Gar Alperovitz: Workplace Democracy

Gar Alperovitz on workplace democracy, workers' self-management and co-ops.

Websites for more information:
http://evergreencooperatives.com/
http://www.mondragon-corporation.com/...
http://www.democracyatwork.info/learn...
http://www.thenews.coop/
http://www.democracyatwork.info/
http://shiftchange.org/

http://www.iopsociety.org/
http://www.iww.org/
http://www.afed.org.uk/
http://www.solfed.org.uk/
http://libcom.org/
http://www.freedompress.org.uk/news/
http://occupywallst.org/
http://www.occupytogether.org/

http://www.garalperovitz.com/

Videos/documentaries:
"The Cleveland Model"
"The Mondragon Experiment"
"The Take"
"Together" &
"Shift Change" (trailer):
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=...

"What Then Must We Do?" [full]:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX-Moc...

Noam Chomsky on Workplace Democracy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ugGqJ...

Richard Wolff on Workplace Democracy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls7QZm...

Anarchism and Libertarian Socialism explained:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=...

Is Minimum Wage Another Distraction? Let's talk Basic Income, Shall We?

Originally posted at PopularResistance.org



Cheri Honkala of the Poor Peoples Economic Campaign and Vice President of the Green Shadow Cabinet joins the host Dennis Trainor, Jr. and the Resistance Report panel (Nicole Carty (The Other 98%), Julianna Forlano (Absurdity Today) and Joel Northam (Acronym TV Contributor) - to discuss the jobs crisis in the United States, the perpetually underemployed, and the impact of a raise in the minimum wage versus a policy that guaranteed an income for all.

Climate Change Fail

Originally posted at AcronymTV

http://youtu.be/FJI6NWjQIkA





In what should be another colossal embarrassment for the United States- recently leaked internal documents show how little our government is prepared to take responsibility for the damage done by climate change, the negative effects of which are caused by our hyper capitalist culture of consumption without consequence.



Nithin Sethi, writing at the Hindu.com reports:

“In an internal briefing paper prepared for its diplomats across the world ahead of the Warsaw climate negotiations, which The Hindu has accessed, the U.S. has opposed the setting up of a separate process on ‘loss and damage’, pushed primarily for the role of private investments and finance in providing the promised money to the poor countries to adapt to climate change and have a 2015 climate agreement where no country is forced to take higher emission reduction pledges than the ones they initially volunteer. It also informed its diplomats to keep pushing the line with other countries that the U.S. was doing enough domestically on the climate change front and these were priorities for President Barack Obama and John Kerry.”

There are two things at play here. One is setting limits and playing a chess game over who will pay for the climate change damage that will come – and disproportionally affect less developed countries that have not the means to defend themselves from human induced climate change or contribute to the conditions that will harm or kill them The other thing at play, the Giant Pink Elephant in the room that our world leaders can’t seem to deal with is the reality, as outlined in a study by the Global Carbon Project, of a 4 or 6 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures that could mark a significant and perhaps final chapter in the story of our species.




Get this image on a shirt, yo!

Henry Rollins: Education is the End of Disaster Capitalism

Support the Hostess Strike!

DONATE: ‪http://bit.ly/7OwKc2‬
BLOG: ‪http://punkpatriot.blogspot.com‬
FACEBOOK: ‪http://bit.ly/1OtiqI‬
TWITTER: ‪http://www.twitter.com/punkpatriot‬
STORE: ‪http://punkpatriot.etsy.com‬

Music by ZEBU!

Mitt Romney and the 47%

I had this thought immediately after seeing the video on the day it came out, but I haven't had the free time to film and edit a video of my own till today.

Capitalism = coerced labor
The 47% of people who don't pay taxes = victims of capitalism
government services = wages that weren't paid by employers to start with

Talking Points on Welfare: parts 1-4

Part 1

So after my last video on How to Fix the USA’s Economy, I saw a lot of ignorant comments in the comments section about WELFARE.

