same time, income for the top 1 percent has jumped from roughly 10 percent of all income to roughly 20 percent. Put another way, virtually all the gains of the entire economic system have gone to a tiny, tiny group at the top for at least three decades.
At the most superficial level, Washington—as the saying goes—is broken. The political system is simply incapable of dealing with the challenges. It focuses on deficits, not assets or answers. Long-term, unchanging trends are a clear signal that it’s not simply partisan bickering and congressional stalemate that are causing the problems. We all know that something different is going on—both with the economy and, more fundamentally, with democracy itself.
While there are growing difficulties in our nation’s suburban and rural areas, nowhere are the problems more evident than in far too many of our nation’s cities. The National League of Cities (NLC), which annually publishes a research brief on city fiscal conditions, has documented the rapid deterioration of municipal finance. The NLC’s most recent brief, published last year, found general revenue declines for six consecutive years, an unprecedented average annual decrease of more than 2.5 percent per year, and a cumulative decline in excess of 15 percent.
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