Fuel - the film

Now nearly 5 years old, this documentary remains one of the finest and most hopeful responses to our global suicide pact with the fossil fuel industry. If you want less analysis & Veggie Van nostalgia and more concrete solutions, skip to the last 30 minutes where a sane post-corporate vision is laid out in considerable detail. - Ed.

Fuel by Josh Tickell

Mondragon in Depth

Many social justice activists are at least vaguely aware of the famous Mondragon experiment in worker ownership in Spain's Basque country. The web page below reviews five books on the phenomenon and is the best one-stop introduction to Mondragon history and economics we've run across thus far. 

Now a federation of 256 cooperatives with nearly 100,000 participants and over 12 billion Euros in annual sales, Mondragon deserves deep scrutiny by anyone trying to envision a post-corporate world. One aspect we particularly like is that the average size of all cooperatives is about 330 members - well within our maximum ideal org size of 500 or three standard dunbar deviations from perfect human-scale relatedness. - Ed.

Worker-owner in Mondragon coop factory

Mondragon as a Bridge to a New Socialism

by Carl Davidson
Solidarity Economy Network

Something important for both socialist theory and working-class alternatives has been steadily growing in Spain’s Basque country over the past 50 years, and is now spreading slowly across Spain, Europe and the rest of the globe.

It’s an experiment, at once radical and practical, in how the working-class can become the masters of their workplaces and surrounding communities, growing steadily and successfully competing with the capitalism of the old order and laying the foundations of something new—it’s known as the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC).

Just what that ‘something new’ adds up to is often contested. Some see the experiment as a major new advance in a centuries-old cooperative tradition, while a few go further and see it as a contribution to a new socialism for our time. A few others see it both as clever refinement of capitalism and as a reformist diversion likely to fail. Still others see it as a ‘third way’ full of utopian promise simply to be replicated anywhere in whatever way makes sense to those concerned.

The reality of an experiment on the scale on Mondragon, involving more than 100,000 workers in 120 core industrial, service and educational coops, is necessarily complex. It can contain all these features contending within itself at once. 

Read full article at
http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2011/03/16/mondragon-as-a-bridge-to-a-new-socialism/

The "BELITTLE BIG BODIES" Banzai

A Yearend OWS Salute and Immune Key to 2012

by W. David Kubiak

Yes, Virginia, there really are silver bullets and here’s a sterling one for you.

After a lifetime clashing with monstrous corporate bodies in the US, India and Japan, I hobble into the Occupation arena with a grateful hallelujah and some wild reconnaissance. 

The hallelujah is a chorus, by the way. It also arises from countless other US expatriates who have long lived abroad and prayed for signs of a Yankee spring, i.e., any American uprising against the rampant corporate coup that’s beggared the nation at home and scarred its honor overseas. 

 As for the recon, life in Asia teaches you to see the world as an interplay of living systems – ancient healthy ones like tribes, wetlands and mammal bodies, and newly emerging malignant ones like megacorporations. It also suggests we’re not simply facing a random series of fiscal, social or environmental crises, but a human/megacorps endgame battle for the future of the earth.

Like the sorcerer's apprentice, we have conjured up an army of intended servant beings that have grown colossal, escaped our control and now overrun the planet. Indigenous leaders have begun calling big multinationals bodies an "alien invasive species" that menaces their cultures and homelands more than any threat they’ve faced before. 

In this view, Big Banks, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Agrobiz, Big “Defense” et gargantuan cetera are all variations of an emergent new life form – sensually/spiritually/morally blind superorganisms that are alive, in charge and out of control. These Big Bodies' sickening effects on our lands and lives are everywhere apparent, but the good news is that they are a monocultured mutation and remedies that incapacitate some may help to cure them all. 

Applied Sociocracy - Corp Democracy

Can a Company Be Run as a Democracy?

By JACLYNE BADAL
* The Wall Street Journal
* APRIL 23, 2007

During a recent strategy meeting at Ternary Software Inc., a programmer criticized the chief executive's new incentive plan for employees. An hourlong discussion ensued, in which several participants, including the CEO, critiqued the proposal. Ultimately, all six participants agreed to handle incentives differently.