They weren’t NEW ignorant comments, they were the SAME ignorant comments that you hear over and over. Apparently nobody out there is challenging people on their declarations, and allowing the virus of ignorance to spread.

So I wanted to make a list of facts and talking points for progressives when confronted with these conservative... well, let’s call them what they are-- they’re LIES, and stop the spread of ignorance in it’s tracks.

So let’s go down the list, and tackle them one by one, shall we?

1) Welfare spending is the reason our government is in debt.
FALSE.

If you had the choice between giving somebody a dollar and getting back either $1.50 or $0.80, which would you choose? Hold that thought.

According to USGovernmentspending.com The Federal Government is committed by law to spending 557 billion on welfare in the year 2010. Which seems like “Oh my! That’s a lot of money!” Which, for one person, yeah it is. But for our federal government, not so much.

Especially when you compare that to the $895 billion we’re committed to spend, by law on Defense spending. Which doesn’t account for the $711 billion in our discretionary spending on stuff like the War in Iraq and Afghanistan, and useless cold war-era weapons that we don’t even use, and never will.

Next you have to take into account what we get for those dollars spent.
Most economists agree on the following figures, including conservative ones:
Welfare spending has a fiscal multiplier of about 1.5-- while military spending has a fiscal multiplier of 0.8.

To which you might say, “wow, you just said some numbers, but what the hell does that mean? It means that for every dollar our gov’t spends on welfare, we get one dollar and fifty cents back in the form of GDP. With military spending, for every dollar we spend, we get back $0.80.

That seems really stupid. And that’s because it is. Which is why politicians frame their arguments about or disgustingly wasteful military spending as being “patriotic” or “supporting the troops.”
How much support actually goes to our troops? You, know, like after they come back from getting shot at and having their legs blown off?

According to the White House’s own figures, we’re slated to spend $125 billion on veterans affairs. And we all know about staffing shortages and underfunding that goes on in our VA system. So clearly this isn’t about supporting our troops.
For those who don’t care about human lives, and only the hard economics, I want to ask you again: If you had the choice between giving somebody a dollar and getting back either $1.50 or $0.80, which would you choose?
Now for the humanitarians out there, if you had to choose between giving somebody a dollar to feed their family, knowing you’d get back $1.50, or give somebody $1 knowing that your next door neighbor would have his legs blown off and you’ll only get back $0.80, which would you choose?

---

Part 2

Talking Points and facts on Welfare part 2:
"I was denied welfare because I’m white."

The largest population of welfare recipients, by race, is white. So that’s clearly false.

You were denied welfare because conservatives like you threw a hissy fit back in the 1990s, because you thought it was too easy to get on welfare, and that too many people were getting on it. Now that you’ve applied for it, you’ve seen hard to get on it, and rather than admit to your own mistake, now you’re playing the race card.
Typical...

---

Part 3

People on welfare are mostly black teenage mothers:

FALSE: This is a fiction created by assholes like Newt Gingrich to get poor white people to get angry at poor black people, so that poor people in general would spend our time fighting against one another, instead of coming together and fighting against rich assholes like Newt Gingrich.
According to our gov’ts figures, white people receive the largest amount of welfare by race, making up nearly 40% of the welfare recipient population. 43% of welfare recipients with children have only one child, 30% have two, 15% have three, and there’s a real sharp drop-off after that.
Of those who are on welfare, and are mothers, 47% are between the ages 20-29. 32% are between the ages of 30-39. Only 7% of welfare recipients who have children are teenagers.

So sorry. The most common welfare recipient is white, between 20-40 years old, and has two kids or less.

Part 4

"Taxation is theft, why should I have my pay stolen to pay for a free ride for other people?"

This one is going to take a while to unpack. It requires some knowlege of recent economic history, which is going to mean explaining. I hope I don't bore you.

