[chilefuturo] A propos de indignados y 99%, una curiosa posicion...

From: Patricio Chacon <pachamos@xxxxxxxxx>
To: chilefuturo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, chile-h@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Discussion Regarding the Chilean Social Sciences <CHILE-H@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Radio U. de Chile" <pautauchile@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:57:13 -0300
..."Ni revolucion ni reforma" (agregaria "sino que todo lo contrario",
pero seria poco serio). Lo mas curioso es que lo presenta como nueva
estrategia para la izquierda. Que diran los izquierdosos chilensis? Me
parece que nunca le dieron mucha bola a estas cosas -que, dicho sea de
paso, me parecen muuuy interesantes-.

Notable la cantidad y variedad de "instituciones y formas alternativas
no capitalistas" que funcan en USA, y de las que nada -o casi nada- se
sabe.

Muy bonito, pero me pizpo que los 99% quieren mucho mas que eso, y antes.

Cdo lo lean, talvez mis comentarios les calcen.

Esta en http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29560.htm

Sorry, en ingles. Y es larguito.

Patricio

Neither Revolution Nor Reform: A New Strategy for the Left
By Gar Alperovitz

October 31, 2011 "Dissent" -- For over a century, liberals and
radicals have seen the possibility of change in capitalist systems
from one of two perspectives: the reform tradition assumes that
corporate institutions remain central to the system but believes that
regulatory policies can contain, modify, and control corporations and
their political allies. The revolutionary tradition assumes that
change can come about only if corporate institutions are eliminated or
transcended during an acute crisis, usually but not always by
violence.

But what happens if a system neither reforms nor collapses in crisis?

Quietly, a different kind of progressive change is emerging, one that
involves a transformation in institutional structures and power, a
process one could call “evolutionary reconstruction.” At the height of
the financial crisis in early 2009, some kind of nationalization of
the banks seemed possible. “The public hates bankers right now,” the
Brookings Institution’s Douglas Elliot observed. “Truthfully, you
would find considerable support for hanging a number of bankers…” It
was a moment, Barack Obama told banking CEOs, when his administration
was “the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” But the president
opted for a soft bailout engineered by Treasury Secretary Timothy
Geithner and White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers. Whereas
Franklin Roosevelt attacked the “economic royalists” and built and
mobilized his political base, Obama entered office with an already
organized base and largely ignored it.

When the next financial crisis occurs, and it will, a different
political opportunity may be possible. One option has already been put
on the table: in 2010, thirty-three senators voted to break up large
Wall Street investment banks that were “too big to fail.” Such a
policy would not only reduce financial vulnerability; it would alter
the structure of institutional power.

Still, breaking up banks, even if successful, isn’t the end of the
process. The modern history of the financial industry, to say nothing
of anti-trust strategies in general, suggests that the big banks would
ultimately regroup and reconcentrate and restore their domination of
the system. So what can be done when “breaking them up” fails?

The potentially explosive power of public anger at financial
institutions surfaced in May 2010 when the Senate voted by a 96-0
margin to audit the Federal Reserve’s lending (a provision included
ultimately in the Dodd-Frank legislation, which was designed to
protect American taxpayers and consumers from financial corruption and
to make the financial system more accountable)—something that had
never been done before. Traditional reforms have aimed at improved
regulation, higher reserve requirements, and the channeling of credit
to key sectors. But future crises may feature a spectrum of
sophisticated proposals for more radical change offered by figures on
both the left and right. For instance, a “Limited Purpose Banking”
strategy put forward by conservative economist Laurence Kolticoff
would impose a 100-percent reserve requirement on banks. Because banks
typically provide loans in amounts many times their reserves, this
would transform them into modest institutions with little or no
capacity to finance speculation. It would also nationalize the
creation of all new money as federal authorities, rather than the
banks, would directly control system-wide financial flows. A variety
of respected liberal as well as conservative economists have welcomed
this strategy—including five Nobel laureates in economics.

On the left, the economist Fred Moseley has proposed that for banks
deemed too big to fail “permanent nationalization with bonds-to-stocks
swaps for bondholders is the most equitable solution...” Nationally
owned banks, he argues, would provide a basis for “a more stable and
public-oriented banking system in the future.” Most striking is the
argument of Willem Buiter, the chief economist of Citigroup no less,
that if the public underwrites the costs of bailouts, “banks should be
in public ownership…” In fact, had the taxpayer funds used to bail out
major financial institutions in 2007–2010 been provided on condition
that voting stock be issued in return for the investment, one or more
major banks would, in fact, have become essentially publicly
controlled banks.

