Spirit in Action
America Beyond Capitalism - Gar Alperovitz
Gar Alperovitz is author of "America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy", about democratizing wealth and empowering communities through worker-ownership, co-ops, community land trusts, decentralizing control, and many other strategies.
- Broadcast on:
- 16 Dec 2012
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- other
[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. [music] I count myself privileged to have as my guest today an impressive intellect with extensive practical experience as well. Gar Alpervitz is author of America Beyond Capitalism, reclaiming our wealth, our liberty, and our democracy about democratizing wealth and empowering communities through worker ownership, co-ops, community land trusts, decentralizing control, and many other strategies. Gar draws on personal experience in Washington as a legislative director in both houses of Congress and as a special assistant in the State Department, in addition to his extensive academic knowledge and research as a professor of political economy at the University of Maryland, and as a former fellow of King's College, Cambridge University, Harvard's Institute of Politics, and the Institute for Policy Studies. In this list only scratches the surface. Gar Alpervitz has written or co-written and edited a number of other books besides America Beyond Capitalism. His personal list includes unjust desserts, wealth and equality in the knowledge economy, making a place for community and the much acclaimed book The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb. Since my home is Wisconsin, I'm particularly proud to note that Gar grew up in southeastern Wisconsin. He joins us from Washington, D.C. area. Gar, I'm so pleased and actually honored that you join me today for Spirit and Action. Oh, it's my pleasure and my honor. Thank you for having me. The book America Beyond Capitalism is a treat. You've increased my knowledge in certain areas, particularly economic areas, probably 20-fold by reading this book. What led to this book? Well, as you may know, I'm originally from Wisconsin and worked heavily in Wisconsin, progressive politics in the Washington area. I was a legislative director to Wisconsin Congressman, a progressive named Bob Castenmark, and legislative director to Senator Nelson, Gailard Nelson, the founder of Earth Day. At that time, there was a strong progressive tradition that was able to achieve certain things, particularly in the environment and in the social programs and races of the right. This is in the late '60s and then on into the '70s. But what really struck me was that over the last several decades, but it struck me, I guess, in the '70s, something was really wrong with that approach. It was losing steam rapidly, certainly when the Reagan administration came in. But the long trends of income distribution were going the wrong way. After the first burst of environmental change in positive gains, there had been a long decay with a couple exceptions. Civil liberties were kind of going the wrong way. We've been having military adventures. Something wrong that was deeper than politics, as usual. It forced me to take a decision to really change everything I'd been doing and to say where we're going and if I don't sit down and think seriously about this for myself and perhaps for others if I write about it. I think the old direction is stymied, much as I would hope it would continue. Either there's a new direction or we may be in real trouble in this country. Since then, it's only gotten worse. One of the things I found was lots of folks were involved in wonderful, good projects. Where would we be without some of the important projects having to do with poverty and environment? But projects alone, on their own, didn't really give us an answer to where are we going in terms of the larger system, where the trends are coming from. So the question was really straightforward. If you don't like the way corporate capitalism was going and you don't like the way state socialism went, what do you want? And unless you know something about what you want, why in the world should we listen to any of your ideas or follow or do we have a direction? So that was the impetus, really asking myself, is there another way forward? And not just some kind of compromise, but something that's profoundly American in its spirit and democratic and libertarian and it's concerned with liberty, ecologically sustainable. But what would a political economic system be like that actually could achieve these values over time and do so in a way consonant with American traditions? So what would that be? And is there a way to get from here to there? That's the second question, obviously. What do you want and how do you get there? So that's what drove me into thinking about these matters some years ago, some of the decades ago, and one of the results was this book, American Beyond Capitalism, which attempts to sketch out in some details, some of the features of what I think of as a community sustaining system that really alters, then democratizes the sources of wealth so that we have a much more democratic political system as well as a much more democratic economic system. That's kind of the starting point, but after that, it's a long tail step by step. I'm sure we'll get into some of it. Let's talk first about the decline of the system that maybe peaked some time in the past century. You mentioned corporate capitalism, which I think maybe some people might not realize is what our current form is, and state socialism as the two alternatives that people think it's either or, and so we have to choose corporate capitalism. Just say what you mean by that, and maybe you can tell us why the system declined or what you saw as a decline. Those are good and big questions. First, a simple point, that traditional thought about capitalism and the very conservative Chicago School of Economics has this as its premise was really about competitive, small and medium-sized business capitalism, where there actually was a free market. That's a very, very different kind of capitalism than what you see with gigantic companies, big firms, big banks, and with their lobbyists, the best investment for a big bank is paying for a dozen high priced lobbyists in Washington. And I say a dozen, and I should say there's several thousand around here. That concentration of power in big corporations, that was not the vision of the free market capitalism that many people hold in their minds. It's a very different animal. In fact, the founders of the Chicago School of Economics, the source of much modern conservative economic thought, regarded that as a outrageous