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…
Author Archive for Michael A. Peck
Michael A. Peck, MAPA Group
Are We All Wee Workers?
The history and future of concentrated economic power versus functioning democracy and an aspirational future of work with no workers left behind shows the intrinsic value of equating shareholders and stakeholders. This is accomplished in two concurrent steps: first, by relentlessly pursuing anti-trust policies on macro national and global levels to break down platform monopolists so that competition and transparency…
Creating local paths that work for local stakeholders
1worker1vote advisory board member, Dr. Steve Sleigh, with Dr. Julian Manley, Chair of Preston/UK’s Cooperative Development Network (PCDN) inspired by Mondragon’s cooperative ecosystem, outside of the University of Central Lancashire following a hybrid shared ownership model finance roundtable hosted by Julian and the PCDN on“Pension Funds and the value creation conversation,” featuring Steve and Cllr Martyn Rawlinson on “The use…
Legal Cannabis – A Blueprint from Persecution to Restitution through Local Stakeholders as Shareholders
The global legal cannabis industry is projected to reach $57 billion by 2027 according to a Forbes report but that may be a floor, not a ceiling. Other prognosticators (Grand View Research) predict the global legal marijuana market, hemp excluded which had $827 million in 2017 USA sales and is expected to triple that amount by 2022, will come in…
We Can’t Go Home Again
Day 34, five weeks, two missed paychecks later and holding our collective breath; all the King’s tweets and all the King’s mandarins…. can’t put Humpty Dumpty back to work again. Those who save lives and serve in harm’s way for pennies on a paper dollar are told they are “non-essential” but then forced to work without pay by those in…
Cry the Beloved Country Redux
Saturday, October 6th, 2018: the country continues to self-dismantle. The world is witnessing once again how America’s political and judicial processes bully and devalue America’s women. The haters, enablers, dividers and dictators are winning; there is no uplifting alternative vision stronger than reactive selfishness, greed, disgust and fear with enough bipartisan power and inspiration to prevail. Echoing Democratic Party legislative…
Epitaph or Prophecy: Great Recession 2008
The quote, “forgive your enemies, but never forget their names,” is attributed to President John F. Kennedy. In that spirit, my gospel on the financial crash ten years ago this month leading to the September/October 2008 Great Recession is the word according to Matt Taibbi (author of the legendary Rolling Stone magazine article in 2009 where he searingly referred to…
A Good Country for Bad Choices
– Labor Day 2018 Blog Post – Polls and newscasts consistently show that America is a country at uncivil and civic war with itself. National paeans to compromise and solidarity have been replaced by daily twitter dog whistles from 140 to 280 characters where divisive hot air verbiage is either expelled, sucked or typed through pursed foreign and domestic lips…
Slamming the Consolidation & Concentration Brakes on Internet 1.0 Defects
First, of all the global large countries, the U.S. is most advanced in terms of everything under the sun being Internet connected (Finland, Israel and Singapore compete in this category, but their geographical footprint is not comparable). Not necessarily with the newest technology and certainly not with the latest infrastructure, the USA ranks first in universal automation that is most…
If And Only If
In early October 2016, 1worker1vote submitted a grant application to the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change Grant Competition to solve the most threatening challenges facing America and the world. Our submission declared a nationwide “solidarity deficit” and confirmed that, “Since the 1970s, America has counterbalanced high per capita GDP with rising unequal income distribution. ‘Winners-take-all’ results produce stagnant wages, declining mobility, increased…
