“…we all live in the same country now: that of capitalism.” – Bong Joon-ho, director of the 2020 Oscar Best Picture Award film, “Parasite” “Mr. Trump has declined to use his authority to commandeer private industry to produce medical supplies, counting instead on a market-driven response. – New York Times “We learned from the AIDS epidemic that infection traces the…
Author Archive for Michael A. Peck
Michael A. Peck, MAPA Group
Bipartisan Mortal Apologies to Gettysburg
The John Roberts U.S. Supreme Court has much to answer for ideologically twisting the rule of law to disserve a rising majority-minority country, and in the process lower America’s shared democracy common denominators. Abraham Lincoln’s hoped-for inclusive, transparent, regenerative and representative “e pluribus Unum”, a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”, earned through selfless-spilled blue and…
Why Not a Worker-Owned Bloomberg L.P. to Ignite America’s Stakeholder Economy?
The Bloomberg 2020 presidential campaign is recent history but the former candidate’s offer to sell his publicly traded, supremely successful company, Bloomberg L.P., through a blind trust can still positively shake, rattle and roll working class and corporate America if uplifted by more progressive conversion vision and practice. As wayshower, California’s AB-5 worker protection bill illuminates one path forward to…
Democratize the Corporation (From Great Transition Initiative)
Michael Peck’s contribution to the Great Transitions Initiative’s Forum: Corporations in the Crosshairs: From Reform to Redesign The capitalist system is “on fire,” putting global democracy, climate, and peace at risk. Oxfam International reports that billionaires worldwide grow $2.5 billion richer every day, while the poorest half of the global population falls further behind. With social mobility still handicapped by…
Back to the Political Future?
1worker1vote posted this piece toward the end of June 2016, What’s the Matter with Little England?, over four months before the November 2016 USA elections. Reading it again is painful but instructive. With UK elections set for this December and the 2020 U.S. presidential elections one year from this week, will the Brexit past once more presage another “America First” prologue, adding…
Liberating Our Futures Together: Building the Cooperative Ecosystem in Cincinnati
The modern co-op movement originated with the 1840s Rochdale principles in Manchester/UK as did industrial unionization. Cooperatives and unions evolved separately but today’s extreme solidarity, inequality & climate deficits & imperatives compel renewing and scaling the union-coop bond. Given its dual Labor & Cooperative founding rationale; 1worker1vote (a catalytic economic development organizing movement) focuses on policies, practices and helping to build…
Thrown “Unter” The Uber Bus
Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction especially when it comes to putting and keeping others “in their place”. Since August, the American world@work has been rocked by three hitherto difficult to predict revelations. First, the U.S. Business Roundtable publicly confessed that “Shareholder Primacy” is no longer its holy grail. Second, the myths-shattering State of California passed AB-5 declaring that giant…
American Factory – from Netflix and the Obamas – and More Movies About the Economy
An impactful visual, like good storytelling, is worth more than a mere thousand words. American Factory joins the films Shift Change, Weconomics and Don’t Give Up Your Voice in showcasing the rising hopeful-good, the very bad and the extremely ugly in the global quest, beyond borders, markets and silos for an aspirational future of work where all stakeholder workers have a…
The U.S. Business Roundtable Is Born Again
Sometimes earth-shattering truths slip in through the side door. Comparable to the unexpected revelation and conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus, The New York Times reports from the U.S. Business Roundtable Front that, “the chief executives of nearly 200 of the nation’s largest companies pledged to revise the longstanding principle that shareholder interests come first.” The Times’ understated…
The One & Only Leo Gerard
Leo Gerard retires in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Monday, July 15th, 2019, after 54 years as a union member and 18 years as the International President of United Steelworkers (USW). The following is not an epitaph but a declaration: “Bestowed with the common touch of someone who willingly lives his roots every single day, there’s not been a power-paradigm-photo of note…