violation of the principles of democracy and liberty and free competition. And so did some of their great conservative economists, like Hayek, who's also a free market economist. What we have is a concentration of power, and you saw it in the banking structure. Wall Street moved right into the Treasury Department, literally Goldman Sachs executives were everywhere you looked within the Treasury Department, and the lobbyists were in the outside lobbying, and the idea system that supporting these big banks, that's not what people had in mind when we were talking about different Americans. And on the other hand, the socialist vision was always in some ways a religious vision about equality and community, and some historians have argued that if you actually probe beneath Karl Marx, what you find is essentially a Christian vision of a society as in the Bible in Acts, too, where people give up their property to achieve a community, egalitarian community. Well, that vision obviously was not what the Soviet Union became, and not what state socialism, where the ownership of the wealth was, instead of in the corporations, it was in the state which gave overwhelming power to the government and with it the loss of freedom and democracy. So the way in which historians and economists think about political economic systems, and this is only a slight simplification, is that the location of property ownership really defines a lot about political power. Where the wealth is, James Madison, for instance, defined it, and he very explicitly understood that property owners were going to dominate the political system. Well, in feudalism, that was the Lord zoning the land, and they dominated the political system. And in competitive capitalism, it was largely small businessmen, and most of them were businessmen farmers for a long time in the 19th century, and that's really the basis of American politics up to the early part of the 20th century. And in state socialism, it was the state. So the real question in corporate capitalism, it becomes these large corporations. So one of the real questions is where is there a way of thinking about systemic change that is democratic, not only in elections, but in who owns the wealth? One percent of Americans today, this is a really astounding figure. Not only the corporations own the wealth, but one percent of the population owns just about half of the investment capital, of the United States. That's almost medieval. Well, one premise is the different system would have to be much more democratic in its ownership of wealth. A free market capitalism was that way, more or less, particularly when it was free market capitalism in farms, lots of farmers, the majority of society. But now in the modern age, what we've been looking at is, let me give you some examples of democratizing ownership of wealth and capital. 130 million Americans today are members of either co-ops or co-op credit unions. So that's a one person, one vote ownership of a business or of wealth. Another 13 million Americans are members of worker owned cooperatives or worker owned businesses of one kind or another. So that's another way of having democratic ownership of wealth. There are four or 5,000 neighborhood nonprofit corporations that benefit the neighborhood. And again, it's democratizing use of wealth for the neighborhood. And of course municipal ownership, public utilities is a very common form of democratic ownership. There are something like 2,000 of those, many of them in the south, which is supposed to be conservative. But in fact, there are lots of utilities there. 25% of American electricity is from public utilities and co-ops. Again, democratic forms of ownership, they're not big corporations. They're not the giant state, very decentralized. And America Beyond Capitalism, in the book, I kind of survey the kind of thing that the press doesn't have time or money to really explore. Just beneath the surface, you see a lot of this developed on the ground, very American in content. It's basic principle is democratic ownership of wealth and hopefully democratic politics flowing from that if it develops and expands and become kind of the ground level basis of maybe the vision of a larger system. Then we could talk about larger levels at the state and national level, but the starting point is, you know, the language in the Catholic Church and Catholic theology is very good on this. The principle of subsidiarity as radical or decentralization as possible and only moving to higher levels of ownership and control in public forms when necessary. So that's the idea, which is developed at length in America Beyond Capitalism. Really looking around again and again and again for examples on the ground in the United States that we can point to that are real and that give people a sense of what is being done or what can be done. What somebody else is doing in another community that you could do in your community that begins to embody and develop and expand on these basic principles. One thing I want to emphasize was maybe what the goals or the moral imperatives or the overall vision that's behind what I think you want to facilitate for our country. You use three words, equality, liberty and democracy or meaningful democracy. Are those kind of like the foundation on which you think or value or would like to see the system built? Those are the starting point. Those are the traditional profound American values, liberty, democracy and equality. Unless the system generates those meaningful democracy, not the kind that's controlled by a bunch of lobbyists and big corporate money in the election campaigns, but meaningful democracy and some sense of equality. America's become much, much more unequal in both income and wealth over the last 30 years. I saw some figures recently that the top 400 people, this is astounding. I had to double check these numbers. 