Category Archives: Uncategorized

Centrist Think Tanks Won’t Save Our Cities

Gar Alperovitz offers his perspective on centrist, elite resistance to Trump era politics.

“What they (local elites) are after are high-tech metropolises whose upscale tone and glamour can bypass and obscure the deepening pain of those left behind. A rumbling, anger-driven and increasingly sophisticated alternative, however, based on grassroots experimentation and organizing, suggests the developing possibility of something very different.”

Gar offers an number of examples and evidence of the growing national and global movement to build a new economy from the ground up.

Read the full article in “In These Times” here.

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Gar Alperovitz, Historian and Professor of Political Economy Oberlin

 

Gar Alperovitz visited Oberlin College to speak at The State of American Democracy: A National Conversation, a three-day, non-partisan discussion about the state of democracy in the U.S. While visiting the university, he was interviewed by Sydney Allen, News Editor for “The Oberlin Review.”

Read their full conversation here.

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Listen to Gar Alperovitz on Corporations and Democracy

 

 

 

Gar Alperovitz joined hosts, Annie Esposito and Steve Scalmanini, on Tuesday, November 14th at 1:00pm on KZYX’s Corporations and Democracy program. Gar discusses developments in the New Economy and the quietly emerging next system. Gar also answers questions from Mendicino County listeners who are interested in working on the emerging elements, such as public banks, of the next system.

Listen to the full program by using this link and then selecting the November 14th show.

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The New Economy and the Quietly Emerging Next System with Gar Alperovitz

On October 5th, 2017, Gar Alperovitz visited Vermont Law School to speak as a part of the VLS New Economy Law and Policy Forum: A Speaker Series on Building a Sustainable, Just, and Democratic Future. Gar was the first in a series of speakers which will also included Frances Moore Lappe, Jonathan Rosenthal, Helena Norberg Hodge, Sherri Mitchell, Kathleen Falk, former Gov. Madeleine Kunin, and Zephyr Teachout. The forum focuses on finding alternatives, doing more than resisting, and making change. Gar contributed by discussing the new economy that he sees already emerging in a patchwork across the country.

What is the new economy? Just beneath the surface of media reporting a new economy is quietly emerging. It includes cooperatives, public banks, new clean energy strategies, successful campaigns to turn polluting utilities into ecologically sustainable municipal systems, along with an explosion of related developments at different levels of scale.

Click here to watch the entire session.

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Black Monday, ’77, When the Mill Shutdown in Youngstown Gave Birth to the Rust Belt

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gar Alperovitz’s chapter in Charles Derber’s new book, Welcome to the Revolution: Universalizing Resistance for Social Justice and Democracy in Perilous Times, was featured on BillMoyers.com. The chapter discusses the story of Youngstown and how change happens and is happening today.

This is not, however, simply a story about worker coops. It is much more about how change can happen — and about how an idea whose time has come actually “comes.” The spirit of Youngstown lives on. At the time of this writing, a major new initiative — “50 by 50” — aims to organize 50 million workers in worker-owned enterprises in the United States by 2050. And in many communities, other new initiatives have been building momentum. Philadelphia and Santa Fe, for instance, are actively considering new public banks to develop much more broadly democratized local economies. Activists in Boulder, Colorado, have won two major referenda to take over the local electric utility and convert it to less climate-destroying approaches.

Click here to read the full excerpt on BillMoyers.com.

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