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A Pluralist Commonwealth

By Gar Alperovitz

DECENTRALISM FILE

Gar Alperovitz

Gar Alperovitz (1936- ) (PhD Cambridge 1964) is  a former Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland. He has served as legislative director for Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-WI) and was a founding Fellow of the Institute of Politics at Harvard, where he co authored the Community Self Determination Act in 1968.  He also Co-Founded the Democracy Collaborative and is Co-Chair of its Next System Project.

Alperovitz’s work as a political economist has centered on theoretical and practical alternatives to both corporate capitalism and traditional state socialism. He holds that the architecture of both suffers from centralized power that fails to support liberty, equality, ecological sustainability, genuine participatory democracy, and community.  Challenging both theories of reform and of revolution, he emphasizes a model based on the evolutionary reconstruction of economic institutions, communities, and the nation as a whole. In America Beyond Capitalism and other books and essays, Alperovitz offers an integrated systemic model for a pluralist commonwealth based on democratizing ownership of economic institutions at all levels, a regional decentralization of economic and political power, and the building of forms of community wealth-holding and a culture of participatory democracy.

The pluralist commonwealth model includes diverse forms of democratized ownership, from worker-community cooperatively owned production firms to municipally owned institutions, public banks, utilities, land trusts, and public transportation. Regional scaling of larger public enterprises and longer-term political decentralization are proposed as ways to transform and displace extractive elements of financialized corporate capitalism. Alperovitz also acknowledges the utility of certain forms of private enterprises and markets along with participatory economic planning. This model attempts to expand the limits of political economic possibilities beyond the polarity between state ownership and capitalism. The model also proposes a reduction in the workweek, providing workers more free time and allowing for more liberty and democratic participation. It proposes that as population continues to grow, a long-term devolution of the national state in the direction of regional structures can allow for democratic participation and democratic management of ecological issues

 His thesis is best set out in his paper below, published in 2019

A PLURALIST COMMONWEALTH

AND A COMMUNITY SUSTAINING SYSTEM

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The importance of simultaneously clarifying next system institutional goals and architecture, along with a process of deep social, economic, and ecologically sustainable evolutionary reconstruction

 

Throughout much of the modern era, the two dominant alternatives to corporate capitalism have been state socialism and social democracy. The former gave priority of place to state owned economic entities while the latter maintained capitalist institutions and hoped to contain their power through organizing (commonly bolstered by strong labor unions) for robust regulations, health and other social programs, and progressive taxation.   

Both models experienced limitations in the latter part of the twentieth century, and in some cases succumbed to them. For a time, after the collapse of communism in the East and the retreat of social democracy when confronted by neoliberalism in the West, it was proclaimed that unencumbered corporate capitalism—with all its inequality and environmental costs—was the only game in town, the last system left standing.

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Especially since the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, this judgment has begun to change. The rise of right-wing populism in general and the Presidency of Donald Trump in particular have underscored the importance of clarifying central issues not only of progressive politics, but of systemic design and institutional power relationships that may or may not permit the development of a positive new direction. So, too, the 2016 Presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, and the 2018 election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress have stimulated intensified interest in system-altering alternatives that can help open a deeper exploration of longer-term directions that take us beyond periods of political impasse.

At the same time a growing array of new proposals (and variants on older proposals) have emerged in response to the challenges facing the current model and the pain being felt in the United States and around the world. Even as politics recasts traditional left-right divisions, some of the oldest questions of political-economy are being debated with renewed seriousness, a clear response to current difficulties. Alternative system-changing directions have emphasized worker-owned or worker self-managed enterprises as a central economic institution, while other community-based designs elevate local small businesses and cooperatives. Anarchist theories commonly give pride of place to various community forms while playing down larger state and other structures. A far-reaching and many faceted theoretical debate is underway just below the surface of conventional reporting.

On a parallel track, there has been an explosion of on-the-ground experimentation and new institutional development that includes worker cooperatives (and public support for their development), neighborhood land trusts, new municipal and neighborhood economic structures, public banking efforts, re-municipalization campaigns in the water and energy sectors, public take-overs of large banks, and even the crisis nationalizations of General Motors, Chrysler, and AIG—the latter one of the largest insurance companies and financial institutions in the world.  

 As this reassessment process continues, the following approach begins with three assumptions: First, that any serious trajectory of longer term development must clarify both its longer term vision and its explicit value affirmations and goals—and especially how both relate to the implications of alternative institutional designs; Second, that any serious trajectory of development must clarify how, specifically, it relates to emerging and fast-developing economic experiments (including not only, for instance, proposed worker, cooperative and other institutions, but also larger scale national and regional structures); and third, any serious trajectory of development must clarify how it can achieve longer term political and cultural movement in the direction of an integrated system-wide solution supportive of the values it affirms and the ecological and other limits it faces.           

Critical to the latter is the exploration of evolutionary institutional, cultural and political paths—as opposed to the simple assertion of ultimate (static) designs independent of processes that may foster ongoing development in a new direction. Accordingly, the following discussion is not based on a ‘fixed’ approach to systemic ‘design’ and ‘architecture,’ but rather on ‘evolutionary reconstructive’ and related political strategies of (ongoing) development in accord with the proposed model’s overarching direction. For this reason, too, it includes numerous illustrations of emerging and evolving forms of institutional change developing throughout the nation just beneath the focus of most conventional media reporting.

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In schematic terms, the Pluralist Commonwealth model emphasizes the principle of community. Within this general framework it encourages plural forms of democratic ownership (including worker, community, and publicly owned companies alongside small and medium-scale private firms) both at the neighborhood and at the local community (municipal) level. Public or joint worker/community/public enterprises define regional and national level structural directions. Democratic control both within enterprise and within communities—local, regional, and national—are central to the longer-term design.

Especially important are two large-order challenges: (I) Regional decentralization: It is by no means clear that a more participatory political and economic system is possible in a continental system as large as the United States. We often forget that Germany (itself a large country compared to most nations around the world) is physically smaller than the state of Montana alone;[1] California by itself is the fifth largest economy in the world.[2] There is also growing awareness of the possibilities of longer-term regional scale decentralization in New England and the Northwest. Texas may also be an outlier, as Hispanic population trends transform current conservative political domination in a regional scale polity. Seven Regional Commissions defined other possibilities in the 1960s and 1970s.[3]

(II) The nation’s history of slavery and publicly enforced racism pose specific challenges different from those confronted by other advanced nations in their degree of intensity and historical depth.

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An instructive starting place for a deeper analysis of long term systemic design, is John Stuart Mill’s insistence that direct experience with local governance is essential to “the peculiar training of a citizen, the practical part of the political education of a free people.”[4] His elaboration was straightforward: “[W]e do not learn to read or write, to ride or swim, by being merely told how to do it, but by doing it, so it is only by practicing popular government on a limited scale, that the people will ever learn how to exercise it on a larger.”[5] Alexis de Tocqueville similarly stressed that “municipal institutions constitute the strength of free nations. Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and enjoy it.”[6]

In his call for “strong democracy” the late Benjamin Barber also stressed the role of direct participation in cultivating public-mindedness, and, importantly, of creating new future directions—beginning, again, at the local level of everyday community experience. As he observed:

strong democracy relies on participation in an evolving problem-solving community that creates public ends where there were none before by means of its own activity … In such communities, public ends are neither extrapolated from absolutes nor ‘discovered’ in preexisting ‘hidden consensus.’ They are literally forged through the act of public participation created through common deliberation and common action and the effect that deliberation and action have on interests, which change shape and direction when subjected to these participatory processes (emphasis added).[7]

 The same judgments—both about local government and about economic institutions—help define critical points of departure for other core values, including: ecological sustainability, equality, liberty, and, indeed, the foundational concept of community itself. Put in the negative, if the communities and economic institutions in which Americans work and live out their lives are undemocratically managed, lack a culture of citizen initiative, and accept or condone ecologically destructive practices, great inequality, denials of liberty, and practices and attitudes that undermine a sense of community (that “we are all in it together”), it is difficult to see how the nation as a whole might ever achieve such values.