400 people at the top have more wealth than the bottom 60%. That's staggering number. You can't have a democratic society when there's such great inequality. The laws are getting much, much more severe in terms of this terrorism thing leaking over into civil society where it's possible that more and more electronic wiretapping and individual citizens can be held up on suspicion of possibly their charity may or may not have aided some Muslim group. One of the things I discovered in writing America beyond capitalism, I simply didn't know, we deprived more people of liberty per capita than any of the other advanced industrial societies. And way, way more, about seven times more per hundred thousand people are in jail in the United States or in prison than in say England or France or Germany. We're way off the charts and a lot of that has to do with race. Liberty is usually thought of in legal terms, but really the way to think about it is do people get deprived of their liberty and it shocked me to learn that we were at the way bottom end of the scale in terms of depriving people of liberty. Those are the starting points, but as I wrote the book and America beyond capitalism began to become more meaningful in terms of its structures, it became obvious to me that two other values had to be really seriously engaged. And one was ecological sustainability, and that's really forced on us by both material resources and climate change. But also, none of this, I think, really develops until we redevelop a culture of community and that without a different sense of our responsibilities to each other. And I don't mean that only in the abstract, I mean that people have to both learn it and practice it in the day-to-day communities. Without that, we are, if it's not dog eat dog, it's dog fear dog in isolation and rather than a common purpose. So the rebuilding of that spirit, that knowledge, that sense of community, I think we're going to need to do that, too. But it isn't only the religious communities have done a great deal here, but we need, if the structures of society put people against each other or competing with each other or struggling and fighting with each other, it's hard to maintain a sense of common purpose in community. And conversely, if we're thinking about the next society, and there will be another next society in history. One of the things we need to self-consciously say, are we building an economic system that helps create community rather than undercuts it and also helps create the spirit of community that can deal intelligently with ecological problems and common purpose. So those starting with liberty, quality, and democracy, in the modern age, you get very quickly to ecological sustainability and without community as a guiding principle, very little of this moves forward. So those are the five big ones in the book. You know, as you lay out those terms, those components of an important solution for us, equality, liberty, democracy, community, I think that perhaps based just on those terms, we'd have a significant percentage of the tea party supporters who would jump right on board. Likewise, I think you could very easily be pulling in the Occupy crowd. One of the things that did stun me in the book was how many of the proposals and the laws, the structures, were supported very strongly from both ends of the ideological spectrum. It wasn't, this is liberal radical, so therefore the other end is not going to support it. You were finding a new way that most people could support. So my question is, are these goals, is this morality that could speak across the spectrum? Oh, it's a complicated question. My experience is at the grassroots level, or in local, I'm from Racine, Wisconsin, an industrial town, a challenged industrial town in Southern Wisconsin. I go back home and see my high school friends and talk to them, some of them very conservative people, and I'm on the progressive side. And if you get down to what can we do here in Racine, or what we're doing in Cleveland, we're doing some big projects in Cleveland, folks are involved with it, or any other city, really, you start talking about practical things. Will it really work? Will it help the community? Will it help? And then a lot of this ideological banter and rhetoric that you see in the television and radio and Washington politicians screaming at each other really disappears. So I think there's a lot more common ground at the local level than is apparent from watching television or reading some of the newspapers. That said, I do think there are differences. The argument of America Beyond Capitalism is that I wrote a book on this with Lou Daly. Also, a lot of what we call ownership society really is the fruit of generation after generation over the past of government investment. Let me give an example. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs would have gone nowhere at all without big investments by the taxpayer in the internet and in the computer, and in the computer technologies that they built upon. So a lot of the wealth at the very top, and I've traced this, many people have traced this, but we traced it in this other book, really comes both from public taxpayer investment and also from generations of social development, including all the way back to the creation of arithmetic and calculus and mathematics and all the inventions that got us to where we are, that's a social creation that the society created partly by taxpayer spending, partly by the development of knowledge that really is an inheritance of all of us. So what that leads to is the conclusion that a good part of the wealth of society really ought to benefit the society more generally, and that means some form of quasi-public or public ownership, as I say, starting with grassroots things like worker ownership or neighborhood ownership, but when you get to city and state, and in some cases, probably public ownership, I think when the big next financial crisis comes, we're going to see if one or two of those banks are going to have to be taken over. Probably there's an ideological difference about that that we're going to have to sort out and talk through. If we want to make the system work, we can't have these bankers running around doing speculative casino gambling with our money. And if you try to regulate them, really, they're too powerful to regulate. They're lobbyists are up here all the time finding wrinkles in the regulation to let them do what they want. So I think what's going to happen over time is some of these big banks that we've been bailing out are going to become public banks, but that would be a point of difference, I'm sure, with some of the modern conservatives. Although interestingly enough, and I urge my conservative friends to go back and read the founding fathers of the most important economics of the country, the conservative economics of the Chicago school where Milton Friedman was trained. They came to the conclusion, I'm thinking of the founders, H.C. Simon, being the most prominent economist of the 20th century there, they came to the conclusion that if you wanted a free enterprise economy, you could regulate some of these giants. And particularly in banking, you would have to have public banking, otherwise they would disrupt even a free market economy. So there's a lot of larger issues that get ideological, but I think we're going to have to sort them through in practical terms and figure out what works, what works to support democracy, liberty, equality. Certainly the big banks, the five big