Pais, Spain
Rational Hope for a Better Future
By Gabriel Jackson
Translated By Gabriela Ullauri
29 December 2012
Edited by Katya Abazajian
Spain - Pais - Original Article (Spanish)
Blind faith in pure capitalism in the U.S. is decreasing. Young adults are no longer so convinced that this is the ideal model. Alternative ideas are beginning to emerge.
By nature I am quite optimistic, but the first decade of the century has greatly tested this natural tendency.
The kidnapping of the U.S. presidential elections in 2000 by the Supreme Court (the presumed protector of constitutional order in the United States); the crime against humanity on Sept. 11 committed by Islamist terrorists; the invasion of Iraq based on the mistaken idea that the attacks were that country's responsibility, and their alleged possession of "weapons of mass destruction"; the negative response to taking relevant measures to minimize climate change; the refusal from Wall Street and federal government officials to work on the speculation controls introduced by the New Deal in the 1930s; are all just some of the issues, that, not to say it in harsher terms, have made me doubt the motivations and mental mechanisms of our political leaders.
Last Dec. 15, an article appeared in The New York Times that led me to contemplate the future of the human race with slight optimism. The article’s title was “Worker-Owners of America, Unite!” by Gar Alperovitz, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland. Even though I do not know him personally, I have long admired him for having published “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” in 1955, a well-documented study which not only demonstrated the weight of the desires for revenge on the Pearl Harbor attack and the need to save American lives (a need that led to an unnecessary invasion of Japan by land), but also made explicit the motivations and advice of many scientists, army officials and politicians who were in favor of dropping the bomb in a sparsely populated area to show the Japanese the destructive power of the new weapon without having to take the lives of tens of thousands of innocent people.
Professor Alperovitz's article in The New York Times evaluates the importance of various political trends of recent years that virtually nobody has mentioned due to the fact that public debate has mainly focused on austerity plans, bank recapitalization, the advantages and disadvantages of recovering the regulatory laws that kept the tactics of Wall Street at relatively honored levels between 1940 and 1980, the significant reductions in welfare policies implemented after World War II in most developed countries and the financial policies of the world powers and the European Union.
Here are some of the ideological and economic data that Professor Alperovitz has evaluated. Around 30 million American adults (out of 311 million inhabitants) are co-owners of the third sector companies or credit unions. “More than 13 million Americans have become worker-owners of more than 11,000 employee-owned companies, and 6 million belong to private-sector unions. And worker-owned companies make a difference. In Cleveland, for instance, an integrated group of worker-owned companies, supported in part by the purchasing power of large hospitals and universities, has taken the lead in local solar-panel installation, ‘green’ institutional laundry services and a commercial hydroponic greenhouse capable of producing more than three million heads of lettuce a year.”
Local and state governments are likewise changing the nature of American capitalism. Almost half the states manage venture capital efforts, taking partial ownership in new businesses. Calpers, California’s public pension authority, helps finance local development projects; in Alaska, state oil revenues provide each resident with dividends from public investment strategies as a matter of right. In Alabama, public pension investing has long focused on state economic development.
Moreover, this year, some 14 states began to consider legislation to create public banks similar to the longstanding Bank of North Dakota. The author adds that “15 more began to consider some form of single-payer or public-option health care plan.”
In light of the specific examples given in the article, it is clear that in reality, only a very small part of the U.S. economy uses the techniques of cooperative management praised by the author, based on the fact that the workers are also the owners of the company.
On the other hand, I think applying various centralized health care plans in several of the 50 states would be a nightmare for citizens who move from one state to another. However, the introduction of an independent state plan could be useful to provide a few years of experience with different rules, which may help to decide what would work better: a federal or national health plan.
A centralized health care plan for the whole country will only be viable when Americans both leave behind the ridiculous prejudice that private management is better than public and when they show the willingness to question why in the last decades the statistics of health of many other countries with national health systems are better than the private health care of Americans.
In his provisional findings, Professor Alperovitz writes, “Although the American public has long supported the capitalist model, that, too, may be changing. In 2009, a Rasmussen poll reported that Americans under 30 years old were ‘essentially evenly divided’ as to whether they preferred ‘capitalism’ or ‘socialism’.”
This reference seems puzzling, because the Rasmussen poll is mostly quoted by the conservative news outlet Fox News, which has been criticized by many other companies for exaggerating the percentage of partisans of the Republican Party among the U.S. population.
However, it is quite possible that from Rasmussen’s point of view, it is important to warn the capitalist masters that young adults are not as anti-socialist as their parents. When the Soviet Empire collapsed between 1989 and 1990, fortunately without much violence, U.S. conservative intellectuals celebrated the "end of history," meaning that the Soviet defeat in the Cold War proved that capitalism was the only successful model of economic and political development, and with slight modifications, it would serve as the main model for the whole human future.
However, those who dominated American and British politics in the early 1990s did not include the Scandinavian countries among its examples of successful models for the future. In their opinion, the well-being of the state was necessary in order to fight the supposed attractions of the Soviet model. When the Soviet Union failed dramatically, they thought it was time to cut social services introduced in their countries after World War II.
I think what the world needs is a flexible mix between the regulated capitalism of the American “New Deal” combined with the social services which were curiously pioneered by imperial Germany in the late nineteenth century and developed by Scandinavian governments, eventually making them the norm.
Today, and even more in the near future, the fact that the world population is rapidly growing makes it absolutely necessary to find some kind of global planning for the limited use of natural resources and some control of climate change. We also need to develop an international scale; a cooperative economy which Professor Alperovitz assures is increasing in the U.S. with the intention to overcome the economic disaster of 2008. A combination of elements is by no means easy, but necessary.
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