Put positively, the first critical system question is: How, specifically, might new local institutions nurture and support values of importance to the system as a whole while also helping generate political and institutional support for the necessary system-wide preconditions of a flourishing community existence—including economic stability, planning for equality, the devolution of political power (and democratic accountability of concentrated economic power)—that must ultimately be addressed on a larger scale by larger democratically controlled institutional elements of a comprehensive solution.

A fundamental contention is that if development at the level of the community itself is not, by virtue of institutional design and experience, thoroughgoing in its practice and nurturance of the key values, it is unlikely if not impossible to expect transformative change at higher levels of the state, region, and nation. In the language of Martin Buber: “A nation is a community to the degree that it is a community of communities.”[8]

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In addition to the central issue of democracy, four other critical challenges require systemic answers that both begin at the level of community and also help generate value premises and potential structural directions at higher levels of integration. All are highly charged, but also potentially capable of opening radically new possibilities. They include:

(I) Overarching questions of structural racism, changing gender roles, the implications of demographic change, and the economic distress, anger, and alienation of many working-class communities;

(II) Ecologically sustainable long-term development, especially involving climate change, but also understood in terms of challenges presented by the likely expansion of the U.S. population and the material production and growth-dependency of the economy over the next decades;

(III) The impact of ongoing technological change which, on the basis of the 20th Century’s highly uneven economic history (two World Wars, a Great Depression, numerous recessions)—and even leaving aside major new technological advances—is on track to replicate its eight-fold increase in economic output per capita over the coming century;[9]

(IV) An additional challenge of the American system beyond its unusual scale and racial history are the limitations of its more than 200-year-old Constitutional design, elements of which have also slowly begun to come into focus for thoughtful reassessment and ultimate revision.

The judgments implicit in the arguments of Mill, Tocqueville, Barber, and Buber point to the necessity: (I) not only of building democracy on new local footings from the bottom up; but (II) of developing new institutional forms and practices that nurture other critical values, again from the bottom up—which is to say in everyday life; and (III) of developing overarching system-wide capacities that both provide economic and institutional support to maintain local community stability and also deal with system-wide economic, ecological, and other planning.

This is not to exclude proposals, at many levels, of illuminating larger strategies like those, for instance, of the “Green New Deal” or Medicare for All. It is rather to suggest that a system-changing model capable of achieving the larger foundational directions implicit in such proposals (and furthered by them) will ultimately require deeper democratic reconstruction of institutions and political processes at many levels.

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The foundational democratic theory of the Pluralist Commonwealth model includes four critical principles that build on evolving forms and structural principles appropriate to the larger challenges: (I) democratization of wealth; (II) community, both locally and in general, as a guiding theme; (III) decentralization in general (including regional scale devolution of many national institutional capacities); and (IV) substantial (though not complete) forms of democratic planning in support of community, and to achieve longer term economic, democracy-building and ecological goals.

Clarity about the foundational concept of community is critical. Unless new cooperative, neighborhood, municipal and other community structured forms of democratic ownership are established at the local level, there cannot be a democratic economy in general, nor can foundational experiences for broader development become sufficiently widespread so that a culture of democratic ownership and control can become commonplace throughout the larger system. Changing ownership is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of establishing the institutional foundations for systemic movement towards genuine equality.

This fundamental judgment has immediate relevance for political-economic institutional design. Importantly, nearly half of the members of any community, on average, are not understood to be “workers” as defined by traditional conceptions of the labor force. Among these are the elderly (24%) of whom a majority are former workers; individuals with disabilities (10%); individuals providing care for others (8%); and students (6%).[10] If genuine democracy is a priority (to say nothing of genuine community), the development of local community-wide institutions must be broadly inclusive, designed in ways that bring together the interests not only of workers engaged in production at any particular moment in time, but also of other members of society who have been, will be, or nurture the development of traditionally defined “workers,” as well as the interests of the broader community as a whole.

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By “internalizing externalities” a community-inclusive systemic approach also is critical to the nurturing of economic and institutional power relationships that help rationalize environmental choices.  Contrary to situations in which private businesses may pollute—and the community through government must intervene as an opposing regulatory force—when the community itself is directly involved in, for instance, a community owned utility, the question posed is whether it wishes to pay the costs of cleaning up the problems its own activities create. Beginning to move in such a direction is critical to the development of an ecologically coherent culture in everyday life—the necessary local precondition of an ecologically sustainable system in general: To the degree a community or neighborhood owns significant economic enterprises, ecologically sustainable practices become far less contentious: Unlike the conventional regulation of private firms—which inherently creates conflict between public and private interests—in models which include community ownership the regulatory choice is rationalized since the costs of responsible environmental practices are both paid for and simultaneously largely benefit the same entity: the community or municipality which owns the firm.

The principle applies at many different levels of impact: The costs of constraining, eliminating or substituting for processes that currently generate CO2 and other climate impacting gasses commonly create conflict between private corporate owners and regulatory publics. When ownership of the enterprise is anchored in the community of not only the city but the state, region, or nation—and the impact of its noxious output again harms the same (larger scale) community—democratic consideration of the dangers, costs and benefits are rationalized.

Similarly, to the degree the principle of community is normalized, the concept of the community-through-time is also normalized. Which is to say paying the costs of eliminating ongoing climate change and other environmental dangers, again, can both be borne by—and also benefit—the community understood via generational family and other relationships as inherently both present and continuing through time.

Finally, a flourishing and meaningful community, if developed with care and concern for social relationships and the necessary economic and institutional foundations of such relationships, can reduce the pressures that drive wasteful and unsustainable growth and cultures of envy, competition, and unnecessary consumption.

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        An initial approximation of a long-term solution to the systemic design challenge based both on the above principles and on an integration of developing real-world institutional explorations would include these characteristics:

At the level of the local community, economic institutions increasingly and predominantly involve small-scale worker-owned firms, cooperatives, and other forms of democratized ownership. These include: credit unions (which currently boast more than 114 million members in the United States);[11] worker cooperatives—firms owned and democratically operated by their employees—of which hundreds currently operate in America;[12] and a modest proportion of free-standing Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) companies, enterprises that are democratically owned by workers through a particular form of retirement trust.[13]

Important (illustrative) examples of existing public and political support for various democratized economic institutions are now widespread: In New York, the City Council has supported a Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative with some $5 million in funding for more than a dozen partner organizations.[14] In fiscal year 2017 this translated into the launch of 36 new worker cooperatives and 185 total hires at cooperative firms.[15] In Madison, Wisconsin, the City Council has earmarked $5 million over five years to support cooperative development.[16] Oakland and Berkeley, California have taken steps toward establishing preferential treatment in municipal bidding procedures, technical assistance, and financial support for worker cooperatives.[17] In 2017, the Austin City Council passed a similar ordinance directing the city manager to produce recommendations in support of worker cooperatives in general, and to ensure that cooperatives can access small business programs, bid on city contracts, and act as conversion opportunities for retiring business owners, in particular.[18]

In Rochester, New York, Mayor Lovely Warren and the Office of Innovation have launched an incubator for employee-owned businesses—Own Rochester. The city has also announced its own Office of Community Wealth Building (modeled after one in Richmond, Virginia) to combine work on financial literacy and credit access and serve as the city’s liaison to Own Rochester.[19] In Jackson, Mississippi, the city government and Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba hopes to develop “a cooperative bank, a training center, and a cooperative business incubator,” as part of a larger effort to address the city’s infrastructure needs.[20]

In (small and medium scale) cities like Rochester and Jackson, developing municipally supported complexes also aim to strengthen democratic forms by helping secure contracts from large “anchor” institutions, especially those dependent in significant part, directly or indirectly, on public funds (such as non-profit hospitals and universities).