In 1960, the average household worked half as many hours. Adjusted for inflation, the Cost of Living was a third of what it is today. Yet, the average household income for a person in the lower 85% of income brackets, in terms of real dollars, has remained stagnant for the past 40 years.

That’s right, 85% of the population has seen their cost of living triple, has had to double their hours they spend working, and as a reward for working twice as much have LESS expendable income than we did 40 years ago.
To recap really quickly- [drawings] the dollar cost of living has tripled, but the actual stuff we’re getting for that cost isn’t three times better. We’re still buying pretty much the same houses and the same wonderbread and the same Jif peanut butter as we did 40 years ago.
So we’re paying three times as much today for the same things we had in the 1960s.
The Average American household had one income earner working 40 hrs a week in 1960, and that was enough to maintain a comfortable standard of living.
For twice as much labor today, 85% of Americans still have an income gap of a third. That money has to come from somewhere. Some households have two adults working 80 hours a week, and still struggle to make ends meet.
For 85% of Americans, we’ve been slowly eased into a starvation diet over the past 40 years.
That income gap, for many people, who thought that going on welfare was irresponsible, had to borrow their wages. Where did they borrow their wages from? From the wealth they already had. We’ve borrowed against our houses, and we’ve used credit cards to fill our income gap. We were told that this was the responsible thing to do. The fiscal reality of it, is that we’ve been cannibalizing ourselves.
If you look at this through another lense, by indexing things to the value of labor-- the value of the labor you produce has been devalued by two thirds. You have essentially been getting paid a third of what your labor is actually worth. That income gap of a third should rightfully be paid by our employers. And where has all that money gone?
Check Wall Street. While the value of our labor has been cut to a third of what it was, the value of labor of the average CEO has skyrocketed, from just 30 times the lowest paid employee at their company to 300 times the lowest paid employee.
So while the 85% of Americans who work our asses off just to get by, we’ve seen the value of our labor be devalued, fraudulently, by 300%. We’ve seen the value of labor of CEOs increase, fraudulently, by 1000%. What are they doing differently that they need to be compensated at 1000% more than they were back in the 1960s? Well, there’s a short answer and a long answer:
The short answer: Nothing.
The Long answer: Absolutely NOTHING whatsoever, at all.
Now, who has been deciding what everybody’s labor is worth? The invisible hand of the market? Bullshit. It’s been those CEOs. Of course they are going to give themselves raises and reduce the value of our labor by 2/3rds. They’re greedy, shortsighted people. You would probably do the same. Right? No, actually you probably wouldn’t, because that would be THEFT, and THEFT is wrong.

So let’s get back to our initial conservative talking point: Why should you allow somebody else to get a free ride from your labor? You shouldn’t. Which is why we need a maximum wage.
Is taxation really theft? Well, if you’re taxing that top 15% of people who have increased the value of their own labor and decreased the value of everybody else’s labor, we’re not stealing from them by taxing them to pay for welfare. The lower 85% earned that income, but were not paid that income.
The *real* problem is that those richest 15% aren’t PAYING what the 85% is earning by their labor leaving an income gap. How the hell are people supposed to fill that gap through working more if their labor just keeps getting further and further devalued?
With welfare. Welfare is just the lower 85% of people getting what their labor earned them.
If we don’t reverse this trend of the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer, eventually there will be no way for the lower 85% of Americans to feed themselves by our own labor.
At which point, we will be forced to kill the top 15% and eat THEM.