Unknown to most Americans, there have been a large number of small and
medium-sized public banking institutions for some time now. They have
financed small businesses, renewable energy, co-ops, housing,
infrastructure, and other specifically targeted areas. There are also
7,500 community-based credit unions. Further precedents for public
banking range from Small Business Administration loans to the
activities of the U.S.-dominated World Bank. In fact, the federal
government already operates 140 banks and quasi-banks that provide
loans and loan guarantees for an extraordinary range of domestic and
international economic activities. Through its various farm, housing,
electricity, cooperative and other loans, the Department of
Agriculture alone operates the equivalent of the seventh largest bank
in America.

The economic crisis has also produced widespread interest in the Bank
of North Dakota, a highly successful state-owned bank founded in 1919
when the state was governed by legislators belonging to the
left-populist Nonpartisan League. Over the past fourteen years, the
bank has returned $340 million in profits to the state and has broad
support in the business community as well as among progressive
activists. Legislative proposals to establish banks patterned in whole
or in part on the North Dakota model have been put forward by
activists and legislators in Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona,
New Mexico, Montana, Illinois, Louisiana, New York, Maryland,
Virginia, Maine, and Massachusetts. In Oregon, with strong support
from a coalition of farmers, small-business owners, and community
bankers, and backed by State Treasurer Ted Wheeler, a variation on the
theme, “a virtual state bank” (that is, one that has no storefronts
but channels state-backed capital to support other banks) is likely to
be formed in the near future. How far the various strategies may
develop is likely to depend on the intensity of future financial
crises, the degree of social and economic pain and political anger in
general, and the capacity of a new politics to focus citizen anger in
support of major institutional reconstruction and democratization.

THAT A long era of social and economic austerity and failing reform
might paradoxically open the way to more populist or radical
institutional change—including various forms of public ownership—is
also suggested by emerging developments in health care. Here the next
stage of change is already under way. At first, it is likely to be
harmful. Republican efforts to cut back the mostly unrealized benefits
of the Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010, provide one example of
this. The first stages, however, are not likely to be the last. Polls
show overwhelming distrust of and deep hostility toward insurance
companies. We can also expect public outrage to be fueled by stories
like that of fifty-nine-year-old James Verone who attempted to rob a
bank in Gastonia, North Carolina this year—but only, he made clear,
for one dollar. The reason: unemployed and without health insurance,
Verone simply saw no way other than going to jail to get health care
for a growth on his chest, foot difficulties, and back problems.

Cost pressures are building in ways that will also continue to
undermine corporations facing global competitors, forcing them to seek
new solutions. A recent report from the federal Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services (“National Health Expenditure Projections,
2009–2019”) projects health care costs to rise from the 2010 level of
17.5 percent of GDP to 19.6 percent in 2019. It has long been clear
that the central question is to what extent, and at what pace,
underlying cost pressures ultimately force development of some form of
single-payer system—the only serious way to deal with the underlying
problem.

A NEW national solution is ultimately likely to come either in
response to a burst of pain-driven public outrage or more slowly
through a state by state build up to a national system. Massachusetts,
of course, already has a near universal plan, with 99.8 percent of
children covered and 98.1 percent of adults. In Hawaii, health
coverage (provided mostly by nonprofit insurers) reaches 91.8 percent
of adults in large part because of a 1970s law mandating low cost
insurance for anyone working twenty hours or more a week. In Vermont,
Governor Peter Shumlin signed legislation in May 2011 creating “Green
Mountain Care,” a broad effort that would ultimately allow state
residents to move into a publicly funded insurance pool—in essence a
form of single-payer insurance. Universal coverage, dependent on a
federal waiver, would begin in 2017 and possibly as early as 2014. In
Connecticut, legislation approved in June 2011 created a “SustiNet”
Health Care Cabinet directed to produce a business plan for a
nonprofit public health insurance program by 2012, with the goal of
offering such a plan beginning in 2014. In California, there is a good
chance a universal “Medicare for all” bill may be on the governor’s
desk for signature by mid-2012. (Similar legislation passed by both
the House and the Senate was vetoed by then-Governor Schwarzenegger in
2006 and 2008.) In all, nearly twenty states will soon consider bills
to create one or another form of universal health care.

One can also observe a developing institutional dynamic in the central
neighborhoods of some of the nation’s larger cities, places that have
consistently suffered high levels of unemployment and underemployment,
with poverty commonly above 25 percent. In such neighborhoods,
democratizing development has also gone forward, again paradoxically,
precisely because traditional policies—in this case involving large
expenditures for jobs, housing and other necessities—have been
politically impossible. “Social enterprises” that undertake businesses
in order to support specific social missions now increasingly make up
what is sometimes called “a fourth sector” (different from the
government, business, and nonprofit sectors). Roughly 4,500
not-for-profit community development corporations are largely devoted
to housing development. There are now also more than eleven thousand
businesses owned in whole or part by their employees; five million
more individuals are involved in these enterprises than are members of
private-sector unions. Another 130 million Americans are members of
various urban, agricultural, and credit union cooperatives. In many
cities, important new “land trust” developments are underway using an
institutional form of nonprofit or municipal ownership that develops
and maintains low- and moderate-income housing.