banks, and some of the major corporations, that's not a democratic system, whatever that is, it's certainly not a democracy. There's a phrase you use throughout the book, pluralist commonwealth, and I think you were just talking about it from one point of view, you want to fill in the rest of the definition of the pluralist commonwealth? Well, I was casting a bout for, if you don't like state socialism communism and you don't like corporate capitalism, what do you want? And the notion of democratic or democratizing ownership, neighborhood corporations, to worker companies, to co-ops, to local municipalities, to land trusts, to a state investment, you know, in the state of Alaska, the conservative state of Alaska captures the oil revenues, and by law passes them back to the people as guaranteed right to the dividends, a couple thousand dollars a person in recent years, or ten thousand dollars for a family of husband, wife, and three kids. So those are all democratic forms, but they're different kinds, they're neighborhood, I just mentioned possibly public ownership of the big banks, we just nationalized two big auto companies in the last few years, regional ownership like the Tennessee Valley Authority. What would a society be that was democratic and intent, but also democratized ownership in the most radically decentralized way as possible, but in many different ways, co-ops, worker owned companies, land trusts, state and city development in certain areas, regional ownership. As in the Tennessee Valley Authority, public ownership of the national lands, which we currently are about 30% owned by the public, the land surface of the United States. So plural forms of ownership, or pluralist common wealth, that was the term, I don't think it's a perfect term, but it gives you an idea of the concept behind the vision of an America beyond capitalism. You know, when you talk about public ownership of something, I'm pretty sure that some people's hot buttons are pushed right at that point. They think anything that's publicly owned is inefficient, but you give plenty of counter evidence in the book. You want to talk about some of the examples, is this just a myth, the inefficiency of public ownership? Well, I'm certain you can find inefficient public enterprises everywhere in the world, but just think, just pause for a moment and think about, are these big banks that are privately owned, efficient? Are they efficient when they can disrupt an entire global economy and cost the taxpayer billions and trillions of dollars? Maybe they're efficient by somebody's terms, but the auto companies have been proven year in and year out to be radically inefficient until really forced to economize on gas mileage because of competition. The US steel industry went down because it was so backward in its development. There have been studies of, and we're not talking, the central piece of the book is not about nationalization, although I think they're probably in the long run. Some of them, as I said, probably will have to be, but there have been studies of public ownership abroad and here. Most countries, for instance, have public high-speed rail systems that are very efficient. The coal industry in England was compared with the coal industry here. It's nationalized over there, and it was more efficient rather than less efficient. By and large, the efficiencies in the real world, rather than the theoretical world, are much different. They come up pretty much balanced. That's the academic literature on this, is very different from what people think about than what the rhetoric is. But just think about how terribly inefficient to an entire economy it is when you allow these big banks to do what they want to do and speculate and play with people's money and then cause the whole economy to lose trillions of dollars in inefficiency. But if you think about it in a very down-home, local way, as I say, I'm from Racine, Wisconsin, think about public utilities, electric utilities. They've been studied to death, and by and large, public utilities are on balance as efficient as private ones, and they don't have to pay these gigantic salaries to CEOs. They pay public servant salaries, and by and large, they don't have to pay the investors' profits, so they turn out to be both more efficient and a better deal to the taxpayer. And it's a very common thing to look around to public waterworks, which in most cities is pretty straightforward and efficiently run. We know the telecommunications systems in many parts of the world are much better than ours under public ownership. So there's a lot of mythology here. The book does not argue that everything should be socialized. That's quite contrary to what it's argued. But it does say, hey, it's time to start looking at reality rather than all the rhetoric that is pumped up. And when you do that, there are really two kinds of efficiency to look for. One is the efficiency of the individual firm, like the public utilities, where you can match them up. And when I say the public utilities come out equal or ahead in most studies. Then there's the efficiency of a political, what I would call political power. And there you run into the private companies spending so much money lobbying and causing such terrible damage as in the banking crisis that even if they were more efficient, which turns out they aren't, internally, that a public bank, the fact that they have power to destroy the whole economic system for decades at a time through their manipulation, that's very, very inefficient in a very different way. And in a sense, just keeping that under control is the best way to maintain efficiency. So I would urge listeners or anyone who reads America Beyond Capitalism to have an open mind and think about those two levels of what goes on when you have both locally and in terms of these political power that comes along with ownership and can't be ignored and wished away. If you just tuned in, you're listening to Spirit in Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet of this Northern Spirit Radio production. Our website is northernspiritradio.org. Come to the site. You can listen to any of our programs in the last six and a half years. You'll find links to our guests like Gar Alpervitz, who is the author of America Beyond Capitalism. You'll also find a place to leave comments and we love having your comments. It really helps guide us for the future. Again, the book is America Beyond Capitalism Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty and Our Democracy. And Gar, one of the things that you've mentioned a few times in the interview already and you speak about throughout the book is ESOPs or employee-owned programs. The employees who've