In today’s economically class-cleaved America, ideological resistance continues unabated to the deployment of government as a force for good especially in contentious change scenarios such as solving growing wealth and opportunity divides and the future of organized Labor (to name just two). Too often, progress is facilitated mainly through the prism of trickle-down tax code set asides to inspire transformational…
Tag: OWOVarchive
Rebuilding the Yellow Brick Road
A new worker-ownership evolution-revolution featuring more virtuous capitalism communities of practice is demonstrating that doing well can realistically and profitably be based on doing good. This brave new economic world is emerging from green-shoot, “made in America” antidotes to structural unemployment and income inequality, sprouting ubiquitously among increasing absentee-owner-plagued urban and rural geographies. Hybrid home, land, and workplace sovereignty-recuperation models…
When the Right Ones Get It Wrong
The Mondragon Cooperative Group (“Humanity At Work” through Cooperation, Participation, Social Responsibility and Innovation, headquartered in the Basque region between Spain and France) is ranked as the world’s largest worker-owned industrial cooperative group but also as the top Basque industrial group, tenth in Spain with 80,000 personnel, a presence in 70 countries, and winner of the 2013 Financial Times “Boldness in Business” award. Mondragon’s…
Corporate & Capitalist Transition & Transformation Models
Paper submitted by Michael Peck (Mondragon USA), Steve Dubb (The Democracy Collaborative, University of Maryland), and Rob Witherell (United Steelworkers Union) for the “Corporations in a Great Transition: Visions, Models, and Pathways for Transformation” event hosted by the Tellus Institute & MIT Sloan School of Management, in Boston on October 31st & November 1st, 2013. Capitalism at a Crossroads Although the…
The Reading Revolution
The debate over who lost Detroit and how to fix it rages on while Politico reports in “Break-up-the-big-banks fever hits the states” that legislators from “at least 18 states have introduced resolutions this year calling on Congress to split up banking giants by putting back in place a wall between commercial banking, taking deposits and making loans, and investment banking,…
Judo Inequality
“Think about it this way. We’re killing people in foreign lands in order to extract 200-million-year-old sunlight. Then we burn it . . . in order to boil water to create steam to drive a turbine to generate electricity. We frack our own backyards and pollute our rivers, or we blow up our mountaintops just miles from our nation’s capital…
Countering the Emptiness
“In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens—a substantial part of its whole population—who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life. I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them…
Building the New American Ownership Society from the Middle…Out
Now that the elections are over and before the nation’s fiscal cliff becomes a roadrunner cartoon without a happy ending, how can “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” with more elected women reformat, reinvent and re-glue Humpty Dumpty America back together again? In fact, today’s transformational issue transfixing our immediate attention is twofold – whether the chicken…
Running In The Deep – A Tale of Two Cities
Two of the hardest lessons to assimilate leading up to America’s 2012 national elections include the unchallenged devastation from extreme weather fall-out and credible domestic job creation economics by fully globalized industries such as automotive production. The first lesson is being re-learned in excruciating real-time (160 lives lost, $60 billion in damages, and counting) by the country’s powered-out, Northeast coastal…
The Shared Prosperity Election
Voting to preserve morally stale, unproductive and oligarchy self-serving economic inequalities will only reinforce the trickle-down public versus trickle-down private sector thematic impedance mismatch. This, in turn, will exacerbate opportunistic tendencies within those who jump to capitalize on so-called electoral mandates to entertain even more disingenuous comparisons between inherent incongruities. Economic statistics prove in jobs lost and created both domestically…