One source: http://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-productivity-vacation/

Another one I didn't specifically use, but has a lot of the same info as a presentation given at the Commenwealth Club of California two years ago, by an economist whose name I can't remember:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

David Cobb gives a shout out to Jill Stein

JillStein.org

Obamacare is a Giveaway to Corporatism

Here is a video series that I made back in November of 2009

Campaign Signs as Dialogue, Not Marketing

I'm actually on a bus on my way to NYC for the world premier of American Autumn right now. But this is a video I filmed a while ago and just had a speck of free time to edit and upload it:



DONATE: ‪http://bit.ly/7OwKc2‬
BLOG: ‪http://punkpatriot.blogspot.com‬
FACEBOOK: ‪http://bit.ly/1OtiqI‬
TWITTER: ‪http://www.twitter.com/punkpatriot‬
STORE: ‪http://punkpatriot.etsy.com‬

Capitalism: Eat, Shit, and Die

Capitalism Isn't Working

DONATE: ‪http://bit.ly/7OwKc2‬
BLOG: ‪http://punkpatriot.blogspot.com
‬FACEBOOK: ‪http://bit.ly/1OtiqI‬
TWITTER: ‪http://www.twitter.com/punkpatriot
‬STORE: ‪http://punkpatriot.etsy.com‬

CAPITALISM ISN'T WORKING! (or it's working just fine, and this is how it's SUPPOSED to work).

So a couple years ago, about three years ago, I made a video called...
I actually don’t remember what it was called. I’ve deleted it. It was about Capitalism, and how I found the idea that we should be “smashing capitalism” to be infantile. One argument I made was: how would you get avocados for your vegan burrito? What would the incentive be to bringing food from that far away? Would you barter for a hemp necklace?

However, I had made a terrible mistake. Since the word “capitalism” is so propagandized, it’s come to be synonymous with a LOT of things that it has absolutely nothing to do with.

In the video I’m mentioning, I had conflated the term “capitalism” with “markets.”

In reality, capitalism actually has NOTHING TO DO WITH MARKETS. Capitalism simply means that we as a society think that it’s okay for some people who have a lot of money, to buy all the stuff, and then get even more rich simply through the fact that they own all the stuff. Capitalism necessitates abuse of labor. It is in the DNA of capitalism that labor is abused and exploited.

It is under capitalism, that a worker builds a house, and then has to pay the capitalist for the right to live in the house he built with his own hands.

It’s under capitalism that a worker makes hundreds of shoes all day, but is paid so little for his labor by the capitalist who owns the factory, that he cannot, in a day of labor, earn enough to buy a single pair of shoes for himself.

It’s under capitalism that a worker makes enough clothing in a day to clothe a neighborhood block, but is paid so little they would have to save for a month to purchase a single shirt they made through their own labor.

It’s under capitalism, that workers harvest every day from the fields the capitalist owns, enough food to feed a village, but the worker has to pay the capitalist their days wages for the right to eat a single meal’s worth.

You don’t have to think about this very hard to come to understand why so many of our brothers and sisters are homeless, shoeless, naked, and hungry. The game is rigged that way.

These things, the field, the farm, the factory, the financial institution, these are what people are talking about when they say “the means of production.”

What is the value that the capitalist provides in any of these aformentioned situations? The capitalist does no labor, and simply through owning the factory, owning the field, owning the bank, and therefore controlling the money, the capitalist is able to create even more wealth for himself by exploiting the labor of his fellow man.

At what point did we decide that THAT was a good way to organize our society?

Now, it’s often said that capitalism is an economic system. That’s a complete misnomer. Systems have closed loops and sustain themselves. Capitalism is a straight line. What do I mean by that?

Have you ever played the game monopoly? Well, monopoly and capitalism operate under very similar rules. So long as everybody has a fairly equal share of property, and the money keeps getting passed around the board equitably, the game can go on for what seems like forever. But eventually, somebody gets enough of an upper hand that you can see the game is already over. People start losing their homes in order to pay their bills. Sudden expenses come up that you can’t cover, and you start losing the very things that allowed you to participate in the game to begin with. Then slowly and surely, one person ends up owning everything, simply by the virtue of the fact that they own more stuff than anybody else to start with, and then the balance of power tips forever in their favor from that point onwards. And so eventually all the money and all the property ends up in the hands of one person. And that’s how you win Monopoly.

