Another World Is Possible
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It is a commonplace of serious historical research worldwide that the unsung actions of people where they live and work are central to large-order change. Regulatory commissions for railroads and other industries, minimum-wage laws, food- and drug-safety laws, the estate tax, the eight-hour workday, Social Security and related forms of public insurance, child labor laws, laws to increase factory safety, workers' compensation, the preservation of national parks and other conservation measures, and many, many other national policies at the heart of modern American reality built upon precedents first developed and refined by local citizen effort.
IS THERE ANYTHING IMPORTANT and potentially system-changing going on at the grassroots today? Yes–but you have to look beyond conventional media reporting, and even beyond the traditional New Deal and progressive policy paradigms. One of the most important trends involves an array of new economic institutions that transform the ownership of wealth in ways that benefit "small publics," groups of citizens whose efforts feed into the well-being of the community as a whole. Here are a few little-known facts: More people are now involved in some 11,500 companies wholly or substantially owned by employees than are members of unions in the private sector. There are more than 4,000 nonprofit community development corporations that build housing and create jobs in cities across the nation. Both Democratic and Republican city officials have begun to establish municipally owned public companies to make money for their communities (and often to solve environmental problems). Numerous quasi-public land trusts that stabilize housing prices now exist. Cities and states regularly invest in job-creating efforts, often using large-scale public pension assets. In Alaska, the state's Permanent Fund invests oil revenues and provides each citizen with dividends. In Alabama, the public employee retirement system finances a broad range of job-stabilizing and moneymaking industries, including many employee-owned businesses. Numerous other local and state activist efforts to shift the way wealth accumulates and moves around are under way, from "living wage" campaigns to Wal-Mart challenges and beyond.
Not surprisingly, in case after case, ordinary citizens have taken the lead in developing these new strategies, because they often represent the only way to solve real-world problems in the face of national-level failure. Put another way: The systemic crisis is systematically driving unsolved problems to the local level -- and systematically, too, forcing the development of (and opening the way for) new approaches.
The emerging strategies point toward a quietly developing "commonwealth tier" of the economy. At the same time, in quite another realm, there has also been what might be called a "populist vector" of change -- a push to create more economic equality, not by taxing the middle-class suburbs (as in much traditional liberal policy), but rather the top 1 to 3 percent who, amazingly, own more than half of all of America's investment capital. (The top 1 percent alone has twice the income of the bottom 100 million Americans!) These new strategies move the political divide, putting 97 to 99 percent of the population together on the side that has much to gain from progressive politics.
Illustration: Philippe Weisbecker
