Participatory Economics's topics - tribe.net

Conceivia

Tony — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 07:01:23 GMT

I've got a plan for a new system of society, which is similar to Parecon.

Not only do I have a plan for a new system of society, I've also got plans for how to set it up on a world wide scale. Those who are interested in setting up a new society, even if you don't believe exactly in my system of society, we can collaborate. We can setup and test multiple systems of society, to find out what works and what doesn't. To do that, collaboration is the key. We must concentrate our efforts, or we go no where.

Here's my website:
http://conceivia.com

Tony

posted in Participatory Economics - 0 replies

Remuneration as reward; problems and an alternative

I-P — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 21:34:39 GMT

I don't think the Parecon Ideal of people being remunerated in proportion to to their “hard work”
, period of work or "sacrifice" in work is a good idea.

Basically I don't really agree with the idea of remuneration as reward much at all. I think that the need either for reward and punishment as motivators to work are signs of what I would call mal-employment and in that in that case, what is needed is some way to make the work intrinsically satisfying and meaningful or, temporarily failing that, simply equally distributed.

I think the whole rewards and punishment thing is a legacy of sick culture and hyper competitive capitalist (in this case anyway) forms of education (education being considered as the transmission of culture across the generations). I could go into what I think are the various myths about rewards, that i think the parecon modal is mistakenly importing into its vision of a better economic system, but to save time I will just direct you to a couple of articles by the educator and author Alfie Kohn which make a lot of the points I would make about the subject pretty well. the articles are about education but from the point of view of parecon they point to views regarding work that are merely legacies of our own educations into the culture of capitalism.

The articles are: “Punished by Rewards?: an interview with Alfie Kohn” and “Risks of Rewards” are here: www.alfiekohn.org/articles.htm#null. there is also the book “Punished by Rewards” which is probably available at most libraries.

To Kohn's remarks I would add my own considerations of and experience with, various workaholics that I have known for whom work was as much a distraction and character failing as any other addiction and who harmed both themselves and others in with such behavior. I think also that the remuneration provision might also be the result of the parecon “coordinating class” imposing it habits/values/denial (activists can often be workaholics) on the the theory and so indirectly one those who would participate in its practice.

I think if there are to be differentials in remuneration they should be tied not to “sacrifice” and “effort” so much as to Consumption Criteria. By suggesting this I mean gesture at the fact that when we consume we support some form of economy and in most cases we support the sick economy of capitalism with its mal-produced, misallocated, and environmentally destructive goods and services, as well as the misery and mal-employment that goes along with that. I think that remuneration for work (if it could still be called remuneration) should, if it is to be a reward for anything, be a reward commensurate with the willingness of the worker-as-consumer to consume responsibly and so not be taking away as a consumer what they contribute as a worker to a healthy economy. In short, i am interested in creating a system in which, beyond a certain guaranteed minimum that is equal for every one, what you get paid is tied to what you are do with the money.

I suppose as a default, some equation involving the collectives profit, purchase prospectives submitted by workers, and receipts from consumption of past wages, might be involved in assessing the proper distribution of profits per worker (above what the workers may decide to collectively invest in the furtherance of a healthy economy). I hope that there will also be face to face meetings where the, probably ever changing, wage differentials might be discussed and approved. maybe it might be better to do decide the whole thing at face to face meetings in works groups with only certain flexible rules as guide lines...

I don't think that it would be very difficult to get consensus on what companies, goods and services represent healthier consumption choices than others—at least to a certain extent. perhaps consensus on this can be renewed through periodic updates on green businesses with an undated list and ranking covering as many as possible of the categories of things covered in the wage differential. I think that in order not to simply be funding consumption for the sake of consumption (even if the consumption is from more responsible companies) the distribution differential should be limited to necessities such as (organic, local food and clothing, and perhaps certain elements of sustainable technology and material) anything beyond this would perhaps need be argued before the collective and get the face to face agreement of ones work group.

This is new Idea so far as I know—it certainly is a new Idea of mine—and so what I have thrown out in the last two paragraphs regarding the details of implementation are just brainstorms. But I do think that the devil is in the details of such an idea...

I am not so sure that this arrangement solves the problem of Rewards, since there is still some potential of
of it feeling like one is being rewarded for ones consumption patterns in some way that is extrinsic to the rewards of more responsible consumption in and of itself. But I think that whether this is so will be a matter of presentation and implementation. It is not that responsible consumption is being Rewarded by the differential allocation, (and ideally there would be no invidious comparisons or competition involved) it is rather being Supported and Enabled by it. This will be a practical necessity since responsible consumption of essentials will often be more expensive (either in time or money—and perhaps grants of time could function in this same manner as money in some cases) than unsustainable versions of the same consumable.

anyway, this Idea (which I am bravely though perhaps unwisely sharing in its infant state) comes from a vision of a healthy economy within a healthy culture in which the present sick economy is understood as a complex or “economic syndrome'' of Mal-production, Malconsumption, Mal-Distribution and Mal-employment which I will share more fully in some other post since I think the above is enough to think about for now. I just feel the need to mention it now I guess as a kind of prelude to that future post.

take care,

Piankhy

i

posted in Participatory Economics - 0 replies

parecon art market

David — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 07:56:41 GMT

Hello,
I am a new media artist and art market researcher. I developed a new and democratic business pattern for the art world. Many of the decisions of this pattern are based on the parecon model. You can see more information at www.stockartist.net

I looking for your opinion, advice, references and support to become this project real.

Best,
David Hinojosa
Berlin

posted in Participatory Economics - 0 replies

Green Scare Resources

Alexander — Fri, 26 May 2006 19:02:50 GMT

Green Scare Resources

"The term Green Scare, alluding to the Red Scare of the 1940s-50s, is an expression used by environmental activists to refer to legal action by the U.S. government against the radical environmentalist movement."

Green Scare
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Scare

found this post in PortlandIndyMediaCenter:

Green Scare Resources
author: havetheirbacks
this is a list of online resources for greenscare info . . .
GREEN SCARE RESOURCES

Civil Liberties Defense Center: excellent archive of legal papers, updates on indictments.
http://www.cldc.org

Portland Independent Media Center [IMC] Green Scare page
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/topic/greenscare/

Green Scare informational website
http://www.greenscare.org

Wikipedias pages on:
Green Scare:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Scare

Operation Backfire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Backfire_%28FBI%29

Green is the new Red
http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/

Providence Green Scare
http://www.myspace.com/greenscarepvd

Media:

BOOM! Who are the real terrorists? BY ALAN PITTMAN
Eugene Weekly, March 9, 2006
http://www.eugeneweekly.com/2006/03/09/coverstory.html

Sourcecodes ..1 Terrorist Threat?
Download Quicktime movie below
http://sourcecode.freespeech.org/sc302EcotageDL

Operational Backfire: Criminalizing Dissent By MICHAEL DONNELLY
Counterpunch.org
http://www.counterpunch.org/donnelly05242006.html

War on the First Amendment
The Great Green Scare By BEN ROSENFELD
Counterpunch.org
http://www.counterpunch.org/rosenfeld03102006.html

The Green Scare by Karen Pickett
http://shiftshapers.gnn.tv/blogs/13536/The_Green_Scare

all found at http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/05/340003.shtml

posted in Participatory Economics - 1 reply

Interview with Aaron Russo director of "Freedom to Fascism"

Alexander — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 10:27:06 GMT

Interview with Aaron Russo director of "Freedom to Fascism"

An interview by http://consciousmedianetwork.com of Aaron Russo about his new film, America: Freedom to Fascism. In this film Russo sets out to find the law that requires American citizens pay a direct income tax. This interview contains info about the fiat currency owned by private, for profit bank that we call "dollars". He explains how the Federal Reserve is neither 'Federal' nor has any reserves. He also gives a spot on critique of Michael Moore's Farenheit 911 . America: Freedom to Fascism is opening in USA . Also included on the radio.indymedia php page associated with this file will be a short excerpt from the inteview and the 14 min. trailer to the film.
http://fromfreedomtofascism.com
listen for excerpts of it in the daily rotation of radioActive sanDiego http://radioactiveradio.org
look for mp3 links to 16 min. trailer to film, and 4 minute audio clip of interview at the ".php" page on http://radioactiveradio.org
36 min.

http://radio.indymedia.org/uploads/aluhlooyah_aaronrussointerviewcmn.mp3

http://radio.indymedia.org/news/2006/06/10251.php

posted in Participatory Economics - 0 replies

Check in

Tedster — Fri, 19 May 2006 19:10:27 GMT

I think one thing that can be done for this tribe is to get a little more specific about what we are pursuing. So this is what I think I would like to ask, and maybe if there is a critical point, something can get going.

What would you like to do in a collective and were are you located?

posted in Participatory Economics - 2 replies

expanding this tribe?

revolushawn — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 21:01:41 GMT

thanks Sébastien for starting this tribe!

I have been a long-time advocate for parecon. I talk about it whenever the subject of alternatives to capitalism comes up--and for me this is a *very* frequent topic =)

I first saw this tribe a few months ago but i did not join it. I did not join it because i read the first line of the mission: "The goal of this tribe is to help to create Participatory Economics Collectives in every cities."

I knew that I wasn't about to create a parecon collective in my city. Not that i'm against the idea, it's just that i'm busy with other transformative projects.

Recently i happened upon the tribe again and instead of moving on i decided to join so i could pose the questions to any and all of the tribe members:

1) How many parecon advocates like me on tribe have checked out this tribe but moved on b/c they read a mission that says they needed to start a parecon collective in their city?

2) How about folk who are just open and curious about parecon and would like to discuss it with parecon advocates? Where should they go?

Thanks!

--Shawn

that all rise up
that all are called
that none be left behind
--from Popol Vuh (Mayan book of creation)

posted in Participatory Economics - 6 replies

Where are we from?

Eli — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 05:31:16 GMT

Since the stated purpose of this tribe is to start collectives in each city, I wonder what it would take to start a list of each member, and what city they're from, and maybe even a way to post meeting times and places? I'd be happy to volunteer.