That’s also how you win capitalism. That’s where we’re at right now, on the precipice just before the super-wealthy end up owning every property on the game board, and all the money in the bank, while the rest of us are unable to play the game at all. To the 1%, to the Koch Brothers, I say, congratulations, you win at capitalism. Nobody else has anything. You win.
Another word that people use capitalism as a stand-in for is Democracy. Truly Capitalism and Democracy could not be further from each other in meaning.

Under capitalism, your workplace is organized in a hierarchical structure, in which one person, or a small cabal of people own everything, and reap all the profits from the labor of the workers. The workers have no input in the direction of the business, how it is run, how their fellow workers are treated, etc. If your average workplace were a government, we would readily call it fascism. So let’s call it what it is-- fascism.

Worker-owned autonomous workplaces, however, looks very different from Capitalism. Under worker-owned and operated cooperatives, the workers all share ownership of the means of production. They are all paid equally for their labor, they all share equally in the profits, they all share equally in the losses. Workers come to consensus how to run the business, and how their fellow workers are treated. If this workplace were a government, it would be called a “democracy.” Another word for democracy in the workplace, is “socialism.”

So Socialism and markets are not mutually exclusive. In fact there are many worker-owned cooperatives that you already know about and probably purchase their products regularly, like Land O Lakes butter.

Now, most workplaces are capitalist. Which means that there is little to no democracy in our economic sphere. Which means that a few are enriched through the exploitation of the labor of the many. And in a society where money is legally seen as equivalent to speech, and in practical terms is equivalent to power, it’s quite clear that capitalism CREATES a ruling class, and is the OPPOSITE of democracy.
The lack democracy in our workplaces is the ROOT CAUSE of why there is so little democracy in our governmental systems. For information how to to start your own worker’s cooperative, go to usworker.coop

The "crazy radical" that was censored by TED talks

Nick Hanauer in March of 2012:


Me, two years prior in November of 2010:


This isn't a new idea. It's just math. Capitalism is not sustainable.

Dear Cenk, You don't get it.

Dear Cenk,
You don't get it.

The idea behind direct democracy is that nobody can represent you better than you.  Why should I be representing that woman in Florida?  She should represent her.  Send a person to her house, and interview her.  Tell her story.  We are all individuals.  I don't have a right to speak on her behalf.  She should speak on her behalf.

The idea that some people are able to speak better for us than ourselves, is part of the problem with our government, and with our media.  You are lazy.  If the news actually spent money looking into how bad shit was here at home, instead of just repeating what government officials said all day long, maybe this would be a non-issue.

But it's not a non-issue.  It's very much an issue.  Why should WE be the ones to do YOUR job?  We aren't the media, you are.  You should be coming to us to learn about our struggle.

The GA's held in lower Manhattan aren't meant to represent everybody in the world.  People can hold their own GAs in their own towns and self-organize.

Peace,
The Punk Patriot

RSA Animate= The Crisis Of Capitalism

The Capitalism Story: The Whole Fucking Thing Is Coming Down

So I keep resharing this video on my facebook page.

There's a reason for that. I can't believe how close to being true this video is now.

Let me explain:

When I wrote this song, it was back in August of 2011. There had been a successful occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol building, but Scott Walker kicked everybody out. Paul LePage here in Maine had taken down the Labor Mural, and was pushing through anti-human legislation, such as lifting the ban on cancer-causing chemicals in toys and baby bottles, trying to make Maine a right-to-work (for less) state, cutting taxes on the wealthy, cutting services on the most needy, all in the name of being pro-business.

(hence the inspiration for this graphic)


Occupy Wall Street loomed on the horizon as an exciting protest, but I, like many, didn't think it was going to end up being much more than just a week long endeavor, and hoped that I would be able to get down there to attend before it was over, just to say I was there and did my part.

I was working in a factory between 40 and 50 hours a week as a "seasonal hire"-- just the latest of a series of jobs where I was working full time, but being compensated as a "part time seasonal employee" aka no benefits, no bonuses, nothing that isn't mandated by law. Except for maybe the occasional balsam fir scented car freshener, or corporate logo-emblazoned baseball cap. ("Cuz' here at the corporation, we're all on the corporation's team.")

