Our Co-Owned Future

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:



Our Co-Owned Future
From health care to jobs to community development, why the future will be cooperative.

by Gar Alperovitz
posted Mar 02, 2012


The explosive force of Occupy Wall Street—and more than a thousand other local efforts—offers hope that a movement committed to long-term change might one day achieve a fundamental transformation of the American political-economic system. Quietly, a different kind of progressive change is emerging, one that involves a transformation in institutional structures and power, a process one could call “evolutionary reconstruction.”

The first post in this series reviewed emerging possibilities for change in the financial sector both nationally, and state-by-state. This part takes up health care possibilities, along with the democratization of ownership now quietly going on in communities throughout the nation.

That a long era of social and economic austerity and failing reform might paradoxically open the way to more populist or radical institutional change—including various forms of public ownership—is also suggested by emerging developments in health care. Here the next stage of change is already under way. At first, it is likely to be harmful. Republican efforts to cut back the mostly unrealized benefits of the Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010, provide one example of this. The first stages, however, are not likely to be the last. Polls show overwhelming distrust of and deep hostility toward insurance companies. We can also expect public outrage to be fueled by stories like that of fifty-nine-year-old James Verone who attempted to rob a bank in Gastonia, North Carolina last year—but only, he made clear, for one dollar. The reason: unemployed and without health insurance, Verone simply saw no way other than going to jail to get health care for a growth on his chest, foot difficulties, and back problems.

Cost pressures are building in ways that will also continue to undermine corporations facing global competitors, forcing them to seek new solutions. A report from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“National Health Expenditure Projections, 2009–2019”) projects health care costs to rise from the 2010 level of 17.5 percent of GDP to 19.6 percent in 2019. It has long been clear that the central question is to what extent, and at what pace, underlying cost pressures ultimately force development of some form of single-payer system—the only serious way to deal with the underlying problem. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/our-co-owned-future

[xchrom]

1. du rec. nt

[Odin2005]

2. Co-ops are the future of Socialism.

While the Right keeps trotting out the "Socialism = state control over everything" BS socialism is evolving over their heads.

[midnight]

3. 2012: Year of the Co-Op! VIDEO

http://www.thenation.com/blog/166571/2012-year-co-op-video

[nxylas]

4. I wish there was more information about them

I am in the process of setting up my own business here in the UK. Not only do I want it to be a co-operative if it ever grows to the point where it's no longer just me, but I'd also like to only use co-ops, worker-owned businesses, sole traders and general "not corporations" as suppliers. I'd love to see a "Yellow Pages" of such businesses, to make the process easier.