Progressive Massachusetts has come out with the Shared Prosperity Agenda.  Here are a couple of items on that agenda.

QUALITY, FREE PUBLICLY FUNDED EDUCATION FROM PRE-K THROUGH POST-SECONDARY
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AN EQUITABLE TAX SYSTEM THAT RAISES SUFFICIENT REVENUE TO INVEST IN OUR COMMONWEALTH

Whether you agree with all or any of the items on the list, I think you have to admit it is pretty bold. The only way to change the terms of debate is to have the courage to come out and say what it might really take to fix things.

The Daily Kos has the article Another Major Medicaid Scandal for Rick Scott.  The article puts together two quotes from an another article.  First is the quote:

Before Fernandez, an individual had never given a check of $1 million or more to a candidate-aligned committee.

The second quote from the article is:

Two companies partly owned by the finance chairman of Gov. Rick Scott’s re-election campaign [Miguel Fernandez] have won contracts worth potentially billions to serve Medicaid patients in regions across the state.

The trajectory for honest government in Florida goes downhill from there in The Daily Kos article.

Brings to mind what I have been reading in Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ autobiography.  As he would sit before a Congressional committee and listen to the Representatives or Senators rail against the corruption and the inability to take action in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates would wonder if they thought the US government of which they were a part were doing much better than Iraq and Afghanistan.

This example in Florida would be good to compare to the corruption of the warlords and governors of areas of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Admittedly the following YouTube video is painful to watch.  The question I have is what else could Bernie Sanders have done?

So far my two favorite choices for words to use coming from the comments I read are:

Crazy Bachmann Bullshit (patent pending).

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Bernie should have just looked at her back and said “is there an off switch somewhere?”

The trouble with the Bachman side of the argument is that it is easy to flood the conversation with crazy ideas and double talk so that there is no chance to talk about good ideas. If Bernie spent all his time knocking down her crazy ideas, he’d have no time to talk about anything else. If he ignores her crazy ideas (and could find her off switch), then her insanity still hangs in the air like the odor of an angry skunk. Maybe when Bachman talked about what she learned as a tax lawyer Bernie could have turned to her and said,

“Either you know nothing about economics or you are pretending that you don’t or you would understand why what you said is utter nonsense. I would try to explain this to you, but you would just keep yammering away and it would be useless.”

I think it would be time better spent to have the conversation devolve into a discussion about why Bachman cannot listen and learn, then it would be to give any of her ideas the time that they were given.

I have just read the extremely well done analysis in The Daily Kos article Michele Bachman and Bernie Sanders spar on income inequality clash on CNN. The analysis is well worth reading. The conclusion matches my feeling about the debate.

Michele Bachmann continued to keep Bernie Sanders off message by interrupting him and with ample help from the moderator Wolf Blitzer. In this debate truth took a beating.

We have to learn how to defend the truth and protect it from such beatings.  We cannot expect any help from the moderators.

I first heard the news when I saw The New York Times obituary Pete Seeger, Songwriter and Champion of Folk Music, Dies at 94 posted on Facebook.

Pete Seeger, the singer, folk-song collector and songwriter who spearheaded an American folk revival and spent a long career championing folk music as both a vital heritage and a catalyst for social change, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 94.

Of course I was a great fan of Pete Seeger.  How could you not be?  I suppose if you were a John Birch Society member you might not.

I read a biography of Pete Seeger once.  The thing that struck me was that every turn in his life’s path, if he could find the hard way to travel, that was the path he chose.  He certainly could have made life easier for himself if he had wanted to.

Pete Seeger is a prime example of a person who refused to remain silent no matter what pressure the powers that be tried to use to silence him.  What he went through to speak his piece just reminds us of how few people like him that are left.  Did the HUAC and its descendants finally win?

The Real News Network has the final segment What Would You Do If You Had Political Power? – Gar Alperovitz on Reality Asserts Itself (5/5) of a series that I have been following on this blog.  See my previous posts Understanding the Imperialist System Changed My Life – Gar Alperovitz on Reality Asserts Itself (Parts 1 – 3 out of 5) and The Promise and Limitations of Worker Co-ops – Gar Alperovitz on Reality Asserts Itself (4/5).  To whet your appetite, I’ll choose some excerpts focusing on one of the ideas in this interview.