Caveat: I'm new to tribe, and don't know how to program or hack or do anything terribly esoteric with these dread machines; however I can type, research, and tinker with the best of them.

There already exists a service to do just this, however, it's a paysite.

http://parecon.meetup.com/cities/all/

posted in Participatory Economics - 1 reply

A sort of intro...

Cityzen Jane — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 01:30:41 GMT

I'll skip the intro becuase you can check my profile and blog.

I wanted to post some abundance resources I've recently found that might get you excited and allow you to generate some monetary support -- or give it (oh it aint the only thing but it helps!) to projects that deserve it.

Here you go:

www.fundable.com
www.dropcash.com
www.pledgebank.com
www.kiva.org

Namaste!

Cityzen Jane

(PS I could use some friends of similar interests hint hint!)

posted in Participatory Economics - 4 replies

the "Doug" flag of the bioregion of Cascadia

Alexander — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 14:36:37 GMT

Our fellow Cascadian Collin (savepac17@yahoo.com) during the winter holidays had a "Doug" or Cascadian flag made. Those are pictures of the Doug I posted in the photo section. If you are interested then contact the Texan company for a copy.

For those wanting a Cascadian local flag company there is smALL FLAGs in Oregon www.smallflags.com/BASE/About%20us.htm

For those wanted a more organic material made either contact small flags and inquire if it is possible for them or the BeeHive Collective ( www.beehivecollective.org/ ) and see if they can help with materials. I would also suggest starting several local flag making workshops (maybe Tryon Life Farm would be willing or one of the FreeSkools).

Kloshe Nanitch

Alexander

pictures of the Doug:

http://media.portland.indymedia.org/images/2006/03/336589.jpg

http://media.portland.indymedia.org/images/2006/03/336590.jpg

http://media.portland.indymedia.org/images/2006/03/336591.jpg

http://media.portland.indymedia.org/images/2006/03/336592.jpg

original design http://media.portland.indymedia.org/images/2005/12/330627.jpg

symbolism of the bioregion http://media.portland.indymedia.org/images/2005/12/330626.jpg

From Collin:

"Collin" <savepac17@yahoo.com>
Date: Wed Mar 22, 2006 4:19 pm
Subject: CHECK OUT THE PICS OF THE DOUG!!! savepac17

Who says we ain't movin'... we are movin'! Check it out! WE HAVE A FLAG!

Ok, cool, I had to get that off my chest. Anyway, if any of you would like a
flag too let me know. Remember all, the more of you who say, "YES I WANT A
FLAG TOO" means we can get a bulk rate, which will make future productions
of "THE DOUG" cheaper. A and I found a flag maker in Salem, OR who is
waiting for us to make an order.

Collin

various Cascadian groups and sites:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Cascadian_Bioregionalism/

http://cascadians.tribe.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia

http://republic-of-cascadia.tripod.com/

posted in Participatory Economics - 0 replies

the former Enronization of Argentina

Alexander — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 23:41:50 GMT

the former Enronization of Argentina

I am posting these articles on how Argentina had economically
collapsed several years ago, because I believe the Amerikan Empire
is very near this too especially in the next couple of weeks as the
US FED discontinues reporting M3 (March 23) and the Iranians switch
from petrodollars to petroeuros. Ofcourse a US attack on Iran could
add more chaos as corporatists use a nuke or "conventional"
smokescreen to rob more of the masses.

Just as a side note also remember Enron "owns" PGE.

I believe we, Cascadians, need to know how the Argentines pulled
themselves out after the economic collapse. But before we export
the autonomoist movement in Argentina we need to look at what happen
first.

Please circulate (mass spam) the following articles to others people
with URLs ofcourse:

Enron's plundering of Argentina

In 1990, at the height of the neoliberal privatization fever, upon
returning from his visit to George Bush, Sr., Argentine President
Menem received a letter from US Ambassador Terence Todman implying
that eight US companies would walk away from their investment plans
unless Argentina stopped favoring domestic corporations. The first
company on the list was Enron. As reported in the march 2000 edition
of Mother Jones, former Argentine President Carlos Menem, at that
time a golf partner and buddy of the Bushes, signed off on a $300
million deal for a US gas pipeline company in Argentina. The deal
involved a huge tariff and tax cut. Spearheaded by the opposition, a
congressional investigation ensued and a special prosecutor was
appointed to the case. Menem, exercising his supreme powers, fired
the investigator and that was the end of the matter.
A few years earlier, George W. Bush had lobbied heavily on Enronąs
behalf. Former Raul Alfonsinąs minister of public works, Rodolfo
Terragno, recalls G.W.ąs phone call, mentioning his relationship
with his recently-elected dad. Terragno informed him that Enron
wanted to get the gas company for 20% of itąs international
commercial value. The international media attacked him for refusing
to give in to Enronąs demands.
Although the Houston-based corporation ended up abandoning the
project when gas prices fell, an Enron subsidiary later bought into
the pipeline and now owns almost a third of it. Transportadora de
Gas del Sur (TGS), partially owned by Enron, delivers more than 60%
of the natural gas used in Argentina through the nation's largest
pipeline system (4,300 miles). In 1998, 48% of energy used in
Argentina came from natural gas, a fact that tends to explain the
enourmous pressure that this company exerted on the corrupted
Argentine establishment through itąs allies: two US presidents, the
corporate media and a US Ambassador.
Found at http://www.autonomista.org/enron.htm

Argentina and Enron -- Peas in a Pod
by Paul Krugman

LAST WEEK, the Web site SatireWire.com ran a mock news story: "Enron
Admits It's Really Argentina." It was pretty funny, though quite
unfair -- unfair, that is, to Argentina.
Yet, the satire was more on point than its authors realized. Not
long ago Argentina, like Enron, was a darling of the financial
community. And like Enron, Argentina was held up as a role model, to
a large extent by the same people -- Argentina's monetary system, in
particular, was lauded in the pages of Forbes and the Wall Street
Journal, and feted at libertarian think tanks.
Why did the same people tend to admire Enron and Argentina? Because
in their different ways, both the company and the country tried to
turn back the clock to 1913. Both were experiments testing the
libertarian credo: that the great expansion in government's role
between the two world wars was unwarranted. Both were supposed to
demonstrate that government activism is unnecessary, and that
radical laissez-faire works.
The Enron experiment was, in essence, about doing away with
regulation -- regulation of prices, regulation of financial trading.
Most of these regulations had their origin in fear that consumers,
workers and investors would be exploited by those whom Theodore
Roosevelt called "malefactors of great wealth."
Enron used its political clout to create what one of its own
executives called a "regulatory black hole" in which it could
operate freely.
What Enron's admirers believed was that experience would demonstrate
fears about unregulated markets to be unjustified. Unfortunately,
what disappeared into that black hole was not bureaucratic clutter
but billions of hard-earned dollars, including those of Enron's own
employees. Or maybe it wasn't a black hole, but rather a wormhole,
and those billions of dollars emerged in some other universe -- say,
overseas bank accounts. For it turns out that malefactors of great
wealth do exist, and some of them were running Enron.
If Enron was an experiment in doing away with regulatory activism,
Argentina was an experiment in doing away with monetary activism.
Argentina returned to a colonial-era monetary system, a "currency
board," which took government out of the loop. No more lurching from
crisis to crisis, no more disruptive government interventions:
Argentina would provide sound money, and leave the rest up to the
free market.
Though Argentina attracted the usual opportunists, I'm pretty sure
that both the creators of its monetary system and many of its
admirers sincerely believed that they were working in everyone's
interest. Alas, these particular good intentions paved the road to
hell.
In the last few weeks, the bitter irony of Argentina's situation has
become almost too much to bear. The country's monetary system was
introduced in the name of laissez-faire. Now, in its desperate
efforts to save that system from imminent collapse, the Argentine
government has imposed drastic restrictions on economic freedom.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who think that
markets are evil, that the profit motive is always wrong. On the
contrary, I believe that markets are very good things indeed. But
the great economic lesson of the 20th century was that to work, a
market system needs a little help from the government: regulations
to prevent abuses, active monetary policy to fight recessions. The
twin debacles in Houston and Buenos Aires demonstrate that this
great lesson has not lost its relevance.
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle
Found at http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1212-06.htm

IV Online magazine : IV338 - March 2002
Argentina
Enron in Argentina
Andrew Pollack
Do a quick search of the Web on the terms Enron and Argentina and
you mostly get either references comparing the two, or a recent
satire in which Kenneth Lay claims immunity by claiming Enron IS
Argentina. You might even stumble on the Mother Jones article
detailing Dubya's lobbying of the Argentine government on behalf of
Enron when he was governor of Texas.