The lyrics of the song were my life at the time. The refrain of the song "And the whole fucking thing is coming down" wasn't coming from optimism like it may seem to now. What it felt to me, is that eventually the working class were going to be so completely crushed, that Capitalism would finally and entirely eat itsself, plunging our country into chaos and civil war.

This had long been a feeling of mine. This sentiment inspired the following fable which I wrote in October of 2010:

They told us when they took our jobs overseas, "No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"
They told us when they destroyed our 401ks through gambling with our money, "No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"
They told us when we fell behind on our mortgage and foreclosed on our house, kicking us to the street, "No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"
As more and more people were forced on welfare, the government's budget started to look grim. When they cut welfare spending entirely so that they could enjoy bigger tax cuts to "stimulate the economy," they told us, "No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"

Then the poor had nothing left to eat, and no place to go.

So they had to kill and eat the rich.

They descended on Wall Street by the millions, stopping all traffic.

Their numbers were so large, the police couldn't do anything to stop the massive crowd of the disenfranchised. They flooded the buildings of Wall Street, the halls of DC, of the McMansions of Texas, and like a horde of zombies, they tore into the flesh of the horrified wealthy, who screamed and shat themselves, knowing that they were powerless to stop the oncoming mass of gnashing teeth and hungry mouths.

And as the poor picked the bones clean over the burning piles of money, the poor said to the bones:

"No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"

And my youtube mentor Dennis Trainor Jr made this video in Dec 2010:


But back then, we were just pissing in the wind. Just frustrated, angry, and impotent, spewing our rage into the internet, and our message didn't really find purchase in the collective consciousness of the public.

So the refrain to my song

"The whole fucking thing is coming down, the whole fucking thing is coming down" that wasn't coming from a place of empowerment. That was coming from a place of complete and total desperation. It was coming from total hopelessness. It was coming from a place where too many people spend their ever dwindling paycheck at Wal*Mart, and too few people know how their State Budget works.

It came from a place where everything was fucked up, most were pissed, but most didn't bother trying to figure out WHY everything was fucked up, and just watched football instead.

But now... now that Occupy Wall Street has happened, and has been going for 7 months strong coming up on the 17th of this month, when you listen to the refrain of the song, "the whole fucking thing is coming down" imagine the alternative systems that will replace the systems that are around us now. Imagine the better ways we can organize our society- the better ways that those of us in the movement HAVE BEEN organizing our society.

It's been almost two years now that I've been feeling desperate and utterly hopeless; that something has got to give. And now something has given way.

Nobody knows the future anymore. Things that we once might have thought of as important aren't on our Radar-- Romney or Obama? Who gives a shit? They're both Wall Street Puppets. It doesn't matter.

With every incident of young and elderly women getting pepper sprayed, and Iraq War vets getting mortally wounded by police, the legitimacy of the plutocratic regime crumbles. It is a collapsing facade revealing behind it an ugly and terrible face, propped up only by combination of fraud and force. And when the majority of Americans see the regime for what it really is, they'll turn their backs, just like those of us in the movement already have.

The whole fucking thing REALLY IS coming down.

And it's beautiful.

This is an exciting time to be alive.

The Horatio Algers Lie

DONATE (to the Show): ‪http://bit.ly/7OwKc2‬
BLOG: (you're there now)‬
FACEBOOK: ‪http://bit.ly/1OtiqI‬
TWITTER: ‪http://www.twitter.com/punkpatriot‬
STORE: ‪http://punkpatriot.etsy.com‬

A breif and crucial history of the United States Global Empire

Jason Read on the nature of parasitism and economics

Chris Hedges: Empire is Over; the Decent Will Be Terrifying.

January 01, 2012 C-SPAN
via MoxNews