In the United Kingdom, the City Council of Preston, a deindustrialized city of some 140,000 people in the North of England, has partnered with other local public institutions to help direct spending toward cooperatives and other local businesses. Spending by anchor institutions has gone from £38 million to £111 million, while spending in the broader Lancashire county area has increased from £292m to £486m.[21] The City Council has also helped establish a credit union and a studio space for local artists.[22] Efforts are underway to establish a network of worker cooperatives by bringing together current and potential cooperative enterprise owners through the Cooperative Guild Network and by promoting employee buyouts as a succession option for retiring owners.[23] In addition,  government pension funds have invested £100 million locally.[24] In 2018, Preston was named the most improved city out of 42 studied by Demos and PricewaterhouseCoopers along a range of economic, social, and environmental measures.[25]

In larger cities, similar structural efforts based on principles of inclusive community and involving joint community/worker-owned complexes are being developed at the neighborhood level. Again, these are supported both by municipal government and anchor institutions such as hospitals and universities. In Cleveland, Ohio, the “Evergreen Cooperatives” consist of a neighborhood network of worker owned businesses (including an industrial scale laundry, an urban greenhouse, and a contractor specializing in energy efficiency) that provide some 500 jobs for local residents.[26] When profitable, the cooperatives also contribute funds to a neighborhood-wide nonprofit organization that operates a revolving loan fund to start additional cooperatives.

The network is also again in part stabilized by purchasing from local anchor institutions like the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals which help provide a source of demand for the cooperatives’ goods and services. The overall structure in both small city efforts and neighborhood efforts in larger cities embodies two key principles: first, it institutionalizes a community-inclusive system beyond simple worker ownership since the cooperatives are in part jointly owned by and contribute to a community nonprofit organization; and second, the economic relationships between larger institution purchasing and local cooperative complexes defines a form of partial economic planning to help stabilize communities.

Projected larger-scale institutional elements of a new model beginning at (and building from the democratic experience of) the local level include:

(1) Publicly owned enterprises and utilities at the municipal and regional level. A particularly useful illustration is the ongoing community mobilization in Boulder, Colorado to establish a locally owned public utility, freeing itself from the private provider Xcel energy. The city aims to produce 100 percent clean energy by 2030 and to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050.[27] The effort has inspired other communities to follow suit (like Decorah, Iowa where residents put a municipalization measure on the May 2018 ballot).[28] All told, there have been some 692 documented cases of re-municipalization occurring worldwide since 2000.[29] These include many in the United States, especially in the water sector.[30]

(2) Municipal internet systems: over 500 communities have established full or partial public telecommunications networks—e.g. cable or fiber optic lines operated through public utilities or by local governments.[31] More than 130 communities in 27 states even provide ultra-fast, 1 Gigabit services.[32]     

(3) City and state-owned banks: Since the financial crisis of 2008, cities and states have increasingly taken up the issue of public banking as a way to make the most of their limited budgetary resources. Feasibility studies have been conducted or announced in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Oakland, California.[33] At this writing new approaches are under active development in Seattle, Washington, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Washington DC, San Francisco, and many other cities.[34] New Jersey’s recently elected Governor, Phil Murphy, has made a state-owned public bank a major goal of his new administration.[35] Several candidates in the 2018 California Gubernatorial Democratic primary, including the elected Governor Gavin Newsom, endorsed the idea.[36]

(4) Community Land Trusts (CLTs) have also proliferated. These are nonprofit organizations that provide permanently affordable housing by allowing community members to purchase housing on land owned by the CLT, provided that if the home is resold it must be sold to future owners at an affordable price. A leading example is the Champlain Housing Trust—formed in 2006 through a merger of two large Vermont community land trusts.[37] It is now the largest such effort in the nation, with over 2,000 members housed in rental apartments, co-ops, and shared-appreciation single family homes and condominiums.[38]

(5) Community ownership and management of methane collection and energy generation enterprises. For example, the Point Loma Treatment Plant near San Diego captures methane—a potent greenhouse gas—from wastewater and turns it into electricity, saving the city around $3 million annually since 2000.[39] The same approach applies to landfills, roughly 300 of which are publicly owned and capture methane for energy production in the United States.[40]

(6) Community Development Corporations (CDCs). There are some 4,000 of these community-owned enterprises around the country, many of which help revitalize neighborhoods and help provide affordable housing.[41] The New Community Corporation in New Jersey illustrates an earlier model which moves beyond this. It has $500 million in assets, and manages 2000 units of housing, in addition to a shopping center, supermarket, nursing school, and day care centers.[42] The New Community Network also provides workforce training, educational services like GED-Prep and English as a Second Language programs, and mental and behavioral health services.[43]

(7) Community Development Financial Institutions.  There are now over 1,000 credit unions, community banks, loan funds, and other financial intermediaries that are certified as CDFIs.[44] This suggests a direction other financial institutions can take to provide underserved communities access to banking services, to buy first homes, or to start a business. Illustrative is the Latino Community Credit Union, a community development credit union which was started after attacks on immigrants in Durham, North Carolina.[45] The credit union manages financial services and loans for more than 75,000 members, 65 percent of whom were previously unbanked, 80 percent of whom are low-income, and 2,700 of whom have bought their first home through the bank.[46]

(8) Nonprofit social enterprises. These are additional examples of broader community-building economic institutional approaches. For instance, Coastal Community Action in Washington has a 6 Mega-Watt, 29-acre wind farm which sells wind power back to its local public utility and is projected to raise $8 million over 20 years for housing, food security, homeless, energy assistance, and elderly assistance programs.[47] The St. Vincent de Paul Society of Lane County in Oregon operates 15 retail thrift stores and other recycling-based businesses—resulting in more than 1,300 units of affordable housing since 1988 and providing funding for homelessness, job training, and emergency services for thousands of people annually.[48]

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Such concrete examples illustrate the practicality, diversity, and developing trajectory of increasingly democratic local economic elements of a larger model. In addition, a comprehensive approach would necessarily include such widely understood elements as:

  • Small scale private entrepreneurial firms and high-tech innovators;
  • Non-profit institutions in general (a sector that now includes roughly 10 percent of the private sector work force).[49] Among these, particularly important are hospitals, universities, and other quasi-public institutions increasingly structured as non-profit or public municipal or state enterprises. Hospitals and universities alone account for roughly 7 percent of national economic activity.[50]
  • Local elements of regional or national public enterprises structured as joint ventures with local worker, neighborhood, or community wide participation.

Building on precedents like the Tennessee Valley Authority, at higher levels of scale regional forms of public enterprise in critical areas would likely be structured as joint ventures with local worker, neighborhood, and/or community-wide participation. As population continues to grow over the next decades, ultimately in a large nation like the United States most national forms would devolve where appropriate to regional scale joint ventures.

Important strategic areas of concern for larger scale public forms of enterprise include: health care (minimally single payer, i.e. the equivalent of a public insurance company); national and international scale banking; and military production. Beyond these, researcher Charlie Cray has offered a partial listing which provides an appropriate starting point for clarifying which firms might usefully be structured over time as (regional or national) forms of public or joint public/community/worker ownership of larger enterprise:

  •   ‘Industries which principally rely upon public resources (including taxpayer-funded contracts) or the commons for their very existence (essential services like water; the broadcast media; extractive industries) …
  •   Industries that serve a compelling national interest (e.g., weapons manufacturers and other contractors whose primary income is derived from federal defense, intelligence and/or homeland security contracts) …
  •   Other industries (e.g., energy and transportation) with a key role in national security and perceived collective emergencies…
  •   Industries that provide an inherently public function structured in a way that protects the broader economy. Examples include the Big Four auditing firms which have been pressing for a liability cap based on the argument that they are ‘too big to fail.’ Another option, proposed by Reagan-era SEC commissioner Bevis Longstreth, would be to put the SEC in charge of auditing public companies—the way that bank examiners audit banks—a proposal that was included in the original draft legislation creating the SEC.
  •   Industries where the pressures of ‘short-termism’ cannot be alleviated by conventional reforms such as changes in executive compensation policies, corporate governance, or an emphasis on strategic planning.
  •   Recidivist corporations and criminogenic industries that repeatedly break the law, where structural remedies are needed to isolate and/or eliminate the source of such behavior. As Justice Department criminologists have suggested, ‘the size and the complex interrelationships of large corporations make it extremely onerous for government agencies to exercise any effective social control…’[51]

In connection with larger public companies, joint national (ultimately devolved to regional)-community-worker ownership points towards responsive approaches to a number of critical challenges.