taken some control of the business they're part of. So therefore, the wealth is being democratized, I think, as you put it. So these employee stock ownership programs and other forms of employee ownership, can you give us examples of how that works, when it's worked and what the effect is? Well, this is a very interesting American development that kind of speaks to what you raised before, which is conservatives and liberals and progressives coming up with novel and new solutions. An employee stock ownership plan really is another way to say the employees slowly build up ownership of a company. And a conservative banker, really conservative guy, turned up with a very liberal senator 30 years ago. Huey Long's son, who was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee at the time, and they passed legislation. The most important provisions in which were when an owner retires and say his son doesn't want to, or daughter doesn't want to take over the business, if he sells to the employees, he gets a really big tax benefit. So the law currently put together by a conservative and a liberal, and Mavericks really, both of them. Now, rewards changing ownership to worker ownership, and it's called an employee stock ownership plan, or ESOP, commonly, ESOP. And there are something like 11,000 of these on the ground all over the country. They're very common, but people don't know much about them, and they're not given any publicity. And there are about 13 million people involved. And as time goes on, I think we're going to see more of this. So they're out there in the country, and I think what's interesting also is that many of them are slowly becoming more democratized. They aren't necessarily democratic, very often they're run by a trust. But many of them are beginning to say we want to have democratic control as well, so that's another trend within the trend. And some of them are unionized. So we're seeing a really interesting American, quite American phenomenon of changing the ownership wealth in very practical terms, and people not quite realizing that this has been developing for the last three decades, and gives you an idea of where it might go over the next decades. That's really one element of this whole vision of the book America Beyond Capitalism, is the kinds of things we're talking about, co-ops, work around companies, neighborhood corporations, local municipal enterprise, land trusts, which are another way for local nonprofit or city development to take place in a way that recycles profits back into the city or into low income housing. This is slowly spreading. In large part, I think because of the economic pain that's going on, and the other things aren't working, and it's kind of a wake-up call. I think this occupation has such a big response because not only because of what they did, but because people around the country knew in their hearts that something really was wrong and had to be spoken to. I think what we're seeing, and I would encourage people to think about your own community, a long developmental process of this kind, changing the ownership of productive wealth in one or another democratic form. I think we may see that developing like the prehistory of the New Deal or the prehistory of the Progressive Era, developing over decades because other things aren't working and establishing principles in ordinary communities that might go to the state level or the national level at the right time when we've sorted out how best to do this, and as things go on and more and more people are aware of them. I don't, you know, I wear a hat as a historian and a political economist. I don't think we're talking about overnight politics. Anything worth building is worth building for the long haul. And I think this kind of development is the kind of thing that is going to take place year by year building up a different vision, not something that's going to, one election or another election is going to change everything. Another way to think about it is when women got the vote, it took many decades, state by state by state, before they got to the place where they had enough power built up over time to the national level, the vote was given nationally. And I think democratizing wealth in this way is that's the way to think about it and the vision of this book of America Beyond Capitalism is starting that way locally and keeping it as local and as decentralized as possible, but building up experience and knowledge and practical knowledge to go forward over time being committed to the long haul. And I think some of the churches are actually beginning to think about their role in all of this. And I think that's another piece of the puzzle of starting locally. One of the thoughts I've had about the Occupy movement is that maybe it is a developing sense of community. It's got a spiritual element to it as far as I perceive it that says, well, maybe there is this groundswell for changing bit by bit. Maybe it starts locally and maybe it grows throughout the country. Did you feel at all like that about the Tea Party movement? What elements of it did you find that were particularly attractive to you or which ones not? And while we're at it, why don't I ask you how you feel about Scott Walker as governor of Wisconsin? Well, let me start with the Tea Party. I think that the Tea Party in one way or another is reacting to kind of the central issue. We'll come back to one way or another. But that is, it's pretty obvious to anyone who looks closely, and I've been living in Washington for a long time now, and in the past it used to be part of the congressional and executive branch of the government. It's pretty obvious that money and corporate power dominate a great number of decisions, and I don't think that's secret to most people. So if you say, you know, what's going on in Washington is, on Democratic, there's a big element of truth to it, and the Tea Party, I think in part is angry about that as they should be, and they're angry also at the bankers. You find the left and the right and the Occupy and the Tea Party, and a lot of other Americans really upset at what was done in bailing out these bankers and all the lobbying and deals that were cut. So that's a uniting form, the sense that something's really profoundly wrong with democracy, that they have the Tea Party as well as the Occupy Party. I think that's right. I think their economics has been taken over by, you know, the large, very wealthy corporations and others began to subsidize them, and I think they have a notion that you can actually go way back to the 19th century small business model. I don't think that's realistic, and I also think, in part, some of them have been taken over in their politics