It turns out (not surprisingly given the extent of Enron's global
interests) that Enron is very deeply involved in Argentina. Its
holdings there are in Transportadora de Gas del Sur (TGS), whose
website describes the company as "the leading gas transportation
company in Argentina, operating the most extensive gas pipeline
system in the country and in Latin America." Enron's own website
says "The company serves 4.3 million customers, 3.1 million of which
reside in the greater Buenos Aires area."
To understand the significance of these figures it's worth noting
that in 1998, 48% of energy use in Argentina came from natural gas
(as quoted in a report posted by the Brazilian Embassy in Washington
DC, which tracks such things because of the international pipelines
being laid across countries in the region.)
And here's one from MSN's 'Moneycentral' site: 'Don't cry for
Transportadora de Gas del Sur (TGS), Argentina. The company delivers
more than 60% of natural gas used in Argentina through the nation's
largest pipeline system (4,300 miles). Formerly state-run, TGS holds
exclusive license (until 2027) to transport gas from southern and
western Argentine sources to distributors nearby and in the Buenos
Aires metro area. TGS's gas services include treatment, processing,
and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) marketing; the company plans to
export energy to neighbouring countries. It is also building a fibre-
optic network in Argentina. The firm is 70%-owned by Compańía de
Inversiones de Energía, which is jointly controlled by Perez Companc
and US energy giant Enron.'
That's right, Enron. TGS's own website spells this out in more
detail, where it says its controlling shareholder is Compańía de
Inversiones de Energía S.A. (CIESA), "which together with Pecom
Energía group and Enron Corp, hold approximately 70% of the
Company's common stock. The remaining 30% ownership in the Company
is currently held by local and foreign investors."
And who is CIESA? Again, from TGS: "CIESA is owned 50% by Pecom
Energía (whose controlling shareholder is the above-mentioned Perez
Companc) and 50% by subsidiaries of Enron. CIESA has the ability to
direct the management of the Company, to control the election of the
majority of the Board of Directors, to determine the dividend policy
and other policies of the Company and to determine the outcome of
any matter put to a vote of the shareholders of the Company.'
TGS arose through a privatisation process of the kind which Enron
has pushed around the globe. (See 'Enron: The Global Gospel of Gas',
www.moles.org/ProjectUnderground/motherlode/enron.html). 'We started
our operations in late 1992, as a result of the privatisation of Gas
del Estado S.E. ("GdE"), the former state-owned company.'
And TGS has a significant investment in telecommunications through
its Telcosur subsidiary, through which it is 'positioning ourselves
as an independent carrier of carriers and also offering services to
large companies within our area of influence.'
'Telcosur,' says TGS, 'was born at the end of 1998 in order to take
advantage of TGS's existing telecommunications assets and
infrastructure, as well as the upcoming deregulation of the
telecommunications market, and the experience of power companies
from other countries that were successful in the telecommunications
business.' The 'experienced' power companies, of course, means
Enron. And their success in that business was, as the Wall Street
Journal recently documented, a bust - and not just because of fraud,
but because of the glut in fibre-optic capacity (that is, a mismatch
in supply and demand which tends under capitalism to lead to
precisely the kind of fraud Enron specialized in.)
But despite Enron's failures in the telecom field elsewhere,
Telcosur is following its 'experience' in avoiding direct sales in
favour of trading access to commodities, services, and financial
instruments: 'An important difference in connection with other
telecommunication operators is its independence, since it serves the
wholesaling market and therefore does not compete with its customers
in retail operations: switching, frame-relay, telephone services,
among others.' It provides 'value added services; in other words,
[it is] a carrier of telephone carriers and of large corporate
users.'
Telcosur is also 'installing a high-capacity fibre optic network
that will link Buenos Aires, Bahía Blanca and Neuquén, the most
active routes in its service area.'
Enron is currently in the process of divesting various subsidiaries
around the globe to raise cash, and at least one potential buyer for
its Argentina subsidiary has been mentioned. That buyer is Sempra
Energy International, which owns a 43-percent interest in two
Argentine natural gas utility holding companies, Sodigas Pampeana,
S.A., and Sodigas Sur, S.A., and which 'serve 1.3 million customers
in central and southern Argentina, delivering approximately one-
third of all the natural gas distributed in the country.' Sempra, a
big operator in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, also owns
Southern California Gas and San Diego Gas & Electric, and has just
bought Enron's London energy trading operations. It's not clear if
the deal will go through.
In the meantime workers in Argentina are demanding the
renationalisation of firms in a variety of sectors. On February 5th
Argentines marched on the offices of Repsol to demand jobs. Repsol,
according to the Partido Obrero, 'is the 7th largest [oil company]
in the world, which has reaped fabulous profits from privatisation,
and which is responsible for widespread layoffs, pay cuts and
refinery closings.'
If the mobilizations in Argentina continue to deepen we can expect
that calls for renationalisation - this time under workers control -
of the entire energy sector will deepen. And if Enron's Argentine
subsidiaries are targeted that might even encourage some in the US
to think about similar solutions here.

Andrew Pollack is a computer instructor in Brooklyn and author
of "Information Technology and Socialist Self-Management," in
Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the
Global Communication Revolution, edited by Robert W. McChesney,
Ellen Meiksins Wood, and John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review, 1997.
Found at http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/article.php3?
id_article=494

Don't Cry for Bush, Argentina
NEWS: George W. may not recall the names of world leaders, but when
it comes to foreign affairs, he knows the value of his own family's
name.
By Louis Dubose and Carmen Coiro
March/April 2000 Issue

Texans watched with interest last winter as Governor George W. Bush
was home-schooled on international affairs by former Secretary of
State George Shultz and other veterans of his father's foreign-
policy team. Even Carl Bildt, the former prime minister of Sweden,
was brought in for a tutorial at the governor's mansion, in the hope
that his recent U.N. experience in the Balkans could help Bush
understand that Kosovars are not "Kosavarians" and that Greeks are
not "Grecians."
But no one had to prepare a prompt card to remind him who stepped
down as president of Argentina in December. Shortly before Bush
announced his own campaign for president, he had received a visit
from Carlos Saul Menem, the right-wing leader of Argentina for the
past decade. The two men retired to an Austin country club, where
they were joined by Bush's father. Governor Bush had the flu, so he
contented himself with riding along as the former president and
Menem played a round of golf.
The capitol press corps trailed along, dutifully recording the
governor's cordial relationship with a visiting head of state.
Unknown to the assembled reporters, however, was the story of how
Bush and his family became immersed in Argentine politics. The
little-known tale begins with George W. making a phone call to
secure a $300-million deal for a U.S. pipeline company -- a deal
that provoked a political firestorm in Argentina, drawing scrutiny
from legislators and a special prosecutor. The episode marked one of
George W.'s first ventures into foreign affairs, demonstrating the
fundamental rule by which the Texas governor and his family conduct
business: Always know that the Bush name is a marketable commodity.
Bush first made his presence felt in Argentina in 1988, shortly
after his father was elected president. At the time, the junior
Bush's political career was just beginning -- and the political
career of Raúl Alfonsín, who was approaching the end of his term as
president of Argentina, was ending. Alfonsín had returned his
country to civilian rule, prosecuted those responsible for human
rights abuses during Argentina's rule by a military junta, and
struggled to manage an economy that seemed to defy management.
Determined to complete one major private-sector industrial program,
he pushed for the development of a "gasoducto" that would connect
Argentine gas fields with domestic and foreign markets. And he
appointed his minister of public works, Rodolfo Terragno, to oversee
the pipeline project.
Unlike Bush, Terragno achieved political prominence the old-
fashioned way: through a life dedicated to public service. A noted
journalist and public official, he was forced into exile for 10
years after the military seized power in Argentina in 1976. Only
after Alfonsín restored civilian rule did Terragno return to his
homeland, where he went on to serve as minister of public works, a
member of congress, and most recently as cabinet chief to the newly
elected president, Fernando de la Rua.
In 1988, Terragno was considering two proposals for the $300-million
pipeline, one from an Italian firm called Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi
and the other from Pérez Companc, an Argentine company working in
partnership with Dow Chemical. After a year of consideration, the
minister was close to making a decision when Enron, the largest
pipeline company in the United States, suddenly entered the bidding.
At the time, the Houston-based Enron had no experience in Argentina.
It had formed a business relationship with Westfield, a small
Argentine firm, but Westfield wasn't much of a player either. El
Boletín Oficial -- the Argentine equivalent of the Federal Register -
- reported that Westfield's only asset in 1988 was $20, its
corporate filing fee. Westfield was a prestanombre, literally
a "borrowed name" used to provide a domestic front for a foreign
firm.
Terragno was concerned that a newly formed corporation with no
resources was attempting to land a contract that companies with
proven track records had been working on for a year. "I had a lot of
reservations about Enron because the company wasn't well established
in Argentina," Terragno told Mother Jones, providing details of the
episode for the first time.
The minister recalls that Enron sent him "a one-page outline"
proposing a price Terragno now describes as "laughable." Enron
wanted to pay "something like 20 percent of the international market
price," he says. "It all seemed so inadequate. Enron asked the
country of Argentina to practically give them the gas."
Terragno was unenthusiastic about the pipeline bid, but Enron
initiated a full-scale campaign to pressure him. Pro-business
newspapers attacked the minister for blocking the proposal, and
Terragno recalls that Ted Gildred, the U.S. ambassador to
Argentina, "called me and visited me constantly" to push the deal.
Terragno wasn't concerned about the ambassador's lobbying -- that
was politics as usual. "It was good that he was representing the
interest of his country's businesses," he says. But Terragno found
that some of the politics surrounding Enron's campaign were anything
but usual.
A few weeks after the U.S. presidential election in 1988, Terragno
received a phone call from a failed Texas oilman named George W.
Bush, who happened to be the son of the president-elect. "He told me
he had recently returned from a campaign tour with his father," the
Argentine minister recalls. The purpose of the call was clear: to
push Terragno to accept the bid from Enron.
"He was taking a moment to call me because he knew that I was
dealing with this," says Terragno, adding that Bush told him that
he "viewed with some concern the slow pace of the Enron project."
According to Terragno, the president-elect's son noted that a deal
with Enron "would be very favorable for Argentina and its relations
with the United States."
When a brief report on the attempt to influence the Argentine deal
appeared in The Nation and the Texas Observer years later, the Bush
team reacted angrily. His staff produced a copy of his day planner
to show that Bush never placed the phone call, and a top-level
adviser personally called reporters to dismiss the story as a
fantasy by "some guy in Argentina." Bush's staff continues to deny
his involvement, and no other media outlet ever reported on the
episode, despite the high-ranking source.
More than a decade later, Terragno still recalls details of the
phone call clearly -- as well as his outrage. "It looked bad and it
surprised me," he says. "There was this political endorsement,
apparently from the White House. I don't know if George Bush the
father was aware of it, or if it was only a business contact by his
son, who hoped that his family name would have some influence."
George W. wasn't the only Bush plying the family name in Argentina.
His brother Neil had tried to funnel $900,000 in loans from
Silverado Savings and Loan, where he served as a director, into a
failed attempt to drill for oil in Argentina. The S&L eventually
collapsed, costing taxpayers nearly $1 billion to bail out, and
federal regulators banned Neil from certain banking activities.
But Terragno was unimpressed by the family connections. He told
George W. the pipeline concession would be awarded according to
Argentine law. It hardly mattered -- Argentine law was about to
change. Time had run out for Raúl Alfonsín. His party lost the
election, and he left office four months early to make way for his
successor, Carlos Menem.
Enron, for its part, couldn't have appointed an Argentine president
more favorable to its interests. A right-wing follower of Juan
Peron, Menem was eager to open his country to American enterprise --
and his own lavish spending. He took to traveling with a huge
entourage aboard Tango-01, his $66- million presidential jet. The
Bushes took an immediate liking to him. The day after the 1989
election, Neil Bush arrived in Buenos Aires for a tennis match with
the president-elect. The following year, President Bush made the
first of eight trips to see Menem, becoming the first U.S. chief
executive since Eisenhower to visit Argentina.
Several days after the president's trip in 1990, Bush's ambassador
to Argentina, Terence Todman, wrote a stern letter to Menem's
minister of the economy to follow up on issues that Bush
had "intended to address, but failed to do so for lack of time."
Todman went on to imply that eight U.S. companies would walk away
from their investment plans unless Argentina stopped favoring
domestic corporations. The first company on the list was Enron,
which the ambassador described as being "poised to invest $250
million" -- as soon as the Argentine government met its demands for
tax breaks. Todman closed his letter by warning that the Enron
decision was "extremely urgent," as the gas company would make a
final decision on its investment in less than a month.
Todman prevailed: Menem agreed to the company's terms, signing a
presidential decree that included Enron in a national program
freeing it from tariffs and valued-added taxes.
Reports of the Enron deal outraged Argentines, who had supported
Alfonsín's struggle to create a democracy out of what remained after
10 years of military dictatorship. Lawmakers demanded a
congressional inquiry, and a special prosecutor launched an
investigation. Menem dealt with the scandal in a forthright manner:
Since his own justice department was looking into the tax giveaway,
he simply fired the investigator.
Enron ultimately abandoned the project when gas prices fell, but an
Enron subsidiary later bought into the pipeline and now owns almost
a third of the gasoducto. Among the subsidiary's board members is
Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to former President
George Bush.
George W. has certainly benefited from his association with Enron.
Kenneth Lay, the company's chief executive, has personally
contributed $100,000 to Bush's two gubernatorial campaigns. When
Bush announced in 1999 that he was running for president, executives
and political action committees connected to Enron contributed
$89,650 to his campaign in the first three months. Lay signed on as
a "Bush Pioneer," pledging to raise $100,000.
The involvement of George W. and Neil in Argentina has become
something of an m.o. for the Bush brothers in foreign affairs. The
sons of the former president have certainly not been shy about using
their family name to enrich themselves and their friends. Jeb sold
$74 million worth of water pumps to the Nigerian government in 1988.
Marvin tried to sell electronic fences to the defense ministry of
Kuwait two years after the Gulf War, while Neil sought contracts to
provide oil-field antipollution equipment. And George W. lent his
name to tiny Harken Energy to help secure a huge offshore drilling
contract in Bahrain (see "Slick W.," page 48).
Undoubtedly, the family name will continue to open doors
internationally if George W. is elected. Last November, an airplane
with Houston registry numbers landed in Buenos Aires; on board was
former President Bush, who had arrived to spend the night with his
friend, President Menem, 10 days before the end of Menem's final
term. The two men attended a dinner at the home of Argentine banker
José Rohm, where they were joined by the vice president of Chase
Manhattan Bank, the director of Credit Suisse First Boston, the
president-elect of Argentina and the former president of Uruguay.
What was the purpose of President Bush's visit? "Fishing," says
Michael Dannenhauer, a Bush spokesman. But when the Buenos Aires
daily, Pagina 12, asked several of the dinner guests why the
president was in town, they smiled and quietly replied, "Business."
Bush's "real interest," they added, was to learn how the new
government would deal with CEI, an Argentine media company whose
former chief had fled the country under investigation for fraud. One
of CEI's principal investors, the paper noted, is Tom Hicks, "one of
the funders of the presidential campaign of Bush's son, George, the
governor of Texas."
Found at
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2000/03/argentina.html