That part was crucial: Ternary runs itself as a democracy, and every decision must be unanimous. Any of Ternary's 13 other employees could have challenged the incentive decision and forced it to be revisited.

Running a company democratically sounds like a recipe for anarchy, and it can prompt bureaucratic whiplash: Ternary, a company with annual revenues of around $2 million, adjusted salaries for employees up and down several times last year.

Transition Town Videos

Stoneleigh on Transition

Nicole Foss (Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth) on the need to adapt now for a post-collapse future.
"The American lifestyle is not negotiable"
             -Dick Cheney-
To which she replies "That is true, because reality is not going to negotiate with you."


Watch the complete talk


‎

Public Banking Institute Launched

Public Banking Institute Launched
Seeks to Rescue U.S. Public Finances
Mike Kraus
January 13, 2011

There is mounting evidence that the public finances of the United States are verging on collapse.

The national debt has burdened the American people with a debt service – the cost of interest – that threatens to swallow the entire federal budget in years ahead.

States from New Jersey to Illinois, Texas and California are grappling with immense budget deficits. At least fifteen major U.S. cities are reported on the verge of bankruptcy. In a desperate attempt to stave off calamity, state and municipal governments are taking measures that many view as a worse calamity.

Police, firefighters, health care providers and teachers are being laid off. City street lights are turned off at night, responses to 911 calls are provided on a “fee for service” basis, public parks are abandoned and infrastructure vital to commerce is left to decay to third world status. Unemployment is chronic and home foreclosures roll on.

Americans are wondering if there is a way out of what now appears to many as a decades long and accelerating decline of the fortunes of the once fabled American middle class.

A diverse group of American educators, entrepreneurs and businesspeople, local government officials and civic leaders, economists, writers, lawyers and others think they have identified the central problem.

They have banded together to form the Public Banking Institute (PBI), a not-for-profit educational organization that hopes to explain to the American people how a national network of publicly owned banks can revive the American economy.

Financial Transaction Tax Spawns an Advocacy Movement

Suggestions for a minuscule but highly productive levy on currency trading and/or financial transactions have been around since the Tobin Tax proposal in the Seventies, but have been effectively stifled by the brokerage and banking worlds ever since. Recently, however, the public's energetic animosity toward the speculation-driven economic meltdown and bailout antics have birthed fresh revivals of the concept such as the following UK movement for a "Robin Hood tax"

An overview of the proposal: "An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Adopt a Financial Transactions Tax" (pdf file) by John Dillon, May 2010

Related articles

• ECB's Trichet wary of financial transaction tax (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• 60 states to lobby U.N. for currency transaction tax (reuters.com)

The Future of Money

Imagine a World Where People Love Their Jobs

By Rochelle Gurstein, Guernica

To read more stories like this, visit Guernica Magazine.

When the Ford Motor Company opened in 1903, “jack-of-all trades” mechanics were needed to build the first cars. This kind of labor still belonged to the craft tradition—“worthy work” that required skill, knowledge, and experience obtained through years of apprenticeship. The work was varied and interesting and carried with it, as William Morris once put it, “the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill.” In the face of growing demand for the Model T, however, the knowledge and experience of mechanics were found to be expendable. To increase productivity, Ford’s managers broke up the craft of building cars into its constituent parts; highly skilled mechanics found themselves turned into mere assemblers, reduced to performing an ever more limited set of tasks.

By 1910, these once-independent craftsmen refused to accept what they experienced as the mind-numbing and degrading division of their labor and began to walk off the job. During the next few years, Ford took even more extreme measures to step up production, instituting the endless-chain conveyor system; car assemblies now moved past fixed stations where men carried out ever more simple, repetitive operations. Again, these men registered their revulsion at this systematic destruction of their knowledge and skill by walking off the job, this time in droves. “It was apparent,” writes Keith Sward in his The Legend of Henry Ford, “that the Ford Motor Co. had reached the point of owning a great factory without having enough workers to keep it humming.” For the year 1913 alone, the employee turnover rate reached 380 percent. “So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system,” Sward reports, “that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.”