by, you know, different interests who want to use them and finance them for their own purposes, and some of that is large corporate money, and some of it is ideological people who really are ideologues, but also own big businesses like the Koch brothers. Anyway, that's been well described. So I think their economics has been, first, I think it's not well-informed, and I think it's often been taken over. But I do think the impulse is democratic, and in that sense, it's a critical one. Now, I'm not living in Wisconsin anymore, but when I've read about Scott Walker as governor, I think he dramatically over-reached his mandate, so as far as I can tell, many of the things that people were so upset about did not have anything to do with what he campaigned on, and that he came in and attempted to peel back workers' union rights, collective bargaining rights that are traditional in Wisconsin, and were not part of his campaign. Some of the things seemed very undemocratic that I saw in television in terms of the way the votes were taken in the legislature, and I think that that's outrageous, and to the extent that people are attempting a recall effort for what he's done, to the extent that I understand it accurately from the press, that's the Wisconsin tradition that I was brought up in, and it's a populist and progressive tradition that says, "Hey, we don't do things that way in the democratic society, and we certainly don't do that in the democratic Wisconsin." So, I'm with the folks who are saying that this is really the wrong way of talking about things, and certainly not a way to build a democratic understanding or dialogue. Way back at the beginning, we had some mention about unions declining. Can you quantify that, and maybe you can give us some idea of why that happened, and one of the thoughts I want to toss in there as part of that mix is, is this a side effect of globalization? Is this a necessary thing that, you know, essentially bring workers here onto more footing of equality with workers across the border? Well, that's a complicated set of questions. I didn't want to give you something easy to answer. Well, let me start at the simple part of it. The unions were at their peak in the United States in 1945 and '46, and at that point 34.5% of the labor force was organized in unions, mostly in the private sector, almost entirely in the private sector. They are now down to about 11% in the private sector, it's about 6%. So, they've run a radical decline in power. That's one of the reasons, and I think one of the central reasons why the politics of the traditional liberal politics is so weak. But that's the reality, and the American labor movement was always weak by international standards. The Swedish labor movement was 85% of the labor force compared with our maximum, just under 35%. So, why the decline? Certainly competition from globalization, letting in inexpensive goods from around the world, particularly Chinese goods now, in not free societies. So, that's another question about the role of labor unions in other societies that are anti-democratic. That's one piece of it. The second piece of it, and this is the piece that is not really well understood, I think, although I'm working on a book which includes some of this. Labor unions have always been weak in the United States, except in unusual moments. So, they were about 11% of the labor force in 1929. And there are reasons for that. One is race makes it hard to organize. The size of the country makes it hard to organize. Most of the European countries are tiny countries compared with ours. You can drop Germany into Montana. Well, if you've got a whole continent, it's really hard to organize. Labor unions, the companies get up and move to another part of the country if they don't like what you're doing. And you can't do that in smaller countries. So, that's another reason. Another reason is there's no socialist tradition and many scholars point to that, which has always backed labor in some European countries. Another is the individualist ethic and culture. Many reasons. So, I treat the period 1929 until 1935 as oddities that created a stronger labor movement that really was weak all along and probably was going to return to weakness inevitably. So, the Depression boosted labor up another from 11% to 24% of the labor force. And then World War II, and then it boosted it up to 30%. And then just after the war, the postwar boom, they get up just under 35%. But as those special conditions, the Depression, the war, the postwar boom, declined and disappeared. Labor went back in the direction it had been going and it was under assault from cheap labor from abroad. And then in the early 70s, the corporations and the Reagan administration began to really attack labor and further weaken it. So, I think that's kind of a very sketchy answer to why labor so weak in this country, but also why traditional politics based on labor supporting progressives. I think it's very important that we do as much of that as we can, but it's in retreat. We need to see that it is in retreat and not likely to go back to where it was. So, either there's another way going simultaneously with whatever it can do that way, walking in two legs, or there isn't anyway. And I think this buildup of different democratized ownership is going to be a piece of the other way going forward, changing the institutions that may give us institutional power in a new direction. There's a question about the whole society and whether as a whole, not just labor, we are really far too rich for a small planet that doesn't have enough resources. And that's a very different question about where we go in the future of an ecologically resource conserving society and wages and scale, not just for labor, but for the whole society. That's a dominant question of the century, I think. That was too easy of an answer for a hard question. Well, I think in the end, we're going to all have to begin to tamp down some of our resource use in the United States as well as around the world to sustainable levels. And that means reducing the consumption of some of the resources. And certainly we find a change doing it in a way that reduces the emissions of gases that are causing the climate problem. It also means, and this is really a hard place, some form of economic management or planning that allows us to produce a society that is not growing and dramatically chewing up resources to a sustainable level. So that's implicit in all this larger kind of global set of questions about whether the United States can play a humane and meaningful role in the world with resource pressures. You know, I think globalization would be a lot less problematic in our point of view if