Monthly Archives: May 2013

Recent radio interviews: Bloomberg, Majority Report, and more

bloomberg_radio

On Taking Stock, with Pimm Fox and Carol Massar:

 

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On Sam Seder’s Majority Report (interview starts at 15’28”)

 

Plus interviews from Culture Shocks with Barry Lynn, Between the Lines, The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman, and Topical Currents

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Democratizing Wealth

On Wednesday, May 22nd, I had the pleasure of joining Reid Cramer, director of the Asset Building Program at the New America Foundation, for a discussion of my new book What Then Must We Do? 

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Video from the kick-off of my book tour at the MLK National Historic Site in Atlanta, GA

On April 2nd, I had the honor of being invited to start my national book tour for What Then Must We Do? at an event in Atlanta co-sponsored by the Partnership for Southern Equity and Georgia Stand Up, and held at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site. The video of my presentation, and the panel discussion focusing on how the themes of the book are reflected in the community organizing for economic justice and equity happening today on the ground in Atlanta, can be viewed below:

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Congratulations to the workers of the New Era Windows Cooperative!

Congratulations to the workers of the New Era Windows Cooperative, now open for business in Chicago!  Their story is inspiring: two separate occupations of their factory in a day and age when such militancy in the labor movement is assumed to be a thing of the past, not to mention a long fight to get Serious Energy (the second employer to close down their workplace) to agree to sell them the equipment they’d need to restart production.

They had help from powerful allies in UE, the union that helped them organize the two occupations as well as the cooperative buyout—and from the Working World, an innovative lender supporting worker cooperatives both in the US and in Latin America, where a wave of factory “recuperations” erupted in the wake of Argentina’s financial collapse in 2001.

For me, the story of New Era is a dramatic symbol of a choice we face at this moment in history:

On the one hand; long running decay, with jobs continuing to leave communities as employers chase higher margins around the globe—and ongoing and persistent decaying crisis in a stagnant and unstable economy disproportionately played out on the backs of the poor, especially in communities of color.

On the other hand: the possibility of something else, of a movement to rebuild the economy with democracy—and democratized ownership—at its core, helping anchor jobs and workers to communities and vice versa, addressing at a structural level the rampant and corrosive inequality that pervades our contemporary society.

Such long term evolving systemic transformation is neither quick nor easy.  The dedication of the New Era workers, their refusal to give up and  “go quietly”, their willingness to stake their futures on a democratic workplace,  points towards something important: if we are serious about building a “new economy,” we need to be prepared for a long fight.  Not all of the quietly developing experiments with worker, community, and public ownership taking off around the country today are likely to encounter such dramatic tests of faith as those met—successfully—by the workers who today opened the New Era Windows cooperative. Their example, however, and their courage, are examples of the kind of thing we all need learn from as the developing trajectory of new economic democratization and change continues to evolve.
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Podcast: Interview with The Progressive’s Matthew Rothschild

In this wide-ranging May 6th interview with Gar Alperovitz, Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive magazine and host of Progressive Radio, spent a half hour exploring themes of the new book, What Then Must We Do?

Listen now:

Download this segment

[Subscribe on iTunes * Podcast link]

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