Jim Hightower: Cooperatives Over Corporations

[marmar]

Published on Wednesday, February 22, 2012 by Creators.com
Cooperatives Over Corporations

by Jim Hightower


We're being told by today's High Priests of Conventional Wisdom that everyone and everything in our economic cosmos necessarily revolves around one dazzling star: the corporation.

This heavenly institution, the HPCW explain, has such financial and political mass that it is the optimal force for organizing and directing our society's economic affairs, including the terms of employment and production. While other forces are in play (workers, consumers, the environment, communities and so forth), they are subordinate to the superior gravitational pull of the corporate order. Profits, executive equanimity and a healthy Wall Street pulse rate are naturally the economy's foremost concerns.

How nice. For the wealthy few. Not nice for the rest of us, though. We're presently seeing the effect of this enthronement of self-serving corporate elites. Millions of Americans are out of work, underemployed and tumbling from the middle class down toward poverty. Yet excessively paid and pampered CEOs (recently rebranded as "job creators" by fawning GOP politicians) are idly sitting on some $2 trillion in cash, refusing to put that enormous pile of money to work on job creation.

The Powers That Be keep us tethered to this unjust system of plutocratic rule only by constantly ballyhooing it as a divine perpetual wealth machine that showers manna on America. Any tampering with the hierarchical control of the finely tuned machinery of trickle-down corporate capitalism, they warn, will cause a collapse and crush American prosperity. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/22-4

[xchrom]

1. du rec. nt

[Scuba]

2. Cooperatives employ more people than multinational corporations....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1024868

[OneGrassRoot]

3. Sorry, marmar, I didn't see this when I glanced at posts.

I'll edit mine requesting they delete due to being a duplicate.

I would like to invite anyone -- yet again -- who is interested in cooperatives and would like to explore the possibilities to join me at Wishadoo. I have a group devoted to the topic there.

[99th_Monkey]

4. This is such an important issue, that does SO many good things all at once

converting to -- and/or starting up -- worker-owned and controlled business is THE way to go.
Absolutely NOTHING anchors both jobs and capital (e.g. profits) into local otherwise vulnerable
communities than worker ownership.

Interestingly, prior to 1900 the US labor movement was largely ALL ABOUT insisting on worker-owned
enterprises, where workers literally OWN their fucking job. It's time to displace conventional abusive
corporate dinosaurs with worker-owned business. It's what economic democracy is all about.

[stockholmer]

5. Mondragon (Spain), a world-class Cooperative example

http://www.mondragon-corporation.com/ENG.aspx?language=en-US

http://distributistreview.com/mag/2011/10/mondragon-revisited/

Mondragon Revisited

In the face of the global financial crisis that has Spain’s unemployment level standing currently at some 22 per cent, the Mondragon co-operatives offer an astonishingly successful alternative to the way we organise business and economies. Revisiting recently for the fifth time, since the early nineteen-eighties, the great complex of worker-owned manufacturing, retail, agricultural, civil engineering and service cooperatives centred on Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain, it was impossible not to be impressed by the resilience that has enabled them to take their share of economic hits and emerge largely unscathed.

As Mondragon’s Human Resources Director, Mikel Zabala, points out, “We are private companies that work in the same market as everybody else. We are exposed to the same conditions as our competitors.” For example, Mondragon’s Eroski worker/consumer retail co-operative—hitherto Spain’s largest and fastest growing chain of supermarkets, hypermarkets and shopping malls—has over the past two years experienced for the first time since its inception in 1959 losses consequent on massively reduced consumer demand, and only now in the current financial year anticipates a return to modest profitability.

Fagor, Spain’s largest manufacturer of white goods including refrigerators, washing machines and dish washers, has successfully managed down production by 30 to 40 per cent in the face of a precipitous contraction of the effectively discretionary consumer durables market. The co-operative group’s Caja Laboral credit union—effectively Spain’s ninth largest bank—is recovering from a seventy-five per cent reduction in its profitability, from 200 million to 50 million euros. And following a sharp reduction in the use by the co-operatives of temporary workers, overall employment has stabilised at around 83,800. That so testing and ultimately triumphant an outcome has been achieved is attributable overwhelmingly to key attributes that set the co-operatives aside from comparable conventional enterprises.

Not to be overlooked, in the first instance, are the conceptual framework and enduring solidarity and subsidiarity values that are the legacy to the co-operatives of their founder, the Basque priest Don Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta. Internalised and in part secularised as the values and framework have so largely become, they stem directly from the unswerving adherence by Arizmendiarrieta, between his arrival in Mondragon in 1941 and the launch of the first of the co-operatives in 1956, to formation in the ‘see, judge, act’ or ‘inquiry’ study circle mould as developed by the Young Christian Workers (YCW) under the leadership of its long-time director, the Flemish priest, and later Cardinal, Joseph Cardijn.

snip

[yurbud]

8. did you post this as its own thread? It's worth it.

[stockholmer]

9. done, with another link added as well

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002358247

[yurbud]

10. and rec'd

[babydollhead]

6. kick

[yurbud]

7. the good thing is we can do this while our current system is still choking on the vomit of its own

corruption.

I also wonder if some corporations that cater to largely progressive clienteles couldn't be persuaded to move in this direction.