First, publicly accountable enterprises provide a viable answer to destabilizing corporate dislocation of local communities—a practice that undermines local democratic and community practice and culture, the foundational requirement of any serious democratic reconstruction over time. The extension of massive subsidies, tax breaks, and other incentives to large corporations, “smokestack chasing” also wastes budgetary resources needed to respond to community priorities and local democratic choice.[52]  

Second, publicly owned enterprises do not face the same Wall Street driven imperatives to externalize or minimize costs (such as pollution) as private corporations face.

Third, and critically, such firms do not face Wall Street imperatives to grow or die—a foundational requirement of the era we are entering.

Fourth, the financial practices and accounts of publicly owned enterprise can be made transparent, open to public scrutiny.

 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, unlike large private corporations, whose lobbying and political contributions distort democracy, the direct political role of large (public) enterprise can be radically reduced.  

Beyond this the transformation of very large (global) corporations into public (national or regional) enterprise can help reduce pressures to intervene diplomatically and militarily in the politics and economics of developing nations.

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Efficient and effective forms of public enterprise are now common around the world. Simply by way of illustration: High-speed rail systems are run by the government in France, Spain, Belgium, German, Italy, the Netherlands, China, and South Korea.[53] Public ownership of airlines is also common: France holds 17.6 percent of Air France-KLM; Sweden, Denmark, and Norway hold a 42 percent stake in SAS; Israel, 43.48 percent of El Al; and Singapore, 55.6 percent of Singapore Airlines (ranked as one of the world’s best).[54] Collectively, the French, German, and Spanish governments own more than 26% of Airbus, “the largest aeronautics and space company in Europe.”[55]

Much better and faster Internet service than our own is provided in many countries where public corporations exist side by side with private companies. Public telecommunications companies are conventional in most parts of the world, including in Austria, Japan, Sweden, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Norway.[56] Banking provides a further illustration both of existing practice worldwide, and the developmental trend towards a new model in the United States from local to national. Public banks are found in France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and other countries.[57] Germany has more than a thousand cooperative banks and around 400 Sparkassen, or local, publicly-owned savings banks.[58] Publicly owned corporations worldwide control roughly 75 percent of all petroleum reserves.[59]

In the United States, the large publicly-owned Bank of North Dakota directly helped the state thrive during the financial crisis and recession, continuing to contribute revenues to the state budget, backstopping local banks with liquidity. As previously noted, public ownership of banks is now on the agenda for serious discussion and implementation in numerous cities and states.[60]

Neighborhood, municipal, state, regional, and national forms of ownership—from cooperative to national public structures—define a pluralist economy involving democratized entities at many levels—i.e. a ‘pluralist commonwealth.’ That the model would be overwhelmingly characterized by small and medium scale firms is also clear. There are currently an estimated 5.9 million firms in the United States.[61] Of these a mere 0.3 percent currently employ 500 or more employees, and only 0.035 percent of all firms employ more than 5,000 individuals and 0.017 percent employ more than 10,000).[62]

Even if all the significant scale firms were to become national or regional public or joint public-worker-community owned in structure, the economy would still be overwhelmingly characterized by small scale firms.

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Establishing the necessary institutional preconditions and the beginning points for the development of a pluralist model of ownership, democracy and equality from the bottom up—from community to state to region and beyond—also requires addressing the matter of democratic planning. The question, however, is not whether to plan, but who will control planning, in whose interests, and with what measures of transparency and accountability.

In fact, overt and covert economic planning is now common throughout the current political-economic system. In connection with banking (and Federal Reserve operations), energy, agriculture, health care, transportation, and many other sectors, the terms of reference for development are largely set by de facto and little discussed underlying tax policies, regulatory policies, subsidies, monetary policy, trade policy, and many other public processes (including, critically, research and development leading to major technological breakthroughs from effective drugs to the internet), and these in turn are commonly exploited or de facto significantly controlled by corporate interest groups operating in each sector. Growth is a central goal of much of the current planning effort.

The principle of planning, and many of the current procedures, however, offer a preliminary matrix of practices and institutions upon which a trajectory of development towards different, more sustainable goals can begin to be built.

National forms of de facto planning regularly also occur through government estimating procedures at both the Executive and Congressional level; through specific national budget allocations (and Congressional budget ‘reconciliation’ procedures); through Federal Reserve Board policy decisions; and in major federal research financing in diverse areas. In all these areas, planning decisions central to economic functioning are regularly made, though hardly in a participatory democratic fashion. Similarly, economic activity and production that takes place within large corporations is regularly and routinely planned rather than organized by any kind of market mechanism internal to these giant firms.

Initial steps in the direction of decentralized, democratic planning can be found in the explorations of participatory budgeting—a process by which constituents propose, discuss, and vote on budget allocations, a practice now commonplace in some 1,500 cities around the world and in the United States in New York, Chicago, Vallejo (California), St. Louis, Boston, and San Francisco.[63] Building on these various procedures and experiences, new forms of national planning would likely build up priorities from the community, state and regional level—to be integrated at the national level into coherent options for democratic choice.

Market processes would inevitably also occur within the bounds of public choices and the directions set for public and quasi-public institutions. As population continues to expand, ultimate devolution to Constitutionally defined regional scale units capable of more democratic forms of decision-making would likely rationalize processes developed and tested in a transitional period of experimentation.

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Though less commonly discussed, of particular importance are structural and institutional support for substantive (positive) liberty. In contrast to theories of liberty that emphasize the “negative” or “formal” dimensions of liberty (such as the absence of coercion or domination; and specific protections of various “rights”), positive conceptions define liberty more broadly.[64] They include formal legal and Constitutional freedoms, but also “effective” dimensions of liberty—the social and material conditions necessary for independence and true self-determination.[65] Beyond such basics as housing, education, and healthcare, among the most important are:

Material, social, temporal, or psychological aspects, including economic security, free time, and recognition within a community of equals. A preliminary step is a job guarantee which (like university tenure or the personal economic foundation once offered by a small farm) provides the security commonly required from which to express independence. Another approach supportive of substantive liberty—a basic income—is now widely discussed (and being tested in Finland, the Netherlands, Kenya, Spain, Canada, and Oakland, California).[66] The Alaska Permanent Fund also offers suggestive possibilities; it invests revenue from extractive industries in the state and pays out annual dividends to all eligible state residents as a matter of right.

As technology advances over the coming decades, shortened work weeks and increasing free time offer further opportunities to expand the substance of liberty—free time to do as one pleases. (The latter understood not only as assuring ‘time as liberty’ but also free time in support of—and allowing for—much deeper participation in the reconstruction of genuine democracy and a culture of community from the bottom up.)

Although it is a deeply flawed measure, a sense of the possibilities is given by again recalling that GDP per capita increased roughly eight-fold during the twentieth century.[67] If it increases at roughly the same rate (and leaving aside additional possibilities suggested by new information technologies), the current (at this writing) economy’s output of $227,000 for every family of four would be increased to the equivalent of roughly $1.8  million for every family of four.[68] Alternatively, the work-week could be radically reduced to the realm of 20 or even 10 hours per week, depending on allocation choices, and still provide very generous income levels for all—and an ever-expanding potential realm for substantive liberty in a system not constrained to ever-expanding growth.

*

 These and other possibilities both allow for, but also depend upon, systemic reconstruction that generates institutions which can sustain and nurture far greater degrees of equality, common direction, and community. This returns us to the central importance of rebuilding from the bottom up in ways that not only achieve stability but help reconstruct democracy and a culture of community. They also pose the question of whether new political trajectories (and supporting institutions) might allow for, be informed by, and nurture strong democracy, equality, liberty, ecological sustainability and other critical values and supportive trajectories of change from the ground up. These must inevitably involve both positive institutional reconstruction and also strategies of political power accumulation capable of challenging existing institutions. The two are intimately related both in theory and in developmental practice.  

