Gar Alperovitz

Podcast: Speaking on Inequality at the Unitarian Congregation in Annapolis

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 17:26:17 +0000

Earlier this year, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Annapolis, MD hosted a community forum on inequality in the United States, and its impact on the economy and on democracy. Gar Alperovitz keynoted the event, and hosted a diverse question-and-answer portion (which begins at the 50:20 mark).

Listen now:

Download this segment

Podcast: The Emerging New Economy

admin — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:44:21 +0000

On May 7, the Baltimore Higher Education Alliance for Real Democracy and Red Emma’s brought Gar Alperovitz to Baltimore’s 2640 Space to discuss “the emerging new economy.” Joining Gar were Maryland State Senator Jamie Raskin, who discussed the path-breaking legislation he co-sponsored making Maryland the first state in the country to legally recognize benefit corporations or “B-corps”, and the Institute for Policy Studies’ Daphne Wysham, who highlighted another Maryland initiative, the Genuine Progress Indicator, a new metric that presents a comprehensive alternative to one-dimensional economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Listen now:

Download this segment

More video after the break…

Jamie Raskin:

Daphne Wysham:

Worker Ownership and Union Membership in the United States, 1975-2011

admin — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:47:36 +0000

Podcast: Talking about public banking and the big picture

admin — Fri, 04 May 2012 18:47:21 +0000

In this segment, filmmaker Stephen Kerr catches up with Gar Alperovitz after his keynote address at the inaugural national conference of the Public Banking Institute. The interview connects the dots between the new state-by-state initiatives for public banking and the growth and energy in other sectors of the expanding new economy like cooperatives and credit unions. Listen now: Download this segment

The New Economy: A State by State look

admin — Fri, 04 May 2012 16:00:49 +0000

History is paradoxical: Our politics are stalemated, our economy stagnating. But precisely because of this, literally thousands of new social and economic initiatives suggest the possibility, over time, of literally rebuilding the system from the bottom up.

(Click the image for the full version)

Podcast: Pt. 2 Talking about workplace, community democracy, climate change and sustainability with David Schweickart

admin — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:51:17 +0000

Part II of my dialog with David Schweickart on capitalism and economic alternatives, and Q&A session.

Podcast: Talking about workplace, community democracy, climate change and sustainability with David Schweickart

admin — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:45:40 +0000

[Updated from Dec. 2011 with podcast episodes] Here’s the video of a conversation I had with David Schweickart, author of After Capitalism, at this year’s ICAPE conference. It was a great discussion; David’s work on economic democracy is one of the most fully-fleshed out alternative economic models we have, and I greatly appreciated this chance to really explore some of the deep issues that arise when we try to imagine life after capitalism.

Part I: Download the audio segment

Part II: Download the audio segment

[Subscribe to my podcast in iTunes * Podcast link]

Earth Day 2012: Environmental Movement at a Crossroads

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 19:53:50 +0000

Originally published by Alternet

April 20, 2012 | This Sunday marks the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day. I was privileged to be legislative director for Senator Gaylord Nelson, who had the vision in 1970 for Earth Day’s “national teach-in on the environment,” and who helped make that vision a reality. Over the past four decades, I have witnessed and cheered the growth and development of the modern environmental movement. Yet, even as the achievements of the movement are honored, we should also be honest: viewed with any serious attention to long and deep trends, the environment is in serious and ever-growing danger.