USA: Don't Cry for Enron, Argentina

by Paul Krugman, San Francisco Chronicle
December 12th, 2001

Last week, the Web site SatireWire.com ran a mock news story: "Enron
Admits It's Really Argentina." It was pretty funny, though quite
unfair -- unfair, that is, to Argentina.
Yet, the satire was more on point than its authors realized. Not
long ago Argentina, like Enron, was a darling of the financial
community. And like Enron, Argentina was held up as a role model, to
a large extent by the same people -- Argentina's monetary system, in
particular, was lauded in the pages of Forbes and the Wall Street
Journal, and feted at libertarian think tanks.
Why did the same people tend to admire Enron and Argentina? Because
in their different ways, both the company and the country tried to
turn back the clock to 1913. Both were experiments testing the
libertarian credo: that the great expansion in government's role
between the two world wars was unwarranted. Both were supposed to
demonstrate that government activism is unnecessary, and that
radical laissez-faire works.
The Enron experiment was, in essence, about doing away with
regulation -- regulation of prices, regulation of financial trading.
Most of these regulations had their origin in fear that consumers,
workers and investors would be exploited by those whom Theodore
Roosevelt called "malefactors of great wealth."
Enron used its political clout to create what one of its own
executives called a "regulatory black hole" in which it could
operate freely.
What Enron's admirers believed was that experience would demonstrate
fears about unregulated markets to be unjustified. Unfortunately,
what disappeared into that black hole was not bureaucratic clutter
but billions of hard-earned dollars, including those of Enron's own
employees. Or maybe it wasn't a black hole, but rather a wormhole,
and those billions of dollars emerged in some other universe -- say,
overseas bank accounts. For it turns out that malefactors of great
wealth do exist, and some of them were running Enron.
If Enron was an experiment in doing away with regulatory activism,
Argentina was an experiment in doing away with monetary activism.
Argentina returned to a colonial-era monetary system, a "currency
board," which took government out of the loop. No more lurching from
crisis to crisis, no more disruptive government interventions:
Argentina would provide sound money, and leave the rest up to the
free market.
Though Argentina attracted the usual opportunists, I'm pretty sure
that both the creators of its monetary system and many of its
admirers sincerely believed that they were working in everyone's
interest. Alas, these particular good intentions paved the road to
hell.
In the last few weeks, the bitter irony of Argentina's situation has
become almost too much to bear. The country's monetary system was
introduced in the name of laissez-faire. Now, in its desperate
efforts to save that system from imminent collapse, the Argentine
government has imposed drastic restrictions on economic freedom.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who think that
markets are evil, that the profit motive is always wrong. On the
contrary, I believe that markets are very good things indeed. But
the great economic lesson of the 20th century was that to work, a
market system needs a little help from the government: regulations
to prevent abuses, active monetary policy to fight recessions. The
twin debacles in Houston and Buenos Aires demonstrate that this
great lesson has not lost its relevance.

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owner.CorpWatch is making this article available in our efforts to
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Found at http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=1015

posted in Participatory Economics - 0 replies

Venezuela's Path

maybememe — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 07:05:40 GMT

ZNet | Venezuela

by Michael Albert; November 06, 2005

Going to Venezuela? There are beautiful waterfalls and mountains. There is rich surf, sand, and sun. But nowadays the biggest attraction is revolution.

This October I spent a week in Caracas. That's not much information to work with but for what it's worth, here's what I found and felt.

Toward a New Political System

My first and arguably most personally surprising encounter with the Bolivarian Revolution was at the Ministry for Popular Participation, which was created in accord, I was told, with Chavez's desire "that the people should take power."

I asked the officials we interviewed, "What does that mean, that the people should take power?" After noting thousands of years of "empires obstructing people from participating in politics," all culminating in "the North American empire," the official said the "U.S. has had 200 years of representative government, but in your system people turn over control to others." Instead, in Venezuela, "we humbly are proposing a system where people hold power in a participatory and protagonist democracy. We want a new kind of democracy to attain a new kind of society."

On the wall was a diagram of their aims. It had lots of little circles, then other larger ones in another layer, and so on. The idea, they said, "was to establish numerous local grassroots assemblies or councils of citizens where people could directly express themselves." These local councils would be the foundational components of "a new system of participatory democracy."

The bottom layer of the vision focuses on communities with "common habits and customs," the officials said. "We define them as comprising 200 to 400 families, or 1000 to 2000 people each." One could of course imagine sub units within each local unit, as well, but that wasn't immediately on their agenda, nor was it in their diagram. The local units would in turn send "elected spokespersons" to units another layer up. Units in this second layer would "encompass a broader geographic region," and then from there, "spokespeople would be elected to another layer, and so on," creating a network covering "parishes, municipalities, states, and the whole society."

The participation officials, explaining their diagram and their goal, said the smallest units were meant to become "the decision-making core of the new Venezuelan polity." Chavez and this ministry hoped to have, they said, "3,000 local assemblies in place by the new year." Their goal was to have "enough in place, throughout the country, in 4 or 5 years, to account for 26 million Venezuelans."

They didn't want "a dictatorship of the proletariat or of any other kind," they said. Strikingly, they also said they didn't want "what Che died for, though they wanted to learn from that." They wanted to build something new, from the bottom.

I asked, "What happens if the local assemblies want some new policy, and the ministers, legislature, or Chavez don't want it?" "No matter," they said, "the assemblies, once they are in place and operating, rule."

But, I said, "you don't want an assembly of 100 families making a decision for the whole country, surely." "Correct," came the answer, "the local assemblies can only make final decisions bearing just on their own area."

"Suppose one assembly decides it wants some change bearing on crime that has to do with federal courts or police or whatever, extending beyond that community?" I asked. "What happens? When does the law or policy change?"

"On every level there should be a response" came the reply. "On the lowest level assemblies would do whatever they can within their community. But crime goes beyond a community, and requires going to the next higher levels where the issues would have to be confronted, too. On the municipal level they might change ordinances, etc., to also respond. And it could go higher, then."

Okay, I asked, "Suppose one local assembly wants a younger voting age. They bring it to the next higher level and members there are excited about it too. Does it go up to a legislature and does the legislature have any choice?"