it wasn't attendant in the USA by this increasing inequality, the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and the middle class being terribly assaulted. If globalization meant that while we all had to bite the bullet, that would probably not be terribly offensive to all of us, including the Occupy Movement or whatever. But this disparity, this growth of inequality, you quantify it in a number of different ways during the book. I saw a presentation about it, a speech about it on TED Talks, if you know what those are. And it was dramatic. It's like everything that's bad in the world happens when you have large inequality. You get more teen pregnancies, you get worse environmental conditions, you get all of that. And globalization mean that the rich people in this country, they also lose some of the income, they also have to be down with us grunts. Absolutely. I think that the society has gotten more and more inequitable. And also, as the distances have grown further and further apart, there's kind of this trying to climb the ladder to catch up with people who are moving away buying big yachts and cars. In fact, all of that is both contrary to the needs of sustainability. It's inequitable, it's undemocratic. And I think it's being challenged by the occupy folks and also the millions of people who are sympathized with the occupy folks. But the argument that I want to underline this, the argument is that if you want to change that, it's no longer simply that let's just raise taxes at the top. I'm for that. That's not a problem. We're going to have to change the way the whole system functions so that it's much more democratic both in practice and in its ownership of the real resources that give power to people at the top and also to the politics of these big corporations. And that means a long, I mean, I sometimes say don't get involved in any of this unless you're willing personally to say I'm going to put some real time into this and think of it as we're talking about challenging incredibly powerful institutions. That means a long fight, the way the women's movement did it. My heroes are the civil rights people and this is a way to think about what we're talking about. We're talking about challenging very major power. My heroes are the civil rights people in the 1930s and 40s. They're the ones in the really hard period who began to lay down the groundwork that later exploded into the civil rights movement. And the same thing can be said of the women's movement. Slowly laying down the groundwork until ultimately the right to vote and then later some level of equality being achieved. The early years I think is where we're at in beginning to find new structures and new institutions. And as I say, I think that's the hard place. Having a vision of concretely how to democratize the system and the economy of the system. But beginning locally, right at home, and if you look around, you'll see it wrote about it in my book. But if you can study this on various websites, one is called democracy-wealth.org, which surveys this stuff. If you can do very difficult things on the ground in cities like Cleveland, where there are worker ownership developing in very poor neighborhoods, you can do it anywhere. And in some places where the churches and synagogues have decided they're going to do something, we can be done to begin laying this groundwork as other people are doing it around the country. But this is not your overnight that will elect the right guy that will all be done. We're talking about rebuilding from the bottom up. And I think that's the only way to think about the longer term systemic change that challenges these structures and power and the inequities we see around us. As I was reading America Beyond Capitalism, I found a lot of programs that had been put into place had been experimented with to try and redress the balance. The thing that leads to this immense income inequality and disproportionate power given to rich people and so on. When I've talked to people individually, and they've said, but we have to preserve our capitalist ways, our democracy, freedom, rugged individualism, et cetera, I had to say the playing field is not level. And so then I've been trying to come up with what is not level about the playing field, what assumptions tilt it in favor of wealth. So one that was pointed out to me ages ago was that we call it welfare and we call this a bad thing because we're giving money to people who don't do anything. They don't do any work for their money. But if we give money and form of interest or other payments to a rich person, just because he has money, he's not doing any work for it. We call that a good capitalist system at work. And so I said, okay, well, so there's an assumption there. And I can think of a lot of different ways that the system is candid in a particular direction. I think that allowing someone who files a patent on something to get all the benefit of that, even if he's not the one who discovered it and just because he got to the patent office first or he paid off someone or however that works. There's any number of ways of tilting the system. Do you want to comment on some of them that are maybe obvious from your work as a political economist? Well, I think you're right. If you look closely at the way things work, but the kind that I think are really important is when you see the lobbyists in Washington changing the law or just getting a little tiny wrinkle in the law allowing speculators to speculate or the hedge fund guys being taxed at half the rate that you and I would be taxed at or anybody's taxed at because they found a way to get a small wrinkle in the law really outrageous things. The other part of it is, and I should mention this other book that I wrote with Lou Daly called "Unjust the Zirts." And it just goes through example after example of public investment in pharmaceuticals and in telecom communications that all the taxpayers paid for it. And then somebody got in there first and began making huge amounts of money essentially off the taxpayer investment. But the thing that I do want to say is there are many, many outrages and we need to try to tax you tax system and the political system to tax back some of these resources. But the bottom line is that, and that's the argument of this book, that this isn't going to change unless we also simultaneously really change the institutions at the base of the society. And that means changing the system, that old phrase, change the system, and what that means is starting and seeing if power comes with wealth ownership, how do we move away from a highly inequitable ownership pattern? One percent owning just about half of the investment capital, five