In particular, a serious longer-term strategy must build converging political-economic institutional forms and support in Black, Hispanic, and Working-Class White (urban and rural) communities—and a steadily developing sense of the longer-term possibilities of strategic reorientation based on foundational forms and alliances that can help create the basis of new political and cultural as well as economic power aimed at larger common goals such as dealing with climate change and the necessity of reducing the overall growth dynamic.

 The unusual demand placed on long term strategy is not simply (as many hold) to develop institutions that are participatory and democratize ownership in the existing economy, but to (1) develop institutions in and of the current economy; (2) that also help alter power relationships that can change the current economy in the direction of greater equity and ecological sustainability; and at the same time (3) can also refine strategies, based on such relationships, that can help stabilize the foundations of urban as well as rural communities (including especially the targeting of jobs and work to the latter as well as the former); (4) that allow for cross-community political alliances based on common needs and common class concerns; (5) that also, building from the bottom up, prefigure a reconstructed culture of community capable of nurturing a new politics, and of dealing with traumatic racial and other realities (including reparative processes); as well as develop (6) a culture, too, of community capable of nurturing a more powerful ecological, gender-equality-based, and cooperative ethic and politics; (7) pave the way for longer term regional political-economic devolution of the Continental system;[69] and (8) construct a culture capable of nurturing and managing the realities of a transition to a largely post-work era of technological abundance.

Addressing the truly pressing challenge of climate change will involve many of these elements, including planning for the future, addressing unequal institutional power relationships, and stabilizing communities. Given the short window of opportunity to transition beyond fossil fuels before humanity spends the remaining carbon budget, the US government could use one of two methods to acquire and retire the top 25 US extractive corporations, remove them as political obstacles to important climate change policies, and transition their operations into producing green twenty-first century infrastructure:

(I) It could simply buy these enterprises and retire their operations (and their political opposition to regulatory and other strategies aimed at dealing with global warming.) The likely costs of a public takeover, though large, are well within the range of what the United States has accepted in other situations of national concern. Purchasing, dismantling, and re-orienting the major corporate players (say the top 25 oil, gas, and coal producers) towards the production of necessary green infrastructure would likely be cheaper than the average annual costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.[70]

(II) Modern Monetary Theory also opens up policy possibilities to realize such developments with even less cost to the taxpayer. Public control of corporations sufficient to ensure that they do not resist, lobby against, and campaign against responsible approaches to climate challenges could almost certainly be secured without a full takeover, but rather by gaining a majority equity stake and control of the boards. Moreover, such a takeover could be financed by the same ‘quantitative easing’ practices that have been used to boost the U.S. economy—but this time mobilized to ensure a just transition to a sustainable future.[71]

 *

The central challenge of community—both in building radically new political-economic structures and a new political power base—from the bottom up, and at the same time working steadily to develop a new culture of larger community, that “we are all in it together,” is the central challenge of the emerging era—a requirement of a revitalized economy and of a culture oriented to ecologically sustainable and radically reduced growth necessities. Establishing such a culture will not be easy. Political theorist Wendy Brown has described the many ways in which neoliberal ideology has eroded or undermined many foundations of our collective, democratic existence as previously political elements of our social life have been “recast in an economic idiom.”[72] “These elements,” she stresses, “include vocabularies, principles of justice, political cultures, habits of citizenship, practices of rule, and above all, democratic imaginaries.”[73]

And economist Samuel Bowles has demonstrated “how people interact in markets and other economic institutions… durably shapes social norms and preferences, and these are then generalized to noneconomic domains of life.”[74] Ethical considerations like altruism or reciprocity are often “crowded out by policies and incentives that appeal to material self-interest.”[75]

Against such ongoing tendencies, establishing new venues in which a culture of community is nurtured from the bottom up becomes a paramount concern.

It is a concern that must be confronted even as the many specific dangers and explicit political, economic and other institutional and power battles at all levels must be fought—to and through the period of increasingly obvious political danger. In the words of the late Raymond Williams: “It is, in practice, for [anyone], a long conversion of the habitual elements of denial; a slow and deep personal acceptance of extending community. The institutions of cynicism, of denial and of division will perhaps only be thrown down when they are recognized for what they are: the deposits of practical failures to live. Failure the jaunty hardness of the ‘outsider’ will lose its present glamour, as the common experience moves in a different direction.”[76]

Ultimately, building new political and institutional power and a new culture not based on endless growth from the ground up—community by community, region by region—must also confront two of the nation’s great moral failings. The first of these involves the cross-cutting challenges that slavery, and subsequent public policy and institutional racism have brought to the particular history and ongoing reality of the United States. Any serious path towards a new democratic community must deal not only with current discrimination, but with some form of reparations—both material and symbolic.[77]

Reparations in some form are required to address the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the theft of Native American lands and livelihoods, in addition to the ongoing reality of systemic racism. A nation founded on white supremacy must face its past squarely if it has any hope of moving beyond to create a meaningful community capable, too, of managing the larger systemic challenges reviewed in this paper.

So, too, must questions of America’s role around the world—and of formal and informal, overt and covert interference in other nations— be addressed in any serious approach to a longer-term transformation. U.S. actions have toppled governments and regularly installed brutal regimes in the 19th and throughout the 20th and early 21st century—and in modern times from Cuba in 1898 to Iran in 1953 and beyond in many countries around the world in general and in Latin America in particular. Wars fought without explicit Constitutionally required Congressional Declaration in support of such efforts in modern times include the Korean War (“Police action”), the Vietnam undeclared war based on the dubiously supported “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,” and the undeclared wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.[78]

The reconstruction of the nation’s underlying political economy—away from corporate domination, towards democracy and community rebuilt from the bottom up—is itself an important condition of a fundamental change in the nation’s global stance.

*

         A transformative systemic model is commonly viewed as being either utopian or revolutionary. The evolutionary reconstructive building of a next system, however, involves the development of ideas, institutional practices, and political power from the ground up to inform an ongoing reconstructive transformation of real-world experience—both to change here and now relationships and to build political-institutional power and cultural resources for further transformation.

In the decades preceding the New Deal—including the “Red Scare” of 1917-1920 and three of the most conservative Presidencies of the twentieth century (Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover)–experimentation at the state and local levels, in the so-called “laboratories of democracy,” laid down institutional precedents and experience for many of the larger system-wide programs that ultimately became the basis of the New Deal. Illustrations abound: Countercyclical public works projects were explored in states like Pennsylvania in 1917.[79] Worker’s compensation had been passed in 38 states by 1919.[80] Early efforts to establish unemployment insurance date back to Massachusetts (1916) and Wisconsin during the 1920s.[81] Old-age pensions were established in three states by 1923 and six states by 1928.[82]

Similarly, before the federal income tax was established in 1913, Virginia established an income tax in 1909 and Wisconsin passed a state income tax in 1911.[83] Before the 19th Amendment established Women’s Suffrage, 19 states and territories had established full or partial suffrage for women, including Wyoming (1869), Colorado (1893), Utah (1896), Idaho (1896), and Washington (1910).[84]

Over the last several decades—and even in the dark present of the Trump era—there has been and continues to be a flow of positive institutional development building from the bottom up at the local and state level. We have also witnessed explosive financial crises leading to nationalizations following the weakening of regulatory financial controls (a possibility now again returning, given the legislative and regulatory undermining of the Dodd-Frank banking laws enacted after the last major crisis).

