Mortality is universal and bipartisan: black lives do matter and lower economic class, middle-aged white lives with a high school diploma or less are driving actuarial chart curves downward by dying off more quickly than they should. Causes are also bipartisan: disintegrating family cohesion, worsening job prospects in a rapidly decaying, inequality-driven culture that commoditizes the people who work, and inferior…
Renewing the Cooperative-Union Bond
A new culture of work renewing the original cooperative-union bond = workplace democracy, equity, solidarity & greater resiliency 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 economic class divisions and racial tensions at levels not experienced since the Great Depression. This dynamic drastically altered the…
Viscerally Un-American
Friday, January 27th, 2017 – This Administration’s decision to ban all immigrants including refugees fleeing persecution from seven Muslim countries fails on four counts as not being just, accurate, useful or in keeping with America’s founding immigrant values and history. According to Georgia Public Broadcasting (National Public Radio) and New York Times reports, (How Does Trump’s Immigration Freeze Square With…
Beyond Snapchat Greatness
In a mobile, multimedia Snapchat image-messaging world, all human glory is explicitly fleeting and self-deleting. Midwest Rural America, so crucial to Electoral College victory last November, now risks its own Snapchat moment. Pessimists predict that newfound interest in salvaging America’s industrial heartland may evaporate as attention spans shift, compelling alternative priorities and “gotcha” scandalmongering suck up surplus policy oxygen, and “winner…
The Bipartisan Future of Work
Despite widely diverging Liberal, Conservative and Libertarian beliefs, 2016 change-voters united in recoiling against the incessant chipping away of shared founding principles, institutions and values. Both post- and pre-vote polls taken during the 2015-2016 campaign timeframe show that Trump and Sanders voters felt similarly alienated from America’s governing elites and their corporatist, rent-seeking policies widening unequal outcomes and opportunities. Notwithstanding,…
Neither Polemic, Redistributive, Protectionist, Elitist nor Expensive
There is no more transformational and now proven investment in human capital than greatly widened, deepened and inclusive “one worker, one vote” workplace ownership. With just a small amount of imagination but a great deal of concerted convening, America can have its all-inclusive, national rising-rebirth cake and eat it too through worker ownership policies and practices that are neither polemic,…
Do Three Imminent Regulatory Ripples a Worker Ownership Tidal Wave Make?
The Holy Grail for those preferring to work within the current predatory capitalist system rather than overthrow it is to combine market-based incentives with progressive but not redistributive policies. Given the vast, untapped waste lands of anachronistic and inequality-enabling U.S. tax, financial, labor and commerce regulations, it’s refreshing to note three new developments that can feed the evolving, aspirational “Ownership…
Labor Day in America
Obdurately like a species voting for its own extinction, American Democracy self-deports its founding values in exchange for a massive solidarity deficit with well-defined causes and victims but some emerging remedies. Four categories cry out for a national conversation this Labor Day: decaying civic culture, shareholders with more rights than stakeholders, comparative actuarial tables based on race and economic class,…
Ownership for All
Only 32 million American employees, about ten percent of the country, have some form of equity relationship with their workplaces. Despite intense economic populism positions taken during the 2015-2016 presidential campaigns by leading candidates from both parties; widespread, deepened, and more inclusive worker equity policies and practices are still adrift on the nation’s cutting room floor. This is no small…
What’s the Matter with Little England?
“The global economy remains stuck in a deflationary expansion of minimal growth and minimal rates and electorates are increasingly voting in the developed world against wage deflation, high unemployment, immigration and inequality.” Merrill Lynch investors note, Monday, June 27, 2016 Post-Brexit sociopolitical psychoanalysis cannot be fully served without rehashing the relevance of Thomas Frank’s 2004 benchmarking literary diagnosis, “What’s the…