percent owning, 70 percent in the big corporations managing it. How do we move to a different society that is neither socialist state, neither private enterprise corporations, but something that's very American. And the way to do that, I think, and this is the argument of the book, is to look around and see what's happening on the ground in many cities where people are the light bulbs going on. They're building from the bottom up in terms of very practical co-ops, work around companies, municipal land trusts, building understanding of the ingredients of an institutional way forward, not just a tax program or not just kind of being angry at the corporations and the wealthy, but saying we're going to start rolling up our sleeves at the same time and learning and building forward in the way that I said 130, 140 million people are involved in co-ops already. That's a starting point, not an end point. So I want to urge this institution building perspective that's going on in many parts of the country that it's a precondition. Things aren't going to change until we change the institutional power, and I think politics is very important, but it's kind of a dead end without a whole new power base developing a whole new vision, in my opinion. I want to ask one last question before I have to let you go, and that is, what's behind it spiritually or religiously for you? What's the conception? I'm not tied to theological language. I'm a Quaker, and so theology really isn't part of what I do or what we do. Where do you come from on this? Well, I was brought up in a kind of a moderate Jewish family. I'm not much of a practicing Jew. I occasionally go to remember my parents on the high holidays, but I don't do much else. But I think the vision that's common to Judeo-Christian tradition, which is a very, very equitable vision common throughout the theologies of a more egalitarian and democratic form, is guiding vision for many people in America in one form or another. And it's a spiritual tradition as well. I do meditate some myself. But if you look at it from the Christian point of view, I was working with steelworkers and the Catholic Church in Youngstown, Ohio several years ago, and one of the people brought up passage in Acts 2 in the Bible, and it's about changing the ownership patterns to a more egalitarian vision that the steelworkers were trying to do. So I think you find both the essence of a justice vision and a collective community vision in most of the religions and a sense of community that comes from a spiritual base as well, whether or not people are actively practicing within our synagogues or churches. That's common, I think, to all of this, and certainly in my own life has been an empowering force. We've been speaking with Gar Alpervitz, he's the author of America Beyond Capitalism, Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy. It's an excellent book. I recommend you get it. You can follow the link from Nordenspiritradio.org. And Gar, it's great thought, great research. I'm so happy to have you there helping our nation forward. Thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Today's Spirit in Action guest was Gar Alpervitz, professor of political economy at the University of Maryland. He's also been a fellow of King's College, Cambridge University, Harvard's Institute of Politics, Institute for Policy Studies, and he was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. Find more about him, his work, and his books at his website, GarAlpervitz.com, or you can easily follow the link from my nordenspiritradio.org. We'll end today's Spirit in Action with a little thematic music. I mentioned to Gar my perspective about welfare for the rich, and Anne Finney, a wonderful activist and musician that she is, put at least part of that concern into her song, The Corporate Welfare Song. Join me next week for Spirit in Action, and here's Anne Finney. It's time to end welfare as we know it, and get those greedy chislers off the door. It's time to end welfare as we know it, teach them a little self-control. For far too long we've allowed these corporate hawks to belly up to the public trough. No more welfare as we know it, no more handouts, cut them off. Now we should all be irate at this huge welfare state, right here in this mightiest of nations. AFDC is disgraceful to me, I'm talking 8 for dependent corporations. Free enterprise, the cruelest of lies that cost us $200 billion just last year. If they pay their fair share we'd have billions this fair, it's time to tell them the butts stop here. Let's consider Charlie Hurwitz, the CEO at Maxam, holding redwood forest hostage in a vicious little tax scam. It's clear cut we picked up the tab for Charlie's union busting, then paid him to pollute our water Jesus, that's disgusting. Charlie won't repay 500 million that he stole from a Houston SNL, let's say we kick him off the door. It's time to end welfare as we know it, and get those greedy chislers off the door. It's time to end welfare as we know it, teach them a little self-control. For far too long we've allowed these corporate hawks to belly up to the public trough. No more welfare as we know it, no more handouts, cut them off. That Taco Bell chihuahua begs for bucks for Frito-Lay. And Hoppin' Fresh from Pillsbury needs more dough every day. That thief Ronald McDonald and his sidekick Mayor McCheesy. Hamburglarize our treasury in ways that make me queasy. That nasty little mermaid took tax dollars overseas. To hire thugs to bring poor Haitian workers to their knees. It's time to end welfare as we know it, and get those greedy chislers off the door. It's time to end welfare as we know it, teach them a little self-control. For far too long we've allowed these corporate hawks to belly up to the public trough. No more welfare as we know it, no more handouts, cut them off. They've been picking every pocket here from sea to shining sea. We must intervene to break this cycle of dependency. ADM and Cargill General Motors poured in bowing. ITT and Lockheed and that welfare line keeps growing, growing, growing. Now Congress says we can't afford to subsidize the needy. But before we slash the safety net, let's tell the truly greedy. We're gonna end welfare as we know it, and get those greedy chislers off the door. We're gonna end welfare as we know it, teach them a little self-control. For far too long we've allowed these corporate hawks to belly up to the public trough. No more welfare as we know it, no more handouts, cut them off. It's for the realm good, no more handouts, cut them off. And we need business, no more handouts, cut them off. And this means stadium, no more handouts, cut them off. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)