I was told the local unit would - through its spokespeople - send the proposal to the next layer of the popular democratic structures. "Had they decided something bearing only on their local neighborhood, which is all that is happening now, such as the age required for local votes, it would simply be enacted, under their supervision, for them, without having to be discussed more widely." But if their desire stretched wider, as a general new voting law for national elections would, "their proposal would go up, as far as is relevant. Then the proposal would go back to the base of all assemblies for all to consider."

These Bolivarians, entrusted by Chavez's administration with building a new, parallel polity, didn't want any more representative decision making than absolutely necessary. They wanted the proposal from one assembly to go up not so that it could be decided by representatives, but so that it could be discussed by spokespeople and then be brought back to other local assemblies by their spokespeople, eventually to all of them, to be decided at large. "If support came," I was told, "then the goal is that it would yield a new voting age, whether Chavez or mayors or the legislature or anyone else wanted the change or not."

I said surely there must be many elected or just appointed mayors, governors, or bureaucrats who would obstruct this vision, not wanting their power reduced or that of the populace increased. Yes, I was told, "many bureaucrats have held positions for twenty or thirty years and about sixty percent of them are putting breaks on the proposal."

"Even among ministers in the Chavez administration," I asked, "do some resent that they would go from having power to just obeying the public? Cuba's poder popular began with many of the ideals you express," I noted, "but never got to the point where the national power was participatory. Do you believe that the Chavez government will help the assembly system reach its full development, or that after awhile the assembly system will have to push against the government to get full power?"

The answer was "only the organized population can decide. We are on a path to invent a new democracy. We have gone forward from what we had before. There are no guarantees, but we are trying to go further." There was no need, however, the officials said, to remove or otherwise forcefully conflict with the old structures. Rather, the new system would be built alongside what now exists and would prove its worth over time, in parallel. Many in the old would come around, others wouldn't. But either way, in time the old forms would be replaced by the impressive reality of the new forms' success, not by fiat or by force.

"How will Chavez's initiative encourage people to create these local assemblies?" I wondered. The whole assembly structure was a project in development, the officials said, and there were diverse ideas about how to make it happen. Here was the most striking and instructive one I heard. "We Bolivarians have a program for citizens in barrios to gain ownership of their current dwellings. They need only petition to do so, but they have to do that in groups of 200 families or more for the petition to be accepted." In that case, the dwellers get their homes and the community of families hopefully becomes a grassroots assembly.

I asked, "Do you find that the government has to prod the people to participate?" The officials replied, "The people are taking initiative, but it is very important that the government supports them." People taking power involves "a new way of thinking and a new culture," the officials said. "The president and we are working hard to make participatory democracy happen, but we all have limitations in our heads to overcome, as well as old structures." This was a recurring theme. In Venezuela, while there have been coups and thus struggle against capital and also external imperialism, at the moment the struggle seems to be more against the imprint of the past on even poor people's habits and beliefs.

"How many people," I asked, "already support this program?" "The full picture of assemblies is very new, just about to be announced," they said, "but the general goal of people's power maybe about a quarter understand and strongly support, with more soon." They emphasized they didn't want a system "that gives power to another person." They didn't "want representative democracy." The people elect, in the Venezuelan model, "spokespeople, not representatives." What will be proposed in one unit will get to the other units by going up via elected spokespeople, and then back down to the base, through other spokespeople, for further discussion and decision. What will be decided at lowest levels will be binding. "The country has 335 municipalities," they noted. About 255 are with the president."

Discussions about police and courts are also proceeding, I was told, but I didn't get to talk with people working on that dimension of change and apparently it was, as yet, not nearly as far along. These officials told me that the "socialism we are trying to construct incorporates understanding the history of past efforts in Russia, Cuba, etc., but it is not about state run enterprises or a dictatorship. We have to create our own model to reduce the work week, to defend nature, and to create social justice for both the collective and the individual. If it continues, capitalism will put an end to the planet. We have to find a way for everybody to have a better standard of living but also preserve the planet. A virtuous individual thinks about the community. That is what we are looking for."

Additional Examples

Regarding health, though I didn't get to talk to any government officials directly involved with the program, or to any doctors dispensing medicine, it was clear that again the government hadn't simply taken over the old structures and as yet had no inclination to do so. Instead, in cooperation with Cuba, which sent 20,000 doctors, the government had set up new clinics all over the country, dispensing health care locally in barrios, bringing to the poor their first local health care. We were told these clinics serve people's needs, operate pretty democratically, and have doctors who earn typical workers pay and often less. The people love the clinics and the Chavista health officials, I would bet, look for the old structures to bend and break under the competitive pressure of the new ones, but without having been directly coerced.

We visited barrios, which were gigantic stretches of hillside covered with small shack-like homes, and we saw intermittently the newly constructed small but clean medical clinics the Cuban doctors worked from. Compared to nothing, which was the correct comparison, it was a huge improvement and helps explain Chavez's support from the barrio communities. We also heard about a plan for eye care, even offering free eye operations of diverse kinds, 500,000 operations over ten years, to poor U.S. citizens. The Venezuelans would provide the transportation. The Cubans would do the surgery. Having eye problems myself, I listened closely, smiling at the thought.

The same general pattern was true of a project aimed at raising literacy throughout Venezuela. With the same logic and methodology, this project also proceeded by not fighting with the old, but instead existing alongside it. In under two years, Chavez reports and apparently UNESCO verifies, Venezuela has eliminated illiteracy.

Indeed, this same pattern is being employed, we saw, even for higher education. The government didn't take over the national universities, private or public. Instead, after the oil industry strike failed during the last coup attempt, when almost a third of the industry's managers and other technical workers were fired for having participated in trying to bring down the government, many of the prior oil administration buildings were no longer needed. Obviously the bureaucratic waste and fraud had been enormous. A group of these liberated buildings were transformed into the new Bolivarian University.

Workers councils ruled the new university. The government minister of education became its Rector. In time, he overrode the council, determining instead that there would be only meetings of smaller groups, and that he would only interact with representatives from those. This characteristic pattern of a central planner interacting with a workplace and demanding a chain of command in it and in that way interfering with direct self management was disturbing. The Bolivarian revolution is juggling many tendencies with roots in many aspects of social life. But the pedagogy of the new university is, I learned by interviewing a professor there, very innovative, emphasizing serving diverse communities by students having to do projects at the grassroots, having to relate their studies to social conditions and needs, and having grading being a shared task for students, faculty, and community residents.

In an interview with Justin Podur the then University Rector put it this way, "We will prove that you can have quality and equity in education. We will form holistic professionals who are citizens. They will learn ethics, social responsibility, respect for a Latin American and Caribbean identity, solidarity, respect. The professional produced by this institution will work for the transformation of society. She will be a critical thinker who can stimulate others and generate questions. Our curriculum is based on 'axes' of education. Any plan or program of study - say an engineering or teaching professional program - is your 'professional axis'. But you also have a cultural axis, a political axis, ethical axis, aesthetics axis, a social-community interaction axis where you work directly with sectors of society outside of the university from the start."

Bolivarian University has about 7,000 students, we were told, and about 700 staff of whom 250 are non-faculty but only 120 are full-time professors. Some faculty resist the new pedagogy as too flexible. Some see it as too community oriented. In meetings there are radicals and reactionaries. Some faculty resist the trend toward providing classes for non-teaching staff. Some resist having steadily more equitable pay relations among all employees. Some resist the drive to bring the school's resources out into the country, setting up missions beyond Caracas, promoting higher education while reaching out educationally to Venezuela's rural areas for the first time.

Looked at in the large, Bolivarian University competes with the rest of the system of higher education by offering an evolving, but already dramatically different experience. The minister heading Bolivarian University might not be optimal in terms of workers self management, but we were told he does talk frequently and forcefully about proving that the new approaches are better and replacing the old ways via having people see the benefits of change. The students at Bolivarian University, not surprisingly, are mostly poor, which is the opposite of the old system. Ties between the school and local co-ops, which are in turn constructed with uniform wages and council self management, are continually extended, building a kind of parallel world to what has gone before.

Considering still another key domain of social life, media, the emerging pattern continued. A look at the daily newspapers showed that of the first 25 articles, reading from the first page forward, fully 20 were broad attacks on or highly critical of Chavez. The rest were on entirely other topics. And this was typical, day after day, I was told. The papers are privately held corporations, not surprisingly hostile toward Chavez's inclinations. Chavez doesn't restrict them, however, much less nationalize or otherwise take them over. The same situation holds for key TV stations. Regarding the TV stations, however, and I bet something like this will also happen with print before too long, the government has a strategy.

VIVE TV is a new station created, like Bolivarian University, by the Chavez government. We visited and enjoyed touring its facilities. The widest salary difference, from the head of the company to people who cleaned up, was three to one, but the new payment policy, being steadily if slowly enforced, was to attain equal hourly pay for all by periodically raising wages of those at the bottom until they reached parity.

VIVE has roughly 300 employees. Their equipment wasn't like CBS, but it was certainly excellent and far reaching in its potential. The new VIVE website presents their shows, archived, for the world to see. The station's governing body is, of course, a worker's assembly. Workers at VIVE lacking skills are encouraged to take courses, including in film production and other topics, given right on the premises, and those facilities are also used to teach citizens from Caracas and more widely how to film in their own locales.

Indeed, the station's mandate was to provide a voice for the people. Its shows, we were told, routinely present citizens speaking their mind, including voices from well outside Caracas, which was a first for Venezuela. To that end, VIVE undertakes lots of community training, distributing cameras to local citizens as well, so people around the country can send in footage and even finished edited material, for national display.

In some respects VIVE is like a local community cable station in the U.S., except that it is national and the élan is far, far higher, and the desire to incorporate the seeds of the future in the present structure is far, far more explicit and radical, with the employees seeing themselves as presenting to the country and the world a new kind of media that, they hope, will be a model picked up elsewhere as well.

VIVE takes no ads, "to avoid being controlled." There is actually, on the shows, much criticism of the government, since the shows convey grass-roots opinions. But this criticism, unlike that on mainstream private stations, is honest and heartfelt, not manufactured. Rather than trying to create dissension, it is constructive.