The various institutional efforts have also begun to develop
innovative strategies that suggest broader possibilities for change.
Consider the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, Ohio, an integrated
group of worker-owned companies, supported in part by the purchasing
power of large hospitals and universities. The cooperatives include a
solar installation company, an industrial scale (and ecologically
advanced) laundry, and soon a greenhouse capable of producing more
than five million heads of lettuce a year. The Cleveland effort, which
is partly modeled on the nearly 100,000 person Mondragón cooperatives
in the Basque region of Spain, is on track to create new businesses,
year by year, as time goes on. However, its goal is not simply worker
ownership, but the democratization of wealth and community-building in
general in the low-income Greater University Circle area of what was
once a thriving industrial city. Linked by a nonprofit corporation and
a revolving fund, the companies cannot be sold outside the network;
they also return 10 percent of profits to help develop additional
worker-owned firms in the area. (Full disclosure: The Democracy
Collaborative, which I co-founded, has played an important role in
helping develop the Cleveland effort. See www.Community-Wealth.org for
further information on this and many other local and state efforts.)

Another innovative enterprise is Market Creek Plaza in San Diego.
There a comprehensive, community-owned project links individual and
collective wealth-building through a $23.5-million commercial and
cultural complex anchored by a shopping center. The complex has
developed a range of social and economic projects that have resulted
in the employment of more than 1,700 people. Its multicultural
emphasis on the arts has helped create several venues for common
activity among the local Asian, Hispanic, and black communities.

Significantly, these collectively owned businesses are commonly
supported by unusual local alliances, including not only progressives;
labor unions; and nonprofit and religious leaders; but also, in many
cases, the backing of local businesses and bankers. The efforts have
also attracted surprising political support. In Indiana, for example,
Republican State Treasurer Richard Mourdock has established a state
linked deposit program to provide state financing support for employee
ownership. At this writing, Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown has
plans to introduce model legislation to support the development of an
initial group of Evergreen-style efforts in diverse parts of the
country. Environmental concerns are also involved; many of the
enterprises are “green” by design, increasingly so as time goes on.
Cleveland’s Evergreen laundry, which uses less than a third the amount
of water used by comparable commercial firms, is one of the most
ecologically advanced in the Midwest. In Washington state, Coastal
Community Action (CCA) operates a portfolio of housing, food, health,
and employment programs for low-income residents that uses development
and ownership of a fourteen million dollar wind turbine to generate
income to support its social service programs.

Yet another sphere of institutional growth centers on land
development. By maintaining direct ownership of areas surrounding
transit station exits, public agencies in Washington, D.C., Atlanta,
and other cities earn millions capturing the increased land values
their transit investments create. The town of Riverview, Michigan, has
been a national leader in trapping methane from its landfills and
using it to fuel electricity generation, thereby providing both
revenues and jobs. There are roughly five hundred similar projects
nationwide. Many cities have established municipally owned hotels.
There are also over two thousand publicly owned utilities that provide
power (and, increasingly, broadband services) to more than forty-five
million Americans, in the process generating $50 billion in annual
revenue. Significant public institutions are also common at the state
level. CalPERS, California’s public pension authority, helps finance
local community development needs; in Alaska, state oil revenues
provide each citizen with dividends from public investment strategies
as a matter of right; in Alabama, public pension investing has long
focused on state economic development (including employee-owned
firms).

ALTHOUGH PUBLIC ownership is surprisingly widespread, it can also be
vulnerable to challenge. The fiscal crisis, and conservative
resistance to raising taxes, has led some mayors and governors to sell
off public assets. In Indiana, Governor Mitch Daniels sold the Indiana
Toll Road to Spanish and Australian investors. In Chicago, then-Mayor
Richard Daley privatized parking meters and toll collection on the
Chicago Skyway and even proposed selling off recycling collection,
equipment maintenance, and the annual “Taste of Chicago” festival. How
far continuing financial and political pressures may lead other
officials to attempt to secure revenues by selling off public assets
is an open question. Public resistance to such strategies, although
less widely publicized, has been surprisingly strong in many areas.
Toll road sales have been held up in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and
newly elected Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently voiced his
opposition to an attempt to privatize Midway Airport as previously
attempted by Daley. An effort to transfer city-owned parking garages
to private ownership in Los Angeles also failed when residents and
business leaders realized parking rates would spike if the deal went
through.