JAY: But the other sector that essentially was nationalized and again just handed back was the banking sector. And if you’re really going to change things, you’re going to have to do something with how finance, how loans take place. And what could be done at a city and state level there?

ALPEROVITZ: Again, we’re not–this is no longer rhetoric. The state of North Dakota has had a publicly owned bank for almost 100 years now, and it is public. It makes money for the state. Twenty states have legislation introduced to set up public banks. That can be done. You can set up a city-owned bank, or, minimally, you can take city tax deposits and put them in banks that will invest in the city. That’s also being done around the country.
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ALPEROVITZ: Credit unions, nonprofit banks.

Credit unions are key to this. Most people don’t realize this. A credit union is a co-op. It’s a one-person, one-vote bank. That’s all it is. If you put them all together in the United States, all of these one-person, one-vote banks, credit unions, have as much capital as any of the big New York banks–$1 trillion. It’s now being used for non–very boring–housing and auto loans, mainly, a little bit for business. They’re restricted. The banks have made sure to restrict them for business. But they can do housing, and they could be using their strength.

The beauty of this is that you can see some of these ideas in the thinking of the current Democratic candidates for the Governor of Massachusetts in 2014.  I think there is also promise in the recently elected mayor of Boston, Marty Walsh.

I should say, that if you are negative on the ideas presented here, you could come up with a long list of issues and things that could go wrong in carrying out the ideas described by Gar Alperovitz. Any thoughtful proponent of these ideas recognizes the existence of these issues.  All we say is that don’t use the existence of these issues to kill the idea.  Instead think of ways of solving these problems.  If you have the attitude of problem solving, I think you can find a way to guard against, overcome, and measure the occurrence of all these problems.  It’s not like there are no problems with the current system.

As I think Gar Alperovitz would agree, if it looks like there is a better way, then we ought to be able to start moving in that direction.  Of course we need to be ever wary of problems that come up so that we can deal with them as they occur.  It’s not like anybody claims to have all the answers.  As with going with any new direction, it is a learning experience.  We didn’t figure out all the answers to making the USA work in 1776.  We learned as the nation grew.

If you want to raise issues, do so in a spirit of “Let’s see if we can figure out how to solve this.”

Truthout has another item on SOTU 2014: The Cognitive Power of the President by George Lakoff.

Beyond material power, the president has even greater power – cognitive power – and he hasn’t used it much. Cognitive power is the power to put important ideas in people’s minds by shaping public discourse. He has the unique power to change how America thinks simply by discussing crucial ideas over and over.
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He started talking, as Elizabeth Warren has so eloquently, about the crucial nature of public resources, but he messed up once (“You didn’t build it”) and stopped. He needs to take up that theme, get it right and repeat it in every speech.

When Lakoff started talking about cognitive power, I immediately started to think of Elizabeth Warren.  She has shaped a lot of the national debate about holding banks and bankers accountable among other things.  She has much less formal power than the President, but she sure knows how to multiply the strength of her informal power.  What has Hillary Clinton done to change the tone of the debate in this country?

Truthout has Dean Baker’s article President Obama’s Inequality Story.

There are some items on President Obama’s agenda that push in the wrong direction, most notably his plans for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This is wrongly billed as a “free-trade” agreement. In reality it has very little to do with free trade.
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Unfortunately, full employment does not seem to be on anyone’s agenda right now. The budget cuts that slowed the economy and cost us millions of jobs over the last three years are now largely behind us, but no one seems prepared to push an investment agenda or the sort of trade policy that can bring us back to full employment any time soon.

That means we will see little real progress in addressing inequality based on President Obama’s agenda. An increase in the minimum wage is an important goal with substantial benefits but it should not be confused with an inequality agenda.

I don’t expect a lot from Obama’s State of the Union address.  His adamant position on this equality destroying TPP agreement and his inability to see the damage he is doing to the economy with his efforts to cut the deficit preclude his figuring out what this country needs right now.

So if he doesn’t know what the country needs, how can he figure out how to fix the problems?

I’d give my wisdom teeth to be wrong about the speech.

Alternet has the article The 20 Richest Americans Are Greedy Takers—Not Inspirational ‘Makers’.