Along with VIVE and a national public station directly under government control, there is also a new federal law which imposes on private stations that 25% of their shows must be produced by independent producers, not by the stations themselves. This is a kind of service requirement, but, interestingly, it is VIVE who trains many of these contracting producers. Here again is evidence of a kind of multi-pronged, legal, almost stealth-like incursion on old ways, both within the new institutions which are creating new approaches even against recalcitrant attitudes and habits, and also via the new institutions challenging the old ones, by a contrast effect or by outright competition, and injecting ideas into them through the independent producers as well. Venezuela has also embarked on a continental station, to broadcast news and the voices of the poor throughout Latin America, but we didn't have a chance to visit so as to comment on that.

Regarding the economy, Venezuela starts out with huge advantages compared to other third world countries. The oil industry is nationalized and is the centerpiece of the society's economy. Moreover the oil industry provides a gigantic flow of revenues, unlike what any other dissident country has ever enjoyed while trying to chart a new path for itself. Likewise, oil not only provokes great U.S. interest, it also provides considerable defense against U.S. intervention.

We were told by an oil industry official, however, that there are still many transnational firms who contract for various aspects of oil business in Venezuela. The government's reaction, he said, was not to challenge them, much less expropriate them, but to form new co-ops doing the same functions, intended to out compete the transnationals. These new co-ops are worker self managed. They usually are seeking equal wages and even in the least egalitarian ones the ratio is at most three to one. In addition, a minimum social wage is guaranteed. An idea slowly being implemented is to federate the coops, facilitating their interacting and exchanging via social rather than market norms. The vision, it seemed to me, is that in time contracts will go almost exclusively to the co-ops so that the transnationals will simply leave, of their own accord, no confrontation needed.

I asked if officials thought using competing on the market as the strategy to drive out transnationals risked entrenching market mentalities, but the question wasn't really understood. Similarly, my asking whether officials were worried that utilizing as a key strategy market competition would impose on self management old style aims and means, greatly reducing its latitude for change and perhaps even causing it to give way to new hierarchies, also didn't resonate. There is immense opposition to capitalism and its private ownership. There is major opposition to large disparities in income. There is considerable opposition to gaps in job types yielding passivity versus domination. But only a few people seem to be hostile to markets per se.

One of the few who seem to reject markets, however, is Chavez himself. How else can we explain his approach to international economics which not only predictably rejects the IMF, WTO, World Bank, and particularly the FTAA, but is beginning to hammer out an alternative based on mutual aid and, in effect, violating market exchange rates to instead undertake transactions in light of true and full social costs and benefits, and with a commitment to sharing gains from exchanges not just equally, but more advantageously for the poorer participants. This certainly seems to be the logic of the wide array of agreements into which Venezuela is entering with not only Cuba but many neighboring countries, as well as specific occupied factories throughout Latin America, for example providing oil at amazingly low rates and beneficial terms, often in exchange for goods, not payments. This is quite like Cuba's historic sending of aid and items to poorer countries at cut rates, but the scale is tremendously increased, and where Cuba primarily offered people, as in doctors, Venezuela is doing this with resources and economic products, more directly subverting specifically market logic.

Returning to my exchange with the oil official, when I asked about CITGO - the oil industry owned by Venezuela operating in the U.S. - moving toward having a workers council to self manage it, moving toward equal wages, and changing its division of labor, not only on behalf of those working at CITGO but as a demonstration inside the U.S. for other U.S. workers of the potential of self management and equity, the official was very excited, even wanting to immediately call others to talk about this idea. Later discussion of the related possibility of Venezuela making inroads, via CITGO or otherwise, into media and information dispersal in the U.S., instead of information incursions always occurring only in the reverse direction, caused still more excitement.

We were told by the oil ministry officials and also by trade unionists and others how in Venezuela, like in Argentina, there was a movement, just getting up to speed, to "recuperate" failing or failed workplaces. The difference was that while in Argentina this occurs against the inclinations of government, in Venezuela the government welcomes and even propels it. Indeed, the government has now assembled a list of 700 such plants and is urging workers to occupy and operate them on their own. Another difference, however, is that in Venezuela the method of decision-making adopted for the recuperated plants is called co-management and involves both a workers council and government representatives. The upside of this is that the government is often to the left of the local workforce in the affected workplace helping educate and prod it. The downside is that the centralizing inclination of the government and the participatory inclination of real self management are in opposition. We saw both these tendencies in the Bolivarian University, with the government minister pushing radical pedagogy on sometimes contrary faculty, but also reducing the influence of the workers council. In fact, however, it seemed for the moment, in any case, the government was so over stretched that if there are widespread recuperations, government involvement will be slight and workers will in practice be left to self manage.

Beyond a factory recuperation movement in Venezuela the government also creates new co-ops from scratch. These are also co-managed, at least in theory, and also tend to seek equitable remuneration, etc. These co-ops have often been small and local, everything from little dress shops to small construction projects, but plans exist for creating new firms to produce computers, mine resources, run an airline, etc.

As I understood what I heard, the co-ops are expected to out-compete old capitalist firms - a very reasonable expectation given that the co-ops have lower overhead (due to reduced management pay rates, reduced numbers of managers, and altered job roles), and that co-op workers have an inclination to produce more consistently and energetically under the new social relations. The danger of the co-op strategy, however, is that operating via market norms and methods and specifically trying to out-compete old firms in market-defined contests may entrench in them a managerial bureaucracy and a competitive rather than social orientation, leading more toward what is called market socialism, which in my view is a system that still has a ruling managerial or coordinator class and that operates in light of competitive prices and surplus-seeking, instead of the approach pushing them toward what the most radical Venezuelans clearly desire, which is a classless, participatory, and self managing economy, in which people are socially motivated and are well off and efficient, operating in light of full social implications seeking both personal and collective well being.

In capitalist firms, still dominant in economic sectors other than oil, there is a change in mood as well. Workers identify more with the state and feel it is an ally, providing by its initiatives, in the words of a trade union leader, "a more promising moment for change." This has led to workers in capitalist firms "challenging old union norms and methods" and feeling uncomfortable being "stuck in old relations while others are building new co-ops." This trade union leader estimated that "80% of Venezuela's workers firmly support Chavez." She also said this is why the better unions are thinking about pushing for self management even against capitalist owners. She said "while at first occupying failing firms was just self defense" seeking to protect "jobs and union freedoms," more recently more radical unions are seeking "more consistent strategies to win co-management or self management."

She told us that "five or six years ago the typical Venezuelan worker would not exhibit any class consciousness, but now the Bolivarian revolution was awakening class consciousness not only in workers, but in all people." I asked what would happen if "workers in a successful capitalist firm, knowing friends in coops or recuperated firms who enjoyed controlling their conditions and having equitable incomes, struck against their owners and petitioned the government to take over the firm and make it self managed." She talked about how arrangements would likely be made providing the private owners "credits and investments if they would undertake co-management with the workers." I wondered why businesspeople "would make such a stupid deal when it was clearly just a first step toward their disappearing. Why would they do it, even with short term benefits?" I also asked again about "workers wanting to take over a really successful firm, not giving the owners anything, but just taking over? Why weren't workers all over Venezuela seeking that? And what would happen if they did?"

The trade union leader replied that "of course the businesspeople are not stupid, but they believe we are." She talked about unions spreading "the revolutionary virus into the workers" and I asked again, how come it didn't spread quickly, all on its own? She blamed "old union leaders, afraid of taking new steps." But she also said that "just two years ago no one would have believed a worker managed factory was possible but now there are over 20, with over 700 under study for occupation to get them back to work." She pointed out the need to do all this "along with raising consciousness of people." She said, "going too fast, without people wanting it, wouldn't work." And she noted that the businesspeople are "still trying to manipulate and buy off the workers, and especially the leaders."

I also asked this trade union leader, who was explicitly responsible for international relations, about links with movements and unions in the U.S. She reported Venezuelan Chavista unions having links to the "AFL-CIO in California, some grass-roots unions, and the antiwar movement," but not with the national AFL-CIO because they are still giving money to those imposing old bureaucracy and fomenting coups."

I asked her what proportion of the paid workforce was female and she replied, "about 50%." I asked about women's salaries compared to men's and she said there was no difference for the same jobs, but "women didn't get as good jobs as men." I asked if things were better in the occupied factories, and she said "As far as I can tell things are somewhat better, yes, but not ideal." She said "The double duty of women is the biggest obstacle to their deeper involvement in union work." I asked if the Bolivarian movement was trying to address this and she said "The new constitution says domestic work has to be acknowledged as work for social security purposes," but I asked about men and women doing it more equally and she said that that "was progressing very very slowly. At the grassroots level lots of women participate, despite double or even triple work, but our men are very macho, and regrettably many women spoil them by doing all household work." She said her situation was unusual because she got lots of help at home.

Overview

From my trip it seemed to me that…

(1) The Bolivarian movement, and in particular President Hugo Chavez, is pushing the population leftward. Even more, the Bolivarian movement, and particularly President Hugo Chavez, is seeking to replace old capitalist forms with new forms that they call anti-capitalist, participatory, socialist, and Bolivarian, among other labels. They are not directly and forcefully challenging and taking over or removing old structures. They are operating legally in the interstices of society to nurture new forms into existence and to then show by contrast and via socially acceptable competition that Venezuela's old forms are inferior, expecting that in time the new forms will legally win out over the old. But as to what these new forms are, there is far more clarity concerning political norms and structures than economic ones. One would like to see a national exploration, debate, and consciousness-raising campaign aimed at clarifying and advocating the ultimate goals of the revolution, and at making knowledge of its goals and continuous critique and enrichment of them a national possession, not a possession only of some leaders.

(2) The Bolivarians' unusual transitional approach has as its vanguard aspect that the Bolivarian leadership is ideologically and programmatically far ahead of its populace and trying to get that populace to move further and faster than it is alone inclined to. It has as its anarchist aspect, however, that the movement is being nourished, even if by a national president, mostly from the bottom up. It seeks to exist in parallel and to become prevalent without violence and even without confrontation. It seeks to embody the seeds of the future in the present to avoid generating a new domination. It is trying to win adherents by evidence, not force.