This crisis only intensified when the Industrial Workers of the World began a unionization drive of Ford workers during the summer of that same year. To put down both threats, Ford introduced his much-trumpeted five dollars a day. Harry Braverman, in his groundbreaking Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974), questions whether even this pay rate, which was almost double that of Ford’s competitors, would have kept the men on the job had there been any other viable options for skilled mechanics. But there were not; by this time, competing manufacturers, in an effort to keep pace with Ford’s increased output, had also forced the assembly line on their skilled mechanics, thus wiping out all alternative modes of work in the burgeoning car industry. Ford’s workers had no choice but to stay put and their union representatives began their long fight for concessions from management.

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama announced with some urgency that, “jobs must be our number one focus in 2010.” But as I have been reading about how to create jobs for the fifteen million men and women who are currently without work, I have been struck by how much space is devoted to breast-beating about declining standards of living and fear-mongering predictions that America will be a “second-rate” power by the end of the decade, and how little is given to any serious consideration about what kinds of work people will be doing.

The near collapse of the auto industry and the way it was averted, in large part, by unionized workers accepting deep cuts in their ranks, hours, wages, and benefits, herald the end of the kind of blue-collar occupations that afforded generations of working people secure, comfortable lives.

It is an historical irony that in last two years’ public discussions about bailing out Detroit, what was once perceived as the death of dignified labor was portrayed by Republican lawmakers and reactionary journalists as a kind of overpaid, over-compensated worker’s paradise. This characterization of the reasonable wages, paid vacations and sick days, health insurance, and retirement packages that labor unions gained in exchange for workers relinquishing the skills required to build cars reveals a distressing loss of historical memory. What is more, this talk of pampered workers is an outrageous libel on the uneasy bargain to which middle-class workers—both blue and white-collar alike—eventually submitted, trading meaningful work for the promise of better working conditions, a higher standard of living, and increased leisure time.

For decades now, manufacturers have demonstrated their contempt for this trade-off. Claiming competitive threats from “the global market,” more and more manufacturers and associated industries have moved their factories outside the United States to take advantage of poor people who have no choice but to accept meager wages. As for the few remaining manufacturers that have kept their factories in the U.S., most notably, the automobile industry, last spring we heard their obscenely rich executives explain to Congress that the main reason their companies were failing was the extreme financial burden of their workers’ benefits.

As we know, President Obama has been intent on saving Detroit. Last year, in his address to Congress on February 24, he announced, “We are committed to the goal of a re-tooled, re-imagined auto industry that can compete and win. Millions of jobs depend on it; scores of communities depend on it, and I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.” It is certainly not too much to expect that this “re-tooled, reimagined” auto industry, instead of manufacturing gigantic, polluting, profligate S.U.V.’s and light trucks, might produce fuel-efficient, “green” cars. But by what means? The old assembly line has largely been replaced by fully automated, robotic production, leaving many workers with the repetitious, one-dimensional job of tending machines. Will they continue to tend machines, but now with lower pay, fewer benefits, and less security so that, before long, their work will be indistinguishable from the dead-end, often demeaning jobs of the so-called service economy? And to what end? So that instead of drivers sitting for hours in traffic jams during their daily commutes to and from work in cars that pollute, they will now sit for hours in their plug-in, hybrid eco-cars? This is a matter of some urgency, as 90 percent of Americans drive to work and a staggering 76 percent of them drive alone.

When oil prices surged dramatically in the summer of 2008, there was much talk—especially during the presidential debates—about the need to find alternative energy sources as well as about the compromised political situation in which America found itself economically hostage to oil-producing Arab countries that are actively hostile to American interests. (A nice turn on the old saying that capitalists will buy the rope to hang themselves.) Although it is well known that Americans count for only 5 percent of the world’s population but use up over 25 percent of the world’s energy resources, the moral dimension of our gluttonous appetites rarely enters any mainstream public discussions. Paul Kennedy, in his Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, published back in 1993, gave life to these statistics: “According to one calculation, the average American baby represents twice the environmental damage of a Swedish child, three times that of an Italian, thirteen times that of a Brazilian, thirty-five times that of an Indian, and two hundred and eighty times that of a Chadian or Haitian because its level of consumption throughout its life will be so much greater.”