The system question is not simply one of ultimate design. It is that. But it is also, how, specifically, to conceive and then build—to and through the difficulties—a sustainable and democratic next system that is both practical and worth fighting for by virtue of the values it affirms and the institutions in support of such values it builds. The goal is not ‘a final system,’ but rather non-reversible ongoing systemic transformation of individual and community practice, power and institutional development at the level of neighborhood, community, region, and nation—upon which even deeper patterns of ecologically sustainable democracy, and community and liberty can be built beyond…

 

***

 

[1] To compare country and US state sizes, see: Daniel Goldstein, “Put the size of countries in perspective by comparing them to US states,” Decision Science News, February 20, 2015, accessed January 23, 2017,  http://www.decisionsciencenews.com/2015/02/20/put-size-countries-perspective-comparing-us-states/; The World Factbook, “Country Comparison: Area,” United States Central Intelligence Agency, accessed November 10, 2016, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2147rank.html; for the size of states listed: “State Area Measurements and Internal Point Coordinates,” United States Census Bureau, 2010, accessed November 10, 2016, https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/state-area.html.

[2] Thomas Fuller, “The Pleasure and Pain of Being California, the World’s 5th-Largest Economy,” New York Times, May 7, 2018, accessed May 9, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/07/us/california-economy-growth.html.

[3] Martha Derthick, Between State and Nation: Regional Organizations of the United States (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institute, 1974), 108-133.

[4] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Elizabeth Rapaport (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978), p. 108.

[5] John Stuart Mill, “Tocqueville on Democracy in America (Vol. I),” in Essays on Politics and Culture, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), pp. 200-01.

[6] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), Vol. 1, p. 63, as quoted in Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of California, 2003 [1984]), p. 234.

[7] Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of California, 2003[1984]), pp. 152.

[8] Martin Buber, “Paths in Utopia,” (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), p. 136.

[9] U.S. Council of Economic Advisors, Economic Report to the President 2000, (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2000), pp. 23-24, accessed November 9, 2017, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/economic_reports/2000.pdf

[10] Matt Bruenig, “Who Was Poor In 2016 And Why Our System Keeps Failing Them,” People’s Policy Project, September 12, 2017, accessed November 17, 2017, https://peoplespolicyproject.org/2017/09/12/who-was-in-poverty-in-2016/.

[11] Monthly Credit Union Estimates: March 2018 (Washington, DC: Credit Union National Association, March 2018), p. ii, accessed May 4, 2018, https://www.cuna.org/uploadedFiles/Global/About_Credit_Unions/CUMonthEst_MAR18.pdf.

[12] Tim Palmer, “US Worker Cooperatives: A State of the Sector” Democracy at Work Institute, accessed November 11, 2017, http://institute.coop/sites/default/files/resources/State_of_the_sector_0.pdf.

[13] “A Statistical Profile of Employee Ownership,” National Center for Employee Ownership, December 2015, accessed October 4, 2016, https://www.nceo.org/articles/statistical-profile-employee-ownership.

[14] Oscar Abello, “NYC’s Worker Cooperative Ecosystem Continues to Grow,” Next City, January 19, 2017, accessed November 11, 2017, https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/nyc-worker-coops-growth.

[15] Gregg Bishop and Michael Owh, “Working Together” Services (New York, NY: New York City Small Business, 2018), p. 6.

[16] Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo, “$5 Million for Co-op Development in Madison,” Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO), accessed January 29, 2015, www.geo.coop/story/5-million-co-op-development-madison.

[17] Michelle Camou, Cities Developing Worker Co-ops: Efforts in Ten Cities (Medina, Imagined Economies Project, 2016) 18-19.

[18] Oscar Perry Abello, “Austin Council Votes to Boost Worker Cooperatives,” Next City, April 18, 2017, accessed May 7, 2018, https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/worker-cooperatives-austin-city-support.

[19] “Mayor’s Office Of Community Wealth Building,” City of Rochester, accessed May 7, 2018, http://www.cityofrochester.gov/wealthbuilding/.

[20] Mary Mitchner, “Jackson, Mississippi Bets on a Cooperative Local Economy,” Nonprofit Quarterly, October 23, 2017, accessed November 13, 2017, https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2017/10/23/jackson-mississippi-bets-cooperative-local-economy/.

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[22] Clifford Singer, “The Preston Model,” The Next System Project, September 9, 2016, accessed November 14, 2016, http://thenextsystem.org/the-preston-model/; Ed Walker, “GuildMoney credit union to be bankrolled by Preston City Council,” Blog Preston, January 28, 2014, accessed May 8, 2018, http://www.blogpreston.co.uk/2014/01/guildmoney-credit-union-to-be-bankrolled-by-preston-city-council/.

[23] Clifford Singer, “The Preston Model,” The Next System Project, September 9, 2016, accessed November 14, 2016, http://thenextsystem.org/the-preston-model/.

[24] Tom Gann, “Labour’s New Economics Conference: Part Five, Local Democratic Economic Strategies,” February 28, 2018, accessed March 15, 2018, https://newsocialist.org.uk/labours-new-economics-conference-part-five-local-democratic-economic-strategies/.

[25] Richard Partington, “Preston named as most improved city in UK,” The Guardian, October 31, 2018, accessed November 1, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/nov/01/preston-named-as-most-most-improved-city-in-uk.

[26] Zoe Sullivan, “New Cleveland Fund Will Acquire Businesses and Sell Them Back to Workers,” Next City, November 13, 2018, accessed November 13, 2018, https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/new-cleveland-fund-will-acquire-businesses-and-sell-them-back-to-workers.

[27] “Our Energy Vision,” City of Boulder Colorado, accessed November 14, 2017, https://bouldercolorado.gov/energy-future.

[28] Donnelle Eller, “Decorah citizens group seeks a recount on vote to create municipal utility,” Des Moines Register, May 7, 2018, accessed May 7, 2018, https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2018/05/07/alliant-energy-power-decorah-electric-utility-vote-referendum-midamerican-iowa-absentee-ballots/586054002/.

[29] Satoko Mishimoto and Olivier Petitjean, Reclaiming Public Services: How Cities and Citizens are Turning Back Privatization, (Paris, France: Transnational Institute, 2017), p. 8.

[30] Satoko Mishimoto and Olivier Petitjean, Reclaiming Public Services: How Cities and Citizens are Turning Back Privatization, (Paris, France: Transnational Institute, 2017), p. 6.

[31] “Community Network Map,” Community Broadband Networks, accessed November 14, 2017, http://www.muninetworks.org/communitymap. 

[32] “Community Network Map,” Community Broadband Networks, accessed November 14, 2017, http://www.muninetworks.org/communitymap. 

[33] Jimmy Tobias, “What if People Owned the Banks, Instead of Wall Street?,” The Nation, May 22, 2017, accessed November 14, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/what-if-people-owned-the-banks-instead-of-wall-street/; Ali Tadayon, “Oakland council to spend $75,000 for study into public bank,” East Bay Times, September 28, 2017, accessed November 14, 2017, http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/09/28/oakland-to-spend-75k-for-public-bank-study/.

[34] Heidi Groover, “Could Seattle Take the Next Step Toward a Municipal Bank?,” The Stranger, October 16, 2017, accessed November 13, 2017, http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/10/16/25472733/could-seattle-take-the-next-step-toward-a-municipal-bank; Jimmy Tobias, “What if People Owned the Banks, Instead of Wall Street?,” The Nation, May 22, 2017, accessed November 14, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/what-if-people-owned-the-banks-instead-of-wall-street/; Oscar Perry Abello, “Taking Steps Toward Public Options for Banking,” Next City, April 30, 2018, accessed May 7, 2018, https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/taking-steps-toward-public-options-for-banking; Adele Peters, “The Growing Movement To Create City-Run Public Banks,” January 08, 2018, accessed May 7, 2018, https://www.fastcompany.com/40512552/the-growing-movement-to-create-city-run-public-banks.

[35] John Reitmeyer, “Can Gov.-Elect Murphy Make A Go Of His Public Bank?” NJSpotlight, November 13, 2017, accessed November 13, 2017, http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/17/11/12/can-gov-elect-murphy-make-a-go-of-his-public-bank/; Bob Dreyfuss and Barbara Dreyfuss, “Can a Sanders Democrat Win the New Jersey Governor’s Race?,” The Nation, February 22, 2017, accessed November 14, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/can-a-sanders-democrat-win-the-new-jersey-governors-race/.

