Bookshelf: An economy without greedsters

Sam Pizzigati, Other Words - The 79-year-old corporate gadfly Robert Monks, the former top federal regulator over America’s pension system, earlier this year opined that Corporate America operates “for the personal enrichment and glorification of its manager-kings.”

... Corporations, of course, have always done well by the executives who run them. But a half-century ago we had institutions that kept this enrichment in check. Unions acted as a brake on executive greed grabs. A progressive tax system — with rates as high as 91 percent on income over $400,000 — discouraged the greed grabbing in the first place.

But both these institutions — unions and progressive taxes — have atrophied over recent decades. We’ve slid into what University of Maryland political economist Gar Alperovitz calls a “systemic crisis.” For most Americans, daily life has become an ever-faster treadmill. And no real relief looms on the near horizon.

Alperovitz has a new book out that aims to rouse us from this suffocating political stupor. In What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution, he endeavors to show that societies in “systemic crisis” can change. Revolutions dohappen. Indeed, he suggests, “we may now be well into the prehistory of the next American revolution.”

In any social order, Alperovitz explains, political power reflects the ongoing distribution of wealth. Meaningful change only begins when that existing distribution starts coming under challenge.

We already, notes Alperovitz, have the seeds of an alternate, wealth-democratizing economy in place. Well over 100 million Americans belong to credit unions and co-ops. Ten million Americans labor in worker-owned enterprises. Millions more live in municipalities where public institutions generate electric power — or even provide Internet service.

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