It is this picture that we need to keep in mind as we imagine how we are going to move out of the world—ugly and shoddy, morally and aesthetically—created by the ideology of growth without end and the unrelenting piggish desire for more things that have become hallmarks of the American way of life. We must also keep sight of the historical fact that not only did monopoly capital and the division of labor emerge together in the last decades of the nineteenth century, but so, too, did those alarming “plague clouds” and a sun that was “blanched” rather than “reddened”—those first unmistakable signs of industrial pollution that John Ruskin decried in a lecture entitled “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” (1884). To address one of these historical developments without the other two is to ensure that we will never move beyond the narrow confines of current thinking about our present moment or about what the future might look like.

In the same speech to Congress last year, President Obama made a more explicit connection between jobs and the environment than he did in his recent State of the Union speech. He rightly believes it is time to repair our disintegrating infrastructure and announced that over the next two years, the government “will save or create 3.5 million jobs. More than 90 percent of these jobs will be in the private sector, jobs rebuilding our roads and bridges, constructing wind turbines and solar panels, laying broadband, and expanding mass transit.” What is more, Obama promised that American universities will turn out “the highest proportion of college graduates in the world” by the year 2020. But what will these students study? What kinds of work will their college educations prepare them for? Here President Obama seems unable to picture a world significantly different from the economically and morally bankrupt one that we now find ourselves in: “In a global economy, where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity. It is a pre-requisite.” I am sorry to have to notice that the President’s formulation of knowledge as “the most valuable skill you can sell” belongs to the technocratic world view of the professional-managerial class—the very “experts” who, from the time of the first factory line, have been repackaging once-complex sets of skills into simple instructions that can be mastered in a few days or even a few hours of “training.”

Instead of putting forward, as so many of our elected officials, policy analysts, pundits, and journalists predictably do, a picture of our world that is essentially the same, except that it is somehow “green” and somehow peopled with college-educated or better “trained” workers, we need to focus our attention on the more pressing and more basic question of what kinds of work people should be expected to devote their lives to doing. The last time this question—the question of meaningful, satisfying, dignified labor—got a public hearing was in the nineteen sixties and seventies, with Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital being the intellectual high-water mark. What Braverman convincingly demonstrated is that there is nothing natural or inevitable about our system of labor; that it came about through conscious decisions made by industrial capitalists in the name of profit for them alone; and, so long as there were living alternatives to it, that assembly line work was forcefully resisted by skilled craftsmen who walked off the job rather than submit to work that they felt demeaned them. William Morris spoke for those men when he declared the new factory work “worthless; it is slaves’ work—mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil.”

In this context, it is worth recalling the profusion of skilled practices that once existed. In the mid-sixteenth century, a book described ninety different crafts, including jewelers, metalsmiths, goldsmiths, coiners, tapestry makers, printers, musical instrument makers, dyers, potters, tanners, weavers, carpenters, bakers, and millers. Two centuries later, Diderot’s Encyclopedia counted two hundred and fifty. By the middle of the nineteenth century, in a medium-sized town in England, over fifty crafts were still being practiced. Over the last century and a half, however, the social division of labor penetrated ever more dimensions of daily life, with the result that very few occupations requiring skill, knowledge, experience, and long apprenticeships have survived.

Thus it has become increasingly difficult to imagine how to revive what has vanished both from practice and from memory, let alone how a world might come into being where the greater number of things we use or, better yet—to suggest the enormous change in consciousness that is required—things we enjoy using in our daily life are made by people who enjoy making them. I have in mind here the kind of pleasure and pride that accomplished craftsmen at the Waterford Crystal factory in Kilbarry, Ireland, lost when their factory shut down earlier this year. Sean Egan, who worked as a crystal engraver for twenty-five years, spoke of his ten-year apprenticeship: “It’s extremely hard to learn, and machines can’t do it. It’s like playing the piano. You can learn three chords and get away with it, but if you want to learn classical piano, you have to practice all the time.”