This is in no way to minimize the successes of the movement. There have been significant gains in connection with air quality, the incidence of lead, and water pollution, to name three issues that were the subjects of an explosion of public concern around the time of the original Earth Day. Between 1970 and 2010, concentrations of six principal air pollutants declined by almost 71 percent; and in just the first 20 years of the Clean Air Act, an estimated 200,000 premature deaths and 700,000 cases of chronic bronchitis were prevented. The percentage of children with elevated blood-lead levels dropped from 88 percent in the 1970s to just 4.4 percent in the mid-’90s. Similarly, lead air pollution decreased 98 percent by 2000. Prior to 1972, industrial waste and sewage had made approximately two-thirds of waterways unsafe for recreation and fishing use. Three decades later, in 2004, 53 percent of assessed river miles and 70 percent of bay and estuarine square miles were safe for recreation and fishing. It is important, however, to distinguish these significant but relatively isolated “legacy” achievements of policies enacted in earlier, more progressive times from the more recent, worsening trends of environmental degradation in many other areas. The examples are numerous. While the rate at which natural wetlands are being destroyed has slowed, the United States lost more than 500,000 additional acres of such vital areas between 1998 and 2004 alone. In 2007, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) concluded that “water quality improvement reached a plateau about a decade ago,” and that there had been a recent “upward trend for beach closings, red tides, dead zones, droughts, flooding, coral reef damage, nutrient pollution, and sewage pollution.” Given current trends, the EPA has “projected that sewage pollution will be as high in 2025 as it was in 1968, that is, before the passage of the Clean Water Act.” Fish consumption warning advisories increased from 899 nationwide in 1993 to 4,598 in 2010. Toxic chemicals, species loss, landfill waste, deteriorating freshwater supplies—the list seems endless. Around 154 million Americans, about half of the nation, currently live in areas that suffer from ambient ozone and/or particulate levels that are often too dangerous to breathe, resulting in 50,000 or more premature deaths per year. These dynamics—to say nothing of the complete failure to address climate change—are disheartening. They demonstrate that the capacity of the environmental movement to protect the environment through regulations and traditional political strategies is diminishing with each passing year. The problem is not a lack of effort or interest. The problem, first, is that attempts to significantly reverse ongoing social, economic and environmental decay have regularly been stymied by corporate opposition and our stalemated national political system. At a more fundamental level, the economic system is committed to and intertwined with endless growth—growth in the use of resources (many of them non-renewable); growth in the use of low-cost labor; growth in the number of products produced; growth of shareholder profits; and, inevitably, growth in pollution and carbon emissions. Put another way, the challenge is systemic, not simply political in the usual sense of the term. Ultimately, unless we begin to change the system, the politics and economics that produce the long trends of decay will continue. Nor is the problem abstract: Local communities feel the full effects of pollution and climate change, as well as the massive social and environmental costs of corporate outsourcing of jobs. Unless a more fundamental economic strategy can be developed, the pain—and decay—will continue. The environmental movement, and indeed the progressive movement as a whole, is at a critical crossroads. Defending past accomplishments and continuing to strive for stronger environmental laws and regulations are obviously important and necessary. However, the challenge now is greater. As James Gustave Speth, a leading environmentalist and former adviser to two presidents puts it: “For the most part, we have worked within this current system of political economy, but working within the system will not succeed in the end when what is needed is transformative change in the system itself.” What Speth and countless others have come to realize is that the world simply cannot wait for the increasingly remote possibility that somehow “business as usual” will generate a politics that can alter the deteriorating trends. A new economic system of environmental stewardship must be built from the ground up, community by community, state by state, region by region in the coming period. Just such a “new economy” movement is, in fact, quietly building up momentum just beneath the surface of media attention—paradoxically, in large part because the failure of national and international strategies produces more and more economic and ecological devastation. Citizens in all parts of the country have been taking the lead in constructing new economic models and institutions that not only promote democratized economic opportunity, but also, ecological sustainability. Austin, Texas, for instance, has embarked on an ambitious project to make the city carbon neutral by 2020, with the large, local, publicly owned utility taking a lead role. In Edmonds, Washington, community residents, the city government, and a Seattle-based company have come together to form Edmonds Community Solar Cooperative—the first citizen-owned solar cooperative in the state, and an innovative model of government, business and resident collaboration in support of environmental and economic goals. “B Corporations” designed to permit and facilitate investment in socially and environmentally important practices have been authorized by legislatures in Maryland and several other states. On a larger scale, such efforts as the groundbreaking network of linked worker cooperatives in Cleveland are designed not only to build economic wealth and community ownership in low-income neighborhoods, but also to be ecologically sustainable. The industrial-scale, worker-owned laundry cooperative operates out of a LEED Gold-certified building and uses and heats one fourth as much water per pound of laundry as its traditional counterpart. The large-scale solar and greenhouse cooperatives are similarly environmentally oriented as a matter of principle. These are only a few of literally thousands of new efforts developing beneath the surface of public attention. There is certainly every reason to continue the fight for stronger regulations and policies to address specific problems (like hydraulic fracturing and the Keystone XL pipeline). But unless we face up to the hard truth that our traditional regulatory strategies are no longer working, we won’t be celebrating the hopes of Earth Day much longer. The task going forward cannot simply be to reform and regulate the system: we must roll up our sleeves for the long struggle to change it.