[36] David Dayen, “A public bank for pot entrepreneurs? How about the rest of us?,” February 13, 2018, accessed May 7, 2018, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-dayen-public-pot-bank-20180213-story.html; Brianna Lee, “Your guide to the 2018 California governor’s race,” KPCC – Southern California Public Radio, May 7, 2018, accessed May 7, 2018, https://www.scpr.org/news/2018/05/07/82768/2018-election-californias-next-governor/

[37] “History,” Champlain Housing Trust, accessed July 16, 2015, http://www.getahome.org/about/history.

[38] “About Us,” Champlain Housing Trust, accessed January 5, 2018, http://www.getahome.org/about-us.

[39] Brad Schweikert, “Is Your Wastewater Going to Waste?” Sustainable City Network, November 2, 2010, accessed December 2, 2016, http://www.sustainablecitynetwork.com/topic_channels/water/article_86c69e9c-e6af-11df-9dc9-0017a4a78c22.html.

[40] “Landfill Gas Energy Project Data and Landfill Technical Data – Detailed file of currently operational projects (2018),” Environmental Protection Agency, February 2018, accessed May 8, 2018, https://www.epa.gov/lmop/landfill-gas-energy-project-data-and-landfill-technical-data.

[41] Alexander Von Hoffman, “Community Development Past and Present,” in Investing in What Works for America’s Communities, (San Francisco, CA: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, 2012), p. 50.

[42] “About,” New Community Corporation, accessed November 15, 2017, http://www.newcommunity.org/about/; “Frequently Asked Questions,” New Community Corporation, accessed November 15, 2017, http://www.newcommunity.org/about/frequently-asked-questions-faqs/.

[43] “About,” New Community Corporation, accessed November 15, 2017, http://www.newcommunity.org/about/.

[44] “About CDFIs,” CDFI Coalition, accessed November 15, 2017, http://www.cdfi.org/about-cdfis/.

[45] “Latino Credit Union: 2000-2010 Report” Latino Credit Union, accessed November 28, 2016, http://latinoccu.org/assets/10-Year-Report-English-Final-cropped.pdf.

[46] “Impact,” Latino Community Credit Union, accessed November 15 ,2017, https://latinoccu.org/impact/;“Latino Credit Union: 2000-2010 Report” Latino Credit Union, accessed May 8, 2018, http://latinoccu.org/assets/10-Year-Report-English-Final-cropped.pdf.

[47] “Coastal Energy Project” Coastal Community Action Program, accessed November 15, 2017, http://coastalcap.org/coastal-energy-project/; “Craft3 and Coastal Community Action Program: Powering the Elimination of Poverty,” Vimeo, 2014, accessed November 15, 2017, https://vimeo.com/89718788; Kim LaFranchi, “Coastal Energy Project Impact Report,” (Grayland, WA: Strategica Development Solutions, 2011), 4.

[48] “Mission & History,” St. Vincent de Paul Society of Lane County, accessed November 15, 2017 http://www.svdp.us/about-us/mission-history/.

[49] “Nonprofits account for 11.4 million jobs, 10.3 percent of all private sector employment,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, accessed November 14, 2017, https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20141021.htm.

[50] For spending by postsecondary institutions, see: “Fast Facts,” National Center for Education Statistics, accessed November 8, 2017,  https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=75; For hospital procurement spending see: “Hospitals are Economic Anchors in their Communities,” American Hospital Association, January 2017, accessed November 8, 2017, http://www.aha.org/content/17/17econcontribution.pdf.

[51] Charlie Cray, “Using Charters to Redesign Corporations in the Public Interest,” in The Bottom Line or Public Health: Tactics Corporations Use to Influence Health and Health Policy, and What We Can Do to Counter Them, edited by William H. Wiist, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) pp. 305-306. Cray developed this listing in support of an argument for national public chartering. He has since acknowledged that almost certainly public forms of ownership would be required to achieve the goals he sought. Conversation with author, dates etc. and emails. BUT talk to Charlie before finalizing this end note.

[52] Jia Wang, 2016. “Do Economic Development Incentives Crowd Out Public Expenditures in U.S. States?” B.e. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy 16 (1): 513–38. doi:10.1515/bejeap-2015-0042; Richard Florida, “Handing Out Tax Breaks to Businesses Is Worse Than Useless,” CityLab, March 7, 2017, accessed February 7, 2018, https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/03/business-tax-incentives-waste/518754/.

[53] For France, see: SNCF, “EPIC Status,” SNCF, no date, accessed November 6, 2012, http://www.sncf.com/en/meet-sncf/epic-status; For Spain, see: Renfe, “The Company,” Renfe, no date, accessed November 6, 2012, http://www.renfe.com/EN/empresa/index.html; For Belgium, see: Thalys, “About Thalys,” Thalys, no date, accessed November 6, 2012, http://www.thalys.com/fr/en/about-thalys/presentation; for Germany, see: Deutsche Bahn, “2000 to 2008: Restructure and Invest,” DB, January 25, 2012, accessed November 6, 2012, http://www.deutschebahn.com/en/group/history/chronology/2000_2008.html; For Italy, see: Rail Europe, “Italy: Trenitalia,” Rail Europe, no date, accessed November 6, 2012, http://www.raileurope-world.com/about-us-23/railways/article/italy-trenitalia; For the Netherlands, see: “The profile of NS,” NV Nederlandse Spoorwegen, accessed May 8, 2018, https://www.nsannualreport.nl/annual-report-2017/companyprofile/a1002_The-profile-of-NS, and “Organisation of Corporate Governance at NS,” NV Nederlandse Spoorwegen, accessed May 8, 2018, https://www.ns.nl/en/about-ns/corporate-governance/organisation-of-corporate-governance-at-ns.html; For China, see: Keith Bradsher, “High-Speed Rail Poised to Alter China,” New York Times, June 22, 2011, accessed November 6, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/business/global/23rail.html?pagewanted=all; For South Korea, see: Korail, “Korail Innovation Way,” Korail, no date, accessed November 6, 2012, http://info.korail.com/2007/eng/ekr/ekr03000/w_ekr03100.jsp.

[54] For Air France-KLM, see: “2016 Annual Report” Air France – KLM, 2016, accessed May 8, 2018, http://www.airfranceklm.com/sites/default/files/publications/annual_report_2016_1.pdf; For SAS, see: “SAS Annual Report November 2016–October 2017,” SAS Group, accessed May 8, 2018, https://www.sasgroup.net/en/corporate-governance-report-2016-2017/; For El-Al, see: El Al, “Shareholders as of October 31, 2014,” El Al, 2012, accessed May 8, 2018, https://www.elal.com/en/About-ELAL/About-ELAL/Investor-Relations/Pages/Shareholders.aspx; For Singapore Airlines, see: Singapore Airlines, “Stock And Shareholding Information,” Singapore Airlines, 2018, accessed May 8, 2018, https://www.singaporeair.com/en_UK/us/about-us/information-for-investors/shareholding-info/; For airline rankings, see: “

Top 100 Airlines : 2017,” Skytrax, accessed May 10, 2018, http://www.worldairlineawards.com/awards/world_airline_rating.html.

[55] “Share Price & Information,” Airbus, accessed May 8, 2018, http://www.airbus.com/investors/share-price-and-information.html; “About Airbus,” Airbus, accessed May 8, 2018, http://www.airbus.com/company/about-airbus.html.

[56] Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, “Table 2.9. Government ownership of public telecommunication network operators,” in OECD Communications Outlook 2011 (Paris, FR: OECD, June 2011), pp. 78-80. http://dwmw.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/oecd-commoutlook-2011.pdf.

[57] Meagan Day, “Donald Trump Wants to Gut Protections for Bank Customers. Here’s How to Fight Back,” Mother Jones, March 31, 2017, accessed August 18th, 2017, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/03/public-banking-community-private-banks-wall-street-oakland-philadelphia-santa-fe/.