(3) The centrality of a single leader, at least that it is Hugo Chavez, seems to be a highly unexpected benefit. Chavez, so far, has not just been congenial and inspiring, audacious and courageous, willing to step outside every box and implement program after program, experimenting and learning, but has also shown remarkable restraint in utilizing the accoutrements of central power and has even been a key source of anti-authoritarian influence. At the same time, it is also true that the centrality of a single leader, Hugo Chavez, though perhaps unavoidable, is also a debit. The leader could turn bad, or could disappear, and at this point either turn of events would be calamitous. A related problem is the lack of a serious opposition on the left. Revolution benefits from disagreement, debate, and diversity, but those attributes have trouble arising amidst a siege mentality. One wonders who will succeed Chavez, and how the people will succeed the leaders, unless there is massive popular education in leadership and the revolution's aims.

(4) Finally, the idea of out-competing the old system with a new one created in parallel is very cleverly beneficial in that it avoids undue premature conflict that might bring down holy hell on the Bolivarian project even as it also draws on strengths and sidesteps weaknesses. But the idea of out-competing the old system with a new one created in parallel is also at least in one respect detrimental because it risks ingraining competitive qualities and methods and buttressing bureaucratic and classist structures, and because it may ignore some recalcitrant features from the past that need early dramatic attention lest they later drag down the whole project.

My overall impression was that the Bolivarian revolution is still vague. It doesn't have clearly enunciated feminist politics, anti-racist politics, or even anti-capitalist politics, though in all three cases the inclinations are incredibly humane and radical and are moving rapidly forward toward enunciating full aims and proposing immediate program in that light. Chavez appears to be a remarkable detonator of insights, himself moving leftward at a great pace. The Bolivarian revolution is most ideologically clear, which is ironic and a powerful testimony on his behalf, given Chavez's military background, regarding political democracy and political participation where it seems to be already committed to a well conceived, compelling and innovative institutional vision that outstrips what any other revolutionary project since the Spanish anarchists has held forth.

The future is not certain. The Bolivarian revolution could still stall in social democracy. Co-management and not self management could lead that way. It could still stumble or even rush into typical old style "socialist" channels. Its market strategies and lack of clarity about class divisions based on divisions of labor, not property, push that way. There is always a danger of authoritarianism when a government is prodding a populace, of course. But the Bolivarian revolution could also, however, provide a remarkable model, both of a better world and of a very original way to arrive at that better world. Which of these results, or of others, happens, is largely going to be up to Chavez, the Bolivarian movements, and the Venezuelan people, though mass external support, not least to restrain U.S. aggressive inclinations before they can corrupt or destroy the experiment, are also profoundly needed.

I left Venezuela inspired and very hopeful. Venezuela looks to me like Uncle Sam's worst nightmare. I was humbled by Bolivarian ingenuity and steadfastness and by my own continued citizenship in the world's most rogue and brutal nation, against which I and other radicals have had such limited organizing success. Hopefully my country can follow Venezuela's lead rather than crushing its aspirations. Hopefully, citizens in the U.S. can make that happen. Officials won't, of course.

posted in Participatory Economics - 1 reply

Advice?

Tedster — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 04:53:08 GMT

I am trying to start a co-op. Does anybody have experience with starting one?

posted in Participatory Economics - 4 replies

Business As Usual

maybememe — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 08:10:58 GMT

Michael Albert

The growing outrage over the willful ignoring of warnings and overt
cutting of local expenditures that paved the way for New Orleans'
disaster is of course valid. The growing outrage over the unavailability
of resources spent on immoral imperial violence is also valid. Corpses
floating by warrant both tears and recrimination, but I want to address
something slightly different.

Set aside the past history leading to New Orleans' vulnerability. Set
aside the early warnings ignored. Set aside the National Guard sent to
Iraq. The storm hit. Those with means to flee and somewhere to go got
out. Levies burst (or, more accurately, succumbed to insane neglect).
Waters rose. People lost food, medicine, information, and, yes, for a
few, access to addictive drugs.

So what then? I am no city planner. But a few possibilities cross my
mind.

Why not issue an order to bus companies to curtail transport elsewhere
in the south and send all those busses, and certainly not too few, to
New Orleans and the Mississippi coast to extract those who wished to
leave.

Why not send in food, water, medicine, and yes, perhaps even drugs to
appease desperate habits, to be distributed from sites all over the
afflicted area, as well as dispersed to those who couldn't gain access
to distribution points.

Why not issue an order to the military at bases across the south to send
in troops to provide relief, including rescuing people, taking people
out, distributing needed supplies, and, as a sidebar, helping keep
order.

But where will people who leave stay? How will people escape the
blistering heat and rising tides?

Why not issue an order to hotels to open their doors in surrounding
areas free from the floods and power outages. The busses then wouldn't
have to drive people hundreds or even thousands of miles. There would be
no need to put people in vast stadiums with no privacy, amenities, or
security, producing still more suffering. The hotels would be easy
destinations to deliver food, medicine, and other necessities like
clothing, diapers, soap, and radios to, the last so that people could
hear Bush taking credit for issuing executive orders to save their lives
and comfort them for bearing the burden of climate warming gone amuck.

No doubt you can think up better possibilities. Surely mayors and
governors and heads of big corporations, or their advisers, or many news
commentators, could think up good options too.

In other words, even given the grotesque unpreparedness of New Orleans
and the Mississippi coast, even given the unending misallocations of
resources to immoral war, still, once people were clinging to roofs,
once people were wading though chest deep tides, once people were
enduring blistering sun, once people were parched, hungry, without
clothes, without medicine - why did we do so little?

Well, first, it isn't we who did so little. Normal people were
immediately horrified. Normal people, particularly in the area,
immediately tried to help. Despite being inundated daily with media
messages and social situations that arouse antisocial greediness and
egocentrism, the U.S. population still has a beating heart. But
disparate populations have limited options. The "we" who did little or
nothing was not the broad population but the people who had means. The
"we" was the government. So why didn't the government act quicker and
more aggressively?

The answer gaining credence by the hour is that the suffering people
were, and are, black and poor. That is overwhelmingly true and intensely
relevant, particularly to the instant news coverage, to the shoot to
kill rhetoric, to the belief that politicos could ride out being
callous, and to the endless indignities imposed at the gathering places
where acres of hungry, disheveled blacks are harassed by surrounding
police forces - not to mention to the prior history of New Orleans. But
however central racism has been, it is not the whole story.

The additional factor making things much worse than nature imposed, I
think, is that government intervention on behalf of humanity violates
the logic and philosophy of business as usual.

Yes, the Bush administration worships market fundamentalism beyond all
reason which makes them even more guilty than a Kerry or Gore regime,
which would not have so drastically cut security measures for New
Orleans, a hub city of the U.S. and world economy, and might have signed
the Kyoto Accords, paying more attention to global warming, a likely
cause of growing hurricane severity.

But even if Kerry or Gore wouldn't have done as badly before the fact as
Bush, nonetheless, if the storm had hit head on, Kerry or Gore in office
would have faced a situation little different from what we see now.
Kerry would have put on a more sincere looking smiling face, no doubt.
Gore would have delivered more caring and coherent homilies, I bet.
Kerry would have set down the plane and rolled up his sleeves to hand
out water bottles to suffering crowds - can't you just see him in your
mind's eye? But neither Kerry nor Gore would have issued orders to bus
companies, hotels, and pharmaceutical, food, and water providers to
immediately aggressively alleviate people's suffering. Why not?

For Kerry and Gore, as for Bush, to issue such directives would
challenge the private pursuit of profits.

But, you say, this is a calamity. Bush could interfere as an emergency
act and could then soak up gigantic public thanks and avoid the gigantic
public recrimination he is now suffering. Even if Bush doesn't give a
damn about the people who are suffering, how could that not be better
for his stature and even for his market fundamentalist agenda?

The answer is, I think, while such a choice would be in elites'
short-term interest, it would not be in their interest over the long
haul. Over the long haul, it would be okay for elites to volunteer aid,
yes, though incredibly few seem to be doing so, but the government
telling private corporations that they must serve human need at the
expense of private profit is unacceptable because, heaven forbid, it
might cause too many people to perceive the obvious.

If homelessness after a hurricane should be solved by government fiat
against market mayhem making things worse, why not solve day to day
homelessness that way, too? Why not solve a crumbling infrastructure
that way? Why not solve 30 or maybe 40 million Americans living below
the poverty line that way? Why not solve literacy rates falling, poverty
climbing, hunger growing, health failing? If rescuing New Orleans after
a (somewhat) natural calamity warrants the government coercing big
business, why not rescuing New Orleans, and other cities too, from the
continuous ravages of corporate greed? Before the water rose, illiteracy
in New Orleans was 40%. How can that be civilized? Why not correct that?
Must we be literally drowning to address grotesque injustice? What if
people started asking questions like these?

Is Bush looking gleefully at the suffering in New Orleans and even
neglectfully adding to it as a psychopathic sadist might? I doubt it.
Rather, Bush worries about tomorrow, not about tomorrow's ecology, mind
you, or its climate, but about tomorrow's sociology. Bush ignores
prognostications of natural calamity but listens very hard for the
possibilities of social calamity. Retaining corporate power and profit
is Bush's reason for being. Maintaining subordination of the many to the
few is his business as usual. Cheney is probably lining up construction
contracts.

That's the subtext of Katrina and New Orleans. That's why Bush and Co.
reflexively marched lock step into incredible callousness. Accept
business as usual as priority one and all that's left is different
brands of callousness. And then Bush's media spinners have to sell
Bush's callousness. So like rabid sociopaths they try what often works,
being tough - "shoot the looters to kill" they bluster. Shoot people who
are taking food and water and sharing it with those too old or too young
to loot for themselves. Shoot the sick seeking medicine to survive.
Shoot, shoot, shoot. Don't distribute what's needed, heaven forbid.
Defend empty stores. Defend empty hotels. Who cares about the living,
after all, a lot of them will soon be dead and the rest silent.

Just to clarify the point, for those who take seriously the admonition
to shoot the looters to kill - the main looters in our society are
corporate owners who accrue the products of working people's labor. The
shooting gallery, if fulfilling this instruction were to become popular,
would be far more upscale than the swamp that is New Orleans.

