America Beyond Capitalism - Gar Alperovitz

Gar Alperovitz: America Beyond Capitalism

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Source: Community Wealth

Maria Armoudian: How big is this economic movement in the United States?

Gar Alperovitz: It’s a huge development. But the president doesn’t cover it, and the press, on the surface, is not aware of it.

At the grassroots level, there is a lot of activity that is changing the ownership of wealth and making it benefit neighborhoods, workers, cities and communities, at large. There are 11,000 worker-owned companies in the United States, and more people involved in them than are members of unions in the private sector. There are also 120 million Americans who are members of co-operatives — a huge number, about a third of the population.

About 20 percent or 22 percent of our energy is done under public utilities of one kind or another. There are another 4,000 or 5,000 neighborhood corporations, in which neighborhoods own productive wealth to benefit the neighborhood. Much of that is related to housing and land development, but also stores, businesses and factories.

One estimate is that there are 4,500 of these. One, called Newark New Communities, does several million dollars a year in business and pours profits back into helping service the neighborhood — health care and nutrition, education and jobs. So when you really begin to take the lid off of what is emerging in society, there are many forms of decentralized public ownership, social ownership or democratized wealth

Source: The Economic Revolution Is Already Happening — It’s Just Not on Wall St.

1. The top 5% of Americans own just under 70% of all financial wealth.
2. The top 1% of Americans now claim more income per year than the bottom 100 million Americans taken together.
3. The top 2/10th of 1% makes more on the sale of stocks and bonds in one year than everyone else combined.

The distribution of wealth ownership in America is truly feudal–and deeply corrosive of our democracy. Is the growing concentration of wealth inevitable, or are there innovative models and policies that begin to point the way toward more equitable ownership of wealth by individuals, workers, communities?

The coming November election could become a truly fundamental turning point for Democrats and progressives.

But new ideas and a new long term strategy are obviously needed if we are ever to regain serious positive momentum. This requires the kind of profound reassessment of first principles and broad vision which conservatives undertook when they were sidelined and out of power in the 1950s and 1960s.

In America Beyond Capitalism, noted political economist and historian Gar Alperovitz argues that the first decade of the 21st Century is producing conditions that will force the United States to undergo historic changes. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have until now had coherent responses to these challenges.

America Beyond Capitalism is not simply another indictment of our national ills. It builds upon the latest scholarship, theoretical and empirical as well as practical developments at the state and local level to produce systematic proposals for the progressive rebuilding of a democratic America.

Though times may get worse before they get better, major political realignments are the rule, not the exception, in American history, Alperovitz argues.

Source: Gar Alperovitz

Gar Alperovitz (born May 5, 1936) is Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, College Park Department of Government and Politics. He is a former Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge; a founding Fellow of Harvard’s Institute of Politics; a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies; and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution. Dr. Alperovitz also served as a Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and as a Special Assistant in the Department of State.

Alperovitz is political economist and revisionist historian whose numerous articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Nation, and The Atlantic among other publications. Alperovitz has been profiled by The New York Times, the Associated Press, People, UPI, and Mother Jones and has been a guest on numerous network TV and cable news programs, including Meet the Press, Larry King Live, The Charlie Rose Show, Crossfire, and The O’Reilly Factor.

Dr. Alperovitz is the author of critically acclaimed books on the atomic bomb and atomic diplomacy and was named “Distinguished Finalist” for the Lionel Gelber Prize for The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, (Knopf, 1995). Dr. Alperovitz’s most recent book is America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy. (November 2004). Today his research interests include^[1]:

• community-based political-economic development, and in particular new institutions of community wealth ownership;
• political-economic theory, including system-wide political-economic design particularly as related to normative issues of equality, democracy, liberty, community and ecological sustainability;
• local, state and national policy approaches to community stability in the era of globalization;
• the history and future of nuclear weapons; arms control and disarmament strategies, including work on the conditions of peace and related long term political economic structural change.

Several recent articles include ‘Another World is Possible‘ published recently in Mother Jones, ‘A Top Ten List of Bold New Ideas‘ published recently in The Nation and ‘You Say You Want a Revolution?‘ in WorldWatch.

Source: WikiPedia