The New Economy at Harvard, and Historical Insights for Movement-Building

admin — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:48:19 +0000

From March 30th-April 1st 2012, the on-campus group Economy Futures, consisting of 18 committed Harvard undergraduates, hosted the Transition to a New Economy Conference. In a piece entitled “Young People Tire of Old Economic Models” on The New York Times website, environmental journalist Andrew C. Revkin provides excellent context within which to situate the Harvard conference. He quotes Rina Kuusipalo, one of the student organizers, who considers the event “an effort to create holistic alternatives to the current economic system — a discourse cracked open by Occupy Wall Street.” Revkin’s article relies largely on the voices and opinions of young activists themselves, like Michael Sandmel, a senior at NYU:

Many of us study in mainstream neoclassical economics departments where interdisciplinary ecological-economics, and the questioning of G.D.P. growth as a primary (or, depending on who you ask, desirable) objective, is still very much fringe thinking. I don’t attempt to speak for all of my peers, but I know that many of us share an enormous frustration with the way in which our supposedly leading institutions teach us about the economy in a way that is myopic, ahistorical, and devoid of nearly any critical conversation about sustainability or human well being.

As Kuusipalo explains in Revkin’s article, “fifteen mentors, including Gar Alperovitz, a founder of the Harvard Institute of Politics and author of America Beyond Capitalism, ecological economist Josh Farley who works to measure happiness in Bhutan, and Juliet Schor, who used to teach Marxist economics at Harvard” participated as speakers in the conference designed to provide alternatives to the status quo in economic thought. She continues:

The dominant narrative says that environmental restraint must be limited and gradual, while social spending must be contained, otherwise the economy will not grow and we will all suffer. This kind of thinking is pervasive, dangerous, and outdated. Infinite growth in a finite world is impossible, growth based on speculative finance is unstable, and since the 1960’s, GDP growth and self-reported well-being have been completely uncorrelated phenomena. In this sense holistic, deep-reaching change of both thought, education and practice is needed. Indeed, we were brought together by an increasing realization that our global economic troubles aren’t just a few bad apples; the problem is indeed the apple tree.

Journalist Laura Flanders, host of GRITtv and The Nation blogger, attended the conference and interviewed its participants for Free Speech TV: Video: Laura Flanders interviews Gar Alperovitz at the 2012 Economy Futures Conference *** Both student activists quoted in Revkin’s piece mention the importance of The Occupy Movement as a force to push a systemic political-economic agenda forward. Sandmel notes that “[m]any of us have been involved in our local Occupy movements, including Occupy Harvard, and have been trying to use the crisis as an opportunity to push an agenda of plausible alternatives to unsustainable and inequitable finance-dominated capitalism.” Kuusipalo also explains that many of the conference’s organizers “spent considerable time at Occupy Boston in Dewey Square and also pitched tents here on Harvard Yard.” A recent article in Dissent Magazine called “From Vietnam Summers to 99% Springs” by Paul Adler discusses some of the parallels between the two exciting eras of movement-building, the former having developed — in part — on Harvard’s campuses. Adler writes:

As with Vietnam Summer, the 99% Spring represents an attempt by more institutional and “mainstream” progressive individuals and groups to build on the excitement generated by a seemingly more spontaneous protest movement. By the spring of 1967 opposition to the war in Vietnam was expanding from its origin points among existing peace groups and college students. Yet, for a number of organizers, especially in more established groups, concerns persisted (not unlike those with Occupy) that some of the movement’s core characteristics were inhibiting its growth. In particular, they wondered how to get more of “middle America” involved, and others who found large public demonstrations unappealing or even actively discouraging. From such deliberations arose the idea of a coordinated drive to reach out to the wider public and expand the anti-war constituency. Inspired in part by the Mississippi “Freedom Summer” drive in 1964, these individuals, with a thirty-one-year-old Kennedy School fellow named Gar Alperovitz at their center, conceived of an organizing drive for the summer of 1967.

Adler links to an interesting article in the Harvard Crimson from May 1964, which goes into some of Alperovitz’s history within the anti-war movement then:

Alperovitz has been deeply troubled about the war for a long time. In October 1965, he resigned his post as legislative assistant to Senator Gaylord Nelson (D.-Wisc.) to work for the State Department. Hoping he could bring about small changes in U.S. war policy, he took the post of special assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State for the United Nations.

After ten months, he quite the State Department in protest against the war. By this time, he was already considering the possibilities for using the vast manpower resources available at colleges to build a local, political base. … Alperovitz told the students that the only way to translate their ideas into political action was to educate the voters in the district about the problem. Without constituents educated to their position, he reasoned, the Congressmen could never be expected to respond politically.

Taking his advice, Tocsin members addressed various church and fraternal organizations about the issues involved in Berlin. Lacking a word for what they were doing, the group’s members coined the term “Alperovitzing.” … That was the answer: canvassing, talking to people in their homes. Ten thousand people ringing millions of doorbells across the country could accomplish more than 10,000 public speeches. … It is a three-phase plan. First, people opposed to the war or with doubts about it are found through extensive canvassing. Second, once the people are found, they form discussion groups to deepen their understanding of the issues involved in the war. Third, with their studies complete, they undertake “basic political action.”

Adler writes that the Occupy movement can draw a “key lesson” from Vietnam Summer: “many of its key accomplishments arose not based on its exact goals, but rather from what Alperovitz described as its ‘open-ended process.’ If anything, Vietnam Summer shows that providing skills-building and some level of direction, while allowing everyday people considerable leeway in how to apply them, can generate power and positive results.” He concludes:

Examples such as these suggest that the real victories of the 99% Spring may be hard to predict. But it seems entirely plausible that in a few months or even a year, individuals who gained concrete skills and built new connections via the 99% Spring will have started new campaigns and even organizations. They could revive the idea that, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. upon declaring his support for Vietnam Summer, “arrogant power can be made to yield to organized protest.”

Podcast: Left Forum’s Path to Systemic Change in American Society

admin — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 19:42:59 +0000

On March 17, Between The Lines Radio News Magazine hosted a panel at the Left Forum entitled, “From Evolution to Revolution: The Path to Systemic Change in American Society.” This podcast is adapted from a longer recording available at BTL’s website, which hosts other audio files from the three-day conference’s various speakers and events. This podcast features Gar Alperovitz’s presentation, followed by his responses during the wide-ranging and extensive question-and-answer period that followed. Download the audio segment Abstract of the theme:

This panel examined different modalities of political and economic change called for by the Occupy movements — from incremental reform to radical transformation. Panelists attempted to answer the question: What type of change is needed to address the full gamut of failed policies and structures in our broken system — from corporate control of the political process, to environmental degradation, a crumbling infrastructure, economic disparity, a failed health care system, etc.. Can these problems be tackled incrementally or only through radical structural change and central planning.

One can listen to the presentations of fellow panelists Amin Husain, Laura Gottesdiener and Chris Rude, as well as read their biographies, at Between The Lines’ website. [Subscribe to my podcast in iTunes * Podcast link]