Bush has bloody hands, but beyond Bush, the larger system of business as
usual guaranteed a catastrophic response to this catastrophe. The
accurate Katrina headline is: Storm Hits, Capitalism Preserves Profits,
Humanity Drowns.

posted in Participatory Economics - 1 reply

worker self-management in Venezuela

revolushawn — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 04:42:36 GMT

fascinating...no wonder capitalist christian fundamentalists like Pat Robertson are calling for Chavez' assassination.

Chavez calls for democracy at work
Iain Bruce
In Puerto Ordaz, Venezuela
BBC News Wednesday, 8/17/05

The heat and the noise are almost unbearable in the casting room of Line 3 at Alcasa.

This is one of two big aluminium plants in the south-eastern city of Puerto Ordaz, where most of Venezuela's basic industries are concentrated.

It is also the test bed for a new experiment in co-management, which President Hugo Chavez says is a key step towards a "socialism of the twenty-first century".

Alcides Rivero, who works here as a maintenance electrician, says co-management means that for the first time in this company's 37 years of existence, the workforce has control.

"It's us, the workers", he says, "who decide on questions of production and technology, and it's us who elect who will be our managers."

Marivit Lopez, from the personnel department, explains that the workers are also drawing up a "participatory budget" for 2006.

"The different departmental works councils are discussing and amending the existing proposal so that we get a budget that really fits the company's needs," she says.

cont'd
see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4155936.stm

posted in Participatory Economics - 3 replies

Evolution as a Team Sport

maybememe — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 23:42:27 GMT

By Douglas Rushkoff

Nothing is around the corner. There's no threshold to reach, event horizon to cross, or moment of novelty to await. The change has happened. Indeed, you're soaking in it.

Those of us who like to think of ourselves on the progressive or countercultural end of the spectrum can't help but try to foment change. We want our revolution, after all, and won't be satisfied until we've won - and done so in a way that everyone notices. Catastrophe and climax are prizes for our long uphill battle. But by insisting on getting to notice change in dramatic ways, we guarantee it never truly happening.

There's a disturbing fundamentalism brewing in the counterculture these days - an aching towards apocalypse as dangerous as that of our counterparts in the reddest of states, and understood just as literally. We are to await the apex of novelty, that singularity when consciousness rises from the chrysalis of matter into a new state, beyond time and maybe even energy. And, of course, only those of us with proper spiritual or psychedelic credentials will be prepared for this inevitability, and make it through the bottleneck at the end of linear history. The rest, well, they finally get their comeuppance.

The story is no different in structure than any of the others we've developed over the last two thousand or so years since Aristotle identified the narrative arc of linear drama: create a character or group we like, put them into danger, increase the stakes until the audience can't take it anymore and then provide a solution: salvation, a political ideology, or even, in the age of marketing, a product that relieves the crisis and saves the day. It's the male orgasm curve that has dominated Western narrative for centuries: crisis, climax, release...and then you get to go to sleep. Winners and losers, saved and damned are properly categorized and justice is finally done. Just buy my product, believe in my god, vote for my guy, or suck my dick, and everything's gonna be alright.

The problem with this structure is that it postpones resolution to some distant and, for the most part, mythical future. Instead of taking actions and facilitating real, if only incremental progress at relieving human suffering, we dismiss reality as some temporary state - a precursor to the much more important light at the end of the tunnel. We keep our eyes on the fanciful prize, and relegate the plights of those around us to the category of distraction.

Whether we're setting out on the communist, capitalist, or Christian narrative journey, we're to endure or, a bit better, witness others' pain now for the promise of gain later on. The ends justify the present. For this, too, shall pass.

I've never liked revolutions. They just go in circles, after all. The downside of getting to "win" is that someone else loses, and invariably the cycle begins again. That's why I've begun to think about our current shift less as a revolution than a renaissance. It's not a whole new order coming into power, but rather, as the word "renaissance" implies, the rebirth of old ideas in a new context. Renaissances are not events we work towards, but processes occurring in the present. Revolutions require faith, because movements generally involve killing and other nastiness that people won't generally commit without some spirited motivation. Revolutions happen in the future; Renaissances happen now.

The more I study the original Renaissance, the more I see our own era as having at least as much renaissance character and potential. Where the Renaissance brought us perspective painting, the current one brings virtual reality and holography. The Renaissance saw humanity circumnavigating the globe; in our own era we've learned to orbit it from space. Calculus emerged in the 15th Century, while systems theory and chaos math emerged in the 20th. Our analog to the printing press is the Internet, our equivalent of the sonnet and extended metaphor is hypertext.

Renaissance innovations all involve an increase in our ability to contend with dimension: perspective. Perspective painting allowed us to see three dimensions where there were previously only two. Circumnavigation of the globe changed the world from a flat map to a 3D sphere. Calculus allowed us to relate points to lines and lines to objects; integrals move from x to x-squared, to x-cubed, and so on. The printing press promoted individual perspectives on religion and politics. We all could sit with a text and come up with our own, personal opinions on it. This was no small shift: it's what led to the Protestant wars, after all.

The original Renaissance invented perspective - and out of that was born the notion of the individual: the Renaissance Man. Sure, there were individual people before the Renaissance, but they existed mostly as parts of small groups. With literacy and perspective came the abstract notion the person as a separate entity. This idea of a human being as a "self," with independent will, capacity, and agency, was pure Renaissance - a rebirth and extension of the Ancient Greek idea of personhood. And from it, we got all sorts of great stuff like the autonomy of the individual, agency, and even democracy and the republic. The right to individual freedom is what led to all those revolutions, in the first place.

For it was also during the first great Renaissance that we developed the concept of competition. Authorities became more centralized, and individuals competed for how high they could rise in the system. We like to think of it as a high-minded meritocracy, but the rat-race that ensued only strengthened the authority of central command. We learned compete for resources and credit made artificially scarce by centralized banking and government.

For just one example, it was during the Renaissance that centralized currency came into widespread use. Before then, localities developed their own currencies, often based on real commodities, and many of which existed side-by-side more centralized currencies that were used for transacting with other regions. With the establishment of the nation state came the exclusive right of kings to create money by "fiat" - literally by invention - and then force everyone else to compete to pay it back. To this day, people who want to buy a house must borrow, say, $100,000 from the bank and then pay back $300,000 over thirty years. Where does the other $200,000 come from? The borrower is to compete for it in the marketplace. Only $100,000 was loaned into existence. The rest must be taken from others.

The idea of competition between individuals was a potentially dangerous side effect of Renaissance thinking. Sure, competition has been a powerful motivator, particularly when applied to capitalism, and on a completely level playing field can competition yield some terrific innovation and growth. But we may have reached the end of what competition can offer us, and new models for innovation and interaction - the ones emerging out of our own renaissance - might prove more appropriate to our current situation.

While our renaissance also brings with it a shift in our relationship to dimension, the character of this shift is different. In a holograph, fractal, or even an Internet web site, perspective is no longer about the individual observer's position; it's about that individual's connection to the whole. Any part of a holographic plate recapitulates the whole image; bringing all the pieces together generates greater resolution. Each detail of a fractal reflects the whole. Web sites live not by their own strength but the strength of their links. As Internet enthusiasts like to say, the power of a network is not the nodes, it's the connections.

That's why new models for both collaboration and progress have emerged during our renaissance - ones that obviate the need for competition between individuals, and instead value the power of collectivism. The open source development model, shunning the corporate secrets of the competitive marketplace, promotes the free and open exchange of the codes underlying the software we use. Anyone and everyone is invited to make improvements and additions, and the resulting projects - like the Firefox browser - are more nimble, stable, and user-friendly. Likewise, the development of complementary currency models, such as Ithaca Hours, allow people to agree together what their goods and services are worth to one another without involving the Fed. They don't need to compete for currency in order to pay back the central creditor - currency is an enabler of collaborative efforts rather than purely competitive ones.

For while the Renaissance invented the individual and spawned many institutions enabling personal choices and freedoms, our renaissance is instead reinventing the collective in a new context. Originally, the collective was the clan or the tribe - an entity defined no more by what members had in common with each other than what they had in opposition to the clan or tribe over the hill. Networks give us a new understanding of our potential relationships to one another. Membership in one group does not preclude membership in a myriad of others. We are all parts of a multitude of overlapping groups with often paradoxically contradictory priorities. Because we can contend with having more than one perspective at a time, we needn't force them to compete for authority in our hearts and minds - we can hold them all, provisionally. That's the beauty of renaissance: our capacity to contend with multiple dimensions is increased. Things don't have to be just one way or directed by some central authority, alive, dead or channeled. We have the capacity to contend with spontaneous, emergent reality.

As collaborators, we are no longer setting ourselves up for exclusion, conflict, or even the postponement of joy. We don't need to dangle the carrot of cash prizes, salvation, or Bhoddisatvahood in order to get others to join in our enterprises, because they are so much fun to do right now, for their own sake.

By the same token, our relationship to the human story changes, as well. Instead of aching towards conclusion, and seeing every global and personal crisis as a sign of impending cosmic state change, we evolve together as a natural course of events. We won't get those dramatic, cataclysmic shifts to look forward to, but neither will we need them. New threads and understandings simply emerge from our collective engagement, just as new traits species and emerge from our exchange of genomes.

Evolution is a team sport, not a competition. There's just one thing going on here, however many eyes and "I's" it may seem to have. We all make it, together, or none of us do.

posted in Participatory Economics - 0 replies

advice on transferring 401k to Roth IRA in Socially responsible econ

LugNut — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 21:59:11 GMT

I have this money currently in a 401K for the past 7 years, and really just want to put my money into something I support rather than companies it's currently in. I know I'm going to get taxed on it, but I really don't care over my piece of mind.

Does anybody have any knowledge of the following:
winslowgreen.com/docs/products/index.asp
www.paxworld.com/

Here's an article with more options:
www.investorideas.com/Researc...dustries/Article/InvestGreen.asp

posted in Participatory Economics - 2 replies