[58] Christopher Cermak, “How Germany’s Three-Tiered Banking System Works,” Handelsblatt Global, June 09, 2017, accessed August 18th, https://global.handelsblatt.com/finance/how-germanys-three-tiered-banking-system-works-779275; “Financial Report 2016 of the Savings Banks Finance Group,” Finanzgruppe Deutscher Sparkassen- und Giroverband, accessed August 18, 2017, https://www.dsgv.de/en/facts/facts-and-figures.html.

[59] Ian Bremmer, “The Long Shadow of the Visible Hand,” Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704852004575258541875590852.html; Carlo Cottarelli, “Fiscal Regimes for Extractive Industries: Design and Implementation,” (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 2012): 23. 

[60] Deborah M. Figart and Mariam Majd, “The Public Bank Movement: A Response to Local Economic Development and Infrastructure Needs in Three U.S. States,” Challenge, 59 (2016): 462.

 

[61] “2015 SUSB Annual Data Tables by Establishment Industry,” United States Census Bureau, September 2017, accessed November 9, 2017, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2015/econ/susb/2015-susb-annual.html.

[62] “2015 SUSB Annual Data Tables by Establishment Industry,” United States Census Bureau, September 2017, accessed November 9, 2017, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2015/econ/susb/2015-susb-annual.html.

[63] “PB Map & Process List,” Participatory Budgeting Project, accessed March 19, 2018, https://www.participatorybudgeting.org/pb-map/.

[64] The University of Pavia professor, Ian Carter, explains egalitarian understandings of positive and negative freedom, writing that the “analysis of constraints helps to explain why socialists and egalitarians have tended to claim that the poor in a capitalist society are as such unfree, or that they are less free than the rich, whereas libertarians have tended to claim that the poor in a capitalist society are no less free than the rich. Egalitarians typically (though not always) assume a broader notion than libertarians of what counts as a constraint on freedom. Although this view does not necessarily imply what [philosopher Isaiah] Berlin would call a positive notion of freedom, egalitarians often call their own definition a positive one, in order to convey the sense that freedom requires not merely the absence of certain social relations of prevention but the presence of abilities, or what Amartya Sen has influentially called ‘capabilities.’” See: Ian Carter, “Positive and Negative Liberty,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, August 2, 2016, accessed June 8, 2017, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/; See also Axel Honneth, The Idea of Socialism (Malden, MA: Polity, 2018) pp. 21-26.

[65] Samuel Arnold, “Socialism,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed June 7, 2017 http://www.iep.utm.edu/socialis/#H6, Carol Gould, “Retrieving Positive Freedom and Why

It Matters,” in Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom : ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ 50 Years Later, edited by Bruce Baum, and Robert Nichols, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), p. 108.

[66] Kate McFarland, “Existing and Upcoming BI-Related Experiments,” basicincome.org, October, 15 ,2017, accessed November 16, 2017, http://basicincome.org/news/2017/10/overview-of-current-basic-income-related-experiments-october-2017/.

[67] U.S. Council of Economic Advisors, Economic Report to the President 2000, (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2000), pp. 23-24, accessed November 9, 2017, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/economic_reports/2000.pdf. ADD REFERENCE TO A GOOD CRITICISM OF GDP

[68] Real gross GDP per capita was $56,823 in Q3 2018. See “Real gross domestic product per capita,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, accessed November 13, 2018, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA; For the increase in income over the 20th Century, see: U.S. Council of Economic Advisors, Economic Report to the President 2000, (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2000), pp. 23-24, accessed November 9, 2017, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/economic_reports/2000.pdf

[69] Serious exploration of such directions occurred among leading political scientists during the 1930s. For a brief overview, see Gar Alperovitz, America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, & Our Democracy (Takoma Park, MD: Democracy Collaborative Press, 2011), p. 65. 

[70] Gar Alperovitz, Joe Guinan and Thomas M. Hanna, “The Policy Weapon Climate Activists Need,” The Nation, April 26 ,2017, accessed May 11, 2018, https://www.thenation.com/article/the-policy-weapon-climate-activists-need/.

[71] [71] For a discussion of quantitative easing and other modern monetary strategies commonly used by central banks around the world, and by the Federal Reserve Board in the United States see: Randall L. Wray, Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems, (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); and Stephanie Kelton, “How We Think About the Deficit Is Mostly Wrong,” October 5, 2017, accessed November16,2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/opinion/deficit-tax-cuts-trump.html

 In recent years, financing well over $2 trillion has been developed in support of banking and other needs. For specific ways in which such strategies can be used to finance a buy-out of corporations that add to climate changer dangers, see: Gar Alperovitz, Joe Guinan and Thomas M. Hanna, “The Policy Weapon Climate Activists Need,” The Nation, April 26, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/the-policy-weapon-climate-activists-need/.   

[72] Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2015), p. 42.

[73] Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2015), p. 17.

[74] Samuel Bowles, The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016) p. 116.

[75] Samuel Bowles, The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016) p. 4.

[76] Raymond Williams, Culture & Society, 1780-1950 (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1960), p. 353.

[77].Many of the most significant social policies of the twentieth century—including Social Security, the GI Bill, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and Federal Housing Administration policy—advantaged white families while excluding communities of color.[77] For example, Social Security occupational requirements initially excluded 65 percent of African Americans.[77] In terms of housing, UC Santa Barbara Professor George Lipsitz notes that “The Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration financed more than $120 billion worth of new housing between 1934 and 1962, but less than 2 percent of this real estate was available to nonwhite families—and most of that small amount was located in segregated areas.”[77] The Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein, meanwhile, has demonstrated that such segregation was not simply the cumulate result of countless private decisions, but was in many cases the direct result of government actions: establishing segregated public housing, promoting exclusionary zoning laws, providing FHA guarantees to developers on condition that they did not rent or sell to African Americans, and largely excluding African Americans from federally backed mortgages.[77] At a minimum, the US government must acknowledge and remedy its specific historical injustices. “When government is directly involved, claims for systemic compensation to match systemic harm become most compelling,” writes Columbia University historian Ira Katznelson. “Public policies, after all, have been the most decisive instruments dividing Americans into different racial groups with vastly different circumstances and possibilities.”[77] Beyond this, reparations are necessary to address the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the theft of Native American lands and livelihoods, in addition to the ongoing reality of systemic racism. A nation founded on white supremacy must face its past squarely if has any hope of moving beyond it. See: Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: The Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006), 6;  Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2017).

[78] For further information on US interventions in support of corporate interests, on the one hand, and anti-democratic forces on the other, see: Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York, NY: Times Books, 2006).

[79] Udo Sautter, “Government and Unemployment: The Use of Public Works before the New Deal,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 73, (1986), p. 64.

[80] Ann Shola Orloff, “The Political Origins of America’s Belated Welfare State,” in The Politics of Social Policy in the United States, ed. by Margaret Weir, et al., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). p. 53.

[81] Edwin Amenta and Bruce G. Carruthers, “The formative years of US social spending policies: Theories of the welfare state and the American states during the Great Depression.” American Sociological Review, Vol. 53 (1988): 663.

[82] Edwin Amenta and Bruce G. Carruthers, “The formative years of US social spending policies: Theories of the welfare state and the American states during the Great Depression.” American Sociological Review, Vol. 53 (1988): 663-664.

[83] Harold Groves, “The Wisconsin State Income Tax” in The Wisconsin Blue Book (Madison, WI: Democrat Printing Company,  1933) p. 51.

[84] Mary Schons,“Woman Suffrage,” National Geographic, January, 21, 2011, accessed November 7, 2017, https://www.nationalgeographic.org/news/woman-suffrage/.

 

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Gar Alperovitz

Gar Alperovitz is the former Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland. Historian, political economist, activist, writer, and former government official, he is the author of numerous books, among them What Then Must We Do? (2013); Unjust Deserts, with Lew Daly (2008); America Beyond Capitalism (2005); Making a Place for Community, with David Imbroscio … Continued