They have all taken from the public or from employees, or through taxes or untaxed inheritances.
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The top individuals on the 2013  Forbes 400 list are generally believed to be makers of great companies or concepts. They are the role models of Paul Ryan, who  laments, “We’re going to a majority of takers versus makers in America.” They are defended by Cato Institute CEO  John A. Allison IV, who once protested: “Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive.”

But many of the richest Americans are takers. The top twenty, with a total net worth of almost  two-thirds of a trillion dollars, have all taken from the public or from employees, or through taxes or untaxed inheritances.

Read the article to see if your favorite billionaire is on this list.  Decide if they built it themselves or had help.

The web site community-wealth.org is the one mentioned in the previous post The Promise and Limitations of Worker Co-ops – Gar Alperovitz on Reality Asserts Itself (4/5).

The purpose of the web site is succinctly stated in its subtitle “Resources for democratic, community-based economic development”.

Here is an adapted excerpt and transcript of Democracy Democracy Collaborative Executive Director Ted Howard’s presentation to a four-city teleconference organized by the regional Federal Reserve Banks in Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia.

The Real News Network has the video The Promise and Limitations of Worker Co-ops – Gar Alperovitz on Reality Asserts Itself (4/5). This is the continuation of the series I started to cover in the previous blog post Understanding the Imperialist System Changed My Life – Gar Alperovitz on Reality Asserts Itself (Parts 1 – 3 out of 5).

The following excerpt gives you a small taste of what is covered in the interview:

ALPEROVITZ: Who has power, because the planning system’s going to be controlled by somebody, and it’s either the corporations or we have to–and to say that is to say, you want to play this game about changing the system? The chips are three decades of your life. We’re talking about big-time build from the bottom, begin to reshape from the neighborhood, from the worker-owned co-ops, from the cities, some of the really interesting things that you’re doing here in Baltimore, beginning to build up knowledge, ideas, experiments, a program that actually is practical and look at it as a 30-year strike, as a strategy at least to begin to deal with the power of this system. So that’s the name of the game.

JAY: And, I mean, it flows from the idea that concentration of ownership gives rise to concentration of political power.

ALPEROVITZ: Yes.

JAY: So you need to change the way things are owned.

ALPEROVITZ: That’s the central element. Systems–you know, in feudalism it was land; who owned the land had the power. Capitalism, who owns the capital has the power. State socialism, there was a form where the state controlled it, and it could have been democratized.

JAY: Well, it was another form of too much concentration of ownership, because the party winds up controlling the state, so the party now has the concentration of ownership, and you wind up with the same kind of–similar kind of problem. I can’t say the same kind, but it’s a similar kind of problem.

ALPEROVITZ: Yeah, exactly, which tells you that the model that we want to build has to have democratized ownership, but democratized in a way that builds from the bottom up, so that the concentrations of power are not overly concentrated, that the terms are whether–appropriate to the scale. So little co-ops in some places, city-owned in other places, neighborhood-owned in other places.

This interview has hit on the core point that concentrations of power are not good. They may lead to efficiency over medium time frames, but they also lead to fragility over longer time frames. So the new model of cooperatives will be good as long as there are lots of them with competing ideas and products.

What used to keep the “capitalist” system in this country from being driven to concentrations of power was the anti-trust law framework. Enforcement of anti-trust has practically disappeared from the scene. Of course the lack of anti-trust regulation is a political problem because of the concentration of power in control of the politics.

Worker coops and increased anti-trust regulation could go hand-in-hand toward getting us back on the right track, but only if centralized political power can be prevented from reining these things in. The people with the power aren’t going to give it up very easily. So it all boils down in the end to solving this problem of concentrated political power.

I wait for part 5 to find out what Gar has to say about solving that problem, other than hoping that somehow these experimental organizations will lead to such a solution to breaking up the political power of the vested interests? Also, we have to account for the fact that concentrations of power exist on a global scale. If we were to solve it in the USA, would that be enough?

The more i think about it, the breaking up of the concentrated economic power may be enough to solve our problems. It probably matters less how each and every small center of power organizes itself. That can evolve if the environment is made to support the evolution. Evolution is the adaptation to the environment. It works in biology and it works in any system where “natural” selection is allowed to work.