We might also take a lesson from the movement for sustainable, organic, local farming. For decades, champions of this movement have been all but banished to the fringe of respectable discourse, but lately they have been getting a hearing, as evidenced by Michael Pollan’s lengthy “Open Letter to the Next Farmer-in-Chief” that appeared in The New York Times Magazine, in October 2008. It seems to me that a good starting point for how to bring about a similar revolution in thinking and practice when it comes to work is the principle that just as monoculture is disastrous for our health and security when it comes to food, lack of variety in work is just as disastrous for our well-being and happiness. The ideology of ceaseless economic growth, made possible by the division of labor that has filled our world with ugly things from the Styrofoam cup to smog in our skies, has always been vapid and destructive. Now, with the implosion of the global financial system, the American way of life as model for global expansion stands exposed as unsustainable as well.

Rochelle Gurstein is the author of Repeal Of Reticence. She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Of Time and Beauty and writes a monthly column about how the world looks and feels for The New Republic Online. Her essays on aesthetic and political matters have appeared in The New Republic, Salmagundi, Raritan, and other “little magazines.”

© 2010 Guernica All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146484/

Introducing Green Renewable Energy Money

Table: Mysteries of a failed financial system and how failure can be avoided ^(a)

	Mysteries of an illogical and inefficient financial system	Possible explanations of mysteries with comments		Avoiding mysteries with cost carrying “green” renewable energy e-money
1	What is the utility of money created out of nothing?	No cost of creation and no limit on amount of money created.		Energy is essential for sustaining life. kWh is an objective unit of value.
2	Why use money to price assets when the value of money is not defined by any one or more specified commodities?	“Orthodoxy has never been able to explain” (Wray 2004). National currencies create “Faulty feedback to Cities” (Jacobs 1985: 156).		Terms of trade and so community sustainability determined by local value of green dollars defined by local renewable electricity sources.
3	Why use prices to allocate resources when money is not based on real things?	“…most economists have not delved deeply into this.” (Wray 2004) but non-economist Jacobs (1985) has.		Monetary unit of account is determined by value of local renewable energy that is likely to be stable over the long run.
4	Why do governments create a national monopoly of what kind of money can be legal?	Once to borrow specie currency from banks to avoid taxing. Now to protect banks creating deposits from loans.		Credit only created by those providing goods, services and investments.  Money no longer used as a store of value.
5	Why do governments control who can create bank deposits?	To protect private bankers creating a public good (money) for private profit.		Deposits in investment funds backed by securities. No fractional “Ponzi” banks
6	Why do governments provide a lender of last resort facility to private banks?	Originally to protect the duplicity of banks creating more deposit notes for specie currency than they held, later to reduce the risk of borrowing short and lending long.		Liquidity and solvency risk of traders and investors creating credit guaranteed by private insurance firms and/or their redemption to pay energy bills at a nominated time in kWh.
7	Why can money at a bank increase in value over time from earning interest when government notes do not?	To encourage individuals to give up consumption to create bank deposits.  But deposits can be created without requiring consumption foregone.		No money created by banks.  Credits used as exchange medium subject to a service fee payable to issuer and/or guarantor of their value and/or liquidity.
8	Why do governments borrow money when they can create money? Asked by chair of US Banking Committee Wright Patman (1941)	Because governments cannot be trusted to limit money creation so it is sounder (and highly profitable) for private bankers to create deposit money to finance government debts.		Government would create negotiable electronic property rights to receive future tax revenues and/or tolls to pay in kWh for deficits and/or infrastructure investments.
9	Why allow private banks to make profits from expanding the money supply that is a public good?	Private bankers have promoted a consensus that this is in the public interest and also spread a belief that they do not create money as deposits		Volume of credit determined by trade turnover and demand for investment that could be guarantee by private credit insurers.
10	Why do governments pay interest on borrowed money that they can create?	Habit from when governments needed specie currency from bankers and now reluctance to compete with banks except when they need a bail-out.		Governments would not borrow money but sell rights to future taxes and/or tolls to create a risk free future store of value defined by local kWh
11	Why do governments allow private financial organisations to grow too big to manage, regulate or fail?	Political influence and advisers who focus on economies of scale, not strategies for either promoting competition to further consumer interests or for achieving resiliency.		Financial system size and shape would be determined by local generation of renewable electricity to match size of local institutions not inflated by seigniorage or compounding interest.
12	Why don’t governments create interest free money to fund public assets?	Refer to points 8 and 10.  Interest costs can double the tax revenues required to finance public assets (Patman 1941) and/or increase the prices of any tolls.		Public assets would become self-financing as described in rows 8 and 10 above so as to liquidate the credit created to build them.

