[lbo-talk] Worker-Owners of America, Unite!

Nathan S n.crazeddoberman at gmail.com
Fri Dec 16 09:09:19 PST 2011


On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 7:55 PM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:


>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/opinion/worker-owners-of-america-unite.html
>
> "But at another level, something different has been quietly brewing in
> recent decades: more and more Americans are involved in co-ops,
> worker-owned companies and other alternatives to the traditional
> capitalist model. We may, in fact, be moving toward a hybrid system,
> something different from both traditional capitalism and socialism,
> without anyone even noticing."
>
> "And while 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.”
>
> Wojtek
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

"hybrid system"? That brief piece reads like liberalism with a few Fabian gestures, though I imagine next to David Brooks and Thomas Friedman it reads like, well, anything else. I note that "Some 130 million Americans, for example, now participate in the ownership of co-op businesses" has "and credit unions" appended to it, and considering that many co-ops simply require a buy-in, I think that this more constitutes local and regional 'communitarianism' or something like that. "More than 13 million Americans have become worker-owners of more than 11,000 employee-owned companies, six million more than belong to private-sector unions" reads far more honestly to me, since 13 million is not exactly huge. That said, it is still early and I'm glad to hear that "don't trust anyone under 30" has been reversed.



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