One thing is certain: traditional liberalism, dependent on expensive
federal policies and strong labor unions, is moribund. The government
no longer has much capacity to use progressive taxation to achieve the
goal of equity or to regulate corporations effectively. Congressional
deadlocks on such matters are the rule, not the exception. At the same
time, ongoing economic stagnation or mild upturns followed by further
decay, and “real” unemployment rates in the 15 percent to 16 percent
range appear more likely than a return to booming economic times.

IRONICALLY, THIS grim new order may open the way for the kinds of
“evolutionary reconstructive” institutional change described here.
Since the Great Depression, liberal activists and policy makers have
implicitly assumed they were providing one or another form of
“countervailing power” against large corporations. But institutional
reconstruction aims either to weaken or displace corporate power.
Strategies like anti-trust or efforts to “break up” big banks aim to
weaken. Public banking, municipal utilities, and single-payer health
plans attempt to displace privately owned companies. At the same time,
community-based enterprises offer public officials alternatives to
paying large tax-incentive bribes to big corporations.

Of course, “evolutionary reconstruction” might fail, as have most
kinds of top-down national reform. The era of stalemate and decay
might continue and worsen. Like ancient Rome, the United States could
simply decline and fall, unable to address its social ills.

However, even during a sustained era of stalemate and decay, it may be
possible to develop a coherent long-term progressive strategic
direction. Such a direction would build upon the remaining energies of
traditional liberal reform, animated over time by new populist anger
and movements aimed at confronting corporate power, the extreme
concentration of income, failing public services, the ecological
crisis, and military adventurism. And it would explicitly advocate the
construction of new institutions run by people committed to developing
an expansively democratic polity, thereby giving political voice to
the new constituencies emerging alongside the new developments at the
same time it helps to begin altering underlying institutional power
balances.

In connection with environmental issues, at least, some “capitalists”
also seem willing to sign onto this vision. New organizations like the
Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) and the American
Sustainable Business Council (ASBC) have been quietly developing
momentum in recent years. BALLE, which has more than 22,000 small
business members, works to promote sustainable local community
development. ASBC (which includes BALLE as a member) is an advocacy
and lobbying effort that involves more than 150,000 business
professionals and 30 separate business organizations committed to
sustainability. Leading White House figures and such Cabinet-level
officials as Labor Secretary Hilda Solis have welcomed the
organization as a counter to the national Chamber of Commerce.
(Jeffrey Hollender, chair of ASBC’s Business Leadership Council and
former CEO of Seventh Generation, has denounced the Chamber for
“fighting democracy and destroying America’s economic future” because
of its opposition to climate change legislation and its support for
the Citizens United decision.) Gus Speth, a member of ASBC’s Advisory
Board (and former environmental adviser to Presidents Carter and
Clinton) offers a more far-reaching general perspective: “For the most
part, we have worked within this current system of political economy,
but working within the system will not succeed in the end when what is
needed is transformative change in the system itself.”

AT THE heart of the spectrum of emerging institutional change is the
traditional radical principle that the ownership of capital should be
subject to democratic control. In a nation where 1 percent of the
population owns nearly as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the
nation, this principle may be particularly appealing to the young—the
people who will shape the next political era. In 2009, even as
Republicans assailed President Obama and his liberal allies as immoral
“socialists,” a Rasmussen poll reported that Americans under thirty
were “essentially evenly divided” as to whether they preferred
“capitalism” or “socialism.” Even if many were unsure about what
“socialism” is, they were clearly open to something new, whatever it
might be called. A non-statist, community-building,
institution-changing, democratizing strategy might well capture their
imagination and channel their desire to heal the world. It is surely a
positive direction to pursue. Just possibly, it could open the way to
an era of true progressive renewal, even one day perhaps step-by-step
systemic change or the kind of unexpected, explosive,
movement-building power evidenced in the “Arab Spring” and,
historically, in our own civil rights, feminist, and other great
movements.

Gar Alperovitz, Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the
University of Maryland and Co-Founder of the Democracy Collaborative,
is the author, most recently, of America Beyond Capitalism and (with
Lew Daly) Unjust Deserts. He is working on a book on system-changing
institutional directions.

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-- 
Patricio Chacon Moscatelli
Fono 56 9 96285304
En Skype, "pachamos"
http://web.archive.org/web/20050329193647/www.geocities.com/etica_piagetiana/
http://piagetianmoraldevelopment.blogspot.com/
http://sites.google.com/site/desarrollomoralpiaget/
http://pachamos.googlepages.com
[chilefuturo] A propos de indignados y 99%, una curiosa posicion...

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