Jacobs, J. (1985), Cities and Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, Vintage Books, New York.
Patman, J.W.W. (1941), Congressional Record of the House of Representatives, Sept. 29, pp.7582–3, Washington D.C 
Wray, L.R. (2004), ‘The Credit Money and State Money Approaches’, Working Paper No 32 available at
http://www.cfeps.org/pubs/wp-pdf/WP32-Wray.pdf;

(a) Extracted from a paper by Dr. Shann Turnbull on ‘How would the invisible hand handle electronic money’, available from http://ssrn.com/abstract=1391812.

Business Alliance for Local Living Economies

The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) is North America's fastest growing network of socially responsible businesses, comprised of over 80 community networks with over 21,000 independent business members across the U.S. and Canada.

BALLE brings together independent business leaders, economic development professionals, government officials, social innovators, and community leaders to build local living economies. We provide local, state, national, and international resources to this new model of economic development.

We´re showing that independent locally owned businesses can go beyond traditional measures of success. We're proving that these businesses are accountable to stakeholders and the environment. We're helping these businesses flourish in their local economies. And we're leveraging the power of local networks to build a web of economies that are community-based, green, and fair - local living economies.

See their website at http://www.livingeconomies.org/

A New Way to Govern: Organisations and Society After Enron

Shann Turnbull
International Institute for Self-Governance
New Economics Foundation Pocketbook 6, 2002

Abstract:    
This pocketbook was commissioned to identify ways for avoiding the unexpected failure of large publicly traded enterprises and overcoming the shortcomings in government, and/or privatised organisations. It describes the fundamental problems of organisational hierarchies in either the public or private sectors to perform effectively and reliably with the ever-increasing complexity and dynamism in modern societies. Network organisations with multiple control centres or boards are identified as providing requisite variety of information and control channels to flexibly govern complexity. Provided self-governing network organisations are kept to human scale they reduce information overload and bounded rationality. The division of power into a number of centres introduces checks and balances to facilitate self-governance and allows individuals to act in a contrary way that are inhibited in command and control hierarchies. The ability of individuals to be competitive/cooperative, suspicious/trusting, self-interested/altruistic and so on introduces natures' check and balances to efficiently introduce self-regulation. Competition for excellence arises from contestability for control within organisations rather than between organisations through the market place to harness the self-interest of executives to further the public good. Networks of network organisations achieve economies of scale and scope, provided that no higher level network undertakes activities that are better carried out by a lower level self-governing unit.

New ways to govern enterprises with stakeholder networks

By Shann Turnbull
11 August 2003

A new approach to governing public or private-sector organisations is becoming urgent as society becomes more complex and dynamic. The command and control hierarchies governing both sectors are rapidly reaching their use-by date.

During the past few decades, efforts have been made to overcome the inefficiencies and unresponsiveness of public-sector bureaucracies. Corporatisation, privatisation and public-private partnerships are now producing mixed results and some failures. Both the public and private sectors are increasingly frustrating citizens with unresponsive telephone call centres. Serious problems have emerged in the private sector from the unexpected failure of major publicly traded corporations. These and other failures raise the fundamental question of whether private ownership and/or market forces can reliably sustain a business, let alone increase its efficiency and effectiveness.