Renewables Rise at the Grassroots

By Aaron Bartley
SolidarityEconomy.net via Huffington Post

May 7, 2012 - While the oil and gas lobby dominates at the federal level, communities across the United States are making great strides in gaining control of energy production.

They are doing so by advancing an impressive range of commercial-scale renewable projects that are heating homes and powering local businesses from Massachusetts to Oregon.

Municipal utilities, community-based co-ops, universities and other nonprofit institutions in both rural and urban settings are executing wind, solar, geothermal and biomass developments.

When combined with the innovative grassroots efforts to retrofit existing buildings for conservation purposes, these renewable energy production programs are placing community-led efforts at the forefront of American innovation. In the process, they are creating a blueprint that could be used to scale-up nationally when and if we develop a rational Federal energy policy fostering both the growth of the renewable sector and democratization of production on the German model.

In Hull, Mass., residents began a campaign to build large-scale wind turbines in 1996. The first turbine was completed in late 2001 and has produced more than 12 million kilowatts to date. A second, larger turbine, known as Hull II, was erected on top of the town's former landfill in 2006 and in its first year produced enough electricity to power all of the Hull's street lights while providing the town with an additional $150,000 from the sale of excess electricity. Hull's two turbines now generate enough electricity to power 1,100 homes as well as the town's street and traffic lights.

Similar community-controlled wind projects have sprouted up across the state of Iowa, placing seven municipalities and about a dozen school districts in control of their energy destinies. The 1.65 megawatt wind farm at Iowa Lakes Community College is among the largest of these community-developed projects, built in conjunction with the ILCC's launch of the first accredited wind turbine training program in the nation.

The Iowa Lakes Electric Cooperative, which operates independently of the college, provides power to more than 12,000 member-owners in eight rural Iowa counties and has developed two wind farms that generate more than 21 megawatts, projects for which it was named wind cooperative of the year by the DOE.

In the realm of community-controlled solar energy, the city of San Francisco, propelled by a citizens movement called Vote Solar, set a new standard for municipal generation with the opening of the Sunset Reservoir development, which includes over 24,000 panels and will generate 5 megawatts daily, tripling the city's solar output and solidifying the municipal utility's ability to meet 100% of the city's electricity needs without burning any greenhouse gases.

San Francisco is also at the forefront of incentivizing residents to produce their own solar power, with rebates of up to $10,000 for residential customers. In 2009, the program's first year, solar installations increased 450%, with more than 800 homeowners taking part.

Solar innovation is also happening in the less cosmopolitan environs of Drake Landing, Alberta, a small town that became the first community on the continent to construct a district heating system powered by the sun. The Drake Landing system pumps solar-heated water through insulated piping flowing to all 52 of the town's homes.

District co-generation plants, which produce heat and electrical energy simultaneously for distribution in nearby communities and large institutions, are increasingly turning to renewables for generation. The largest such system is Minnesota's District Energy St. Paul, which relies on biomass as its primary fuel. Last year, the nonprofit corporation integrated 144 roof-mounted solar panels into its generation system. All told, District Energy St. Paul heats more than 185 office buildings and 300 homes in downtown St. Paul.

The University of New Hampshire has adopted similar co-generation technology, powered by methane emitted from an adjacent landfill, to meet 100 percent of its electricity and heating needs, without burning any carbon-based fuels.

At the community level, grassroots leaders are adapting renewable technologies to meet the needs of their neighborhoods. The Community Power Network has emerged as an association of energy co-operatives and advocacy groups committed to democratizing power production. Affiliated groups include DC Solar United, an alliance of neighborhood-based solar co-operatives in DC; the JOBS project, bringing renewables and green jobs trainings to the heart of Appalachian coal country; and GRID Alternatives, which leads solar installation projects in low-income communities across California.

As renewables are harnessed to meet the heat and power needs of more communities each year, they are proving their viability as greener and more democratic alternatives to the fossil fuel monoliths. The choice between ever more invasive and insidious extraction techniques -- fracking in Marcellus, mountaintop removal in Appalachia and tar sand processing in Alberta -- controlled by mega corporations and the adoption of community-based wind, solar, geothermal and biomass systems is stark.

In the absence of sensible federal policy, some states and cities are taking the lead in supporting the growth of renewables by instituting Feed-in Tariffs (FITs), which establish stable price supports for power that enters the grid from renewable sources. Ontario's FIT has spurred the creation of more than 20,000 green jobs in the wind and solar sectors while recently passed FITs in Vermont, Hawaii and Oregon are showing early gains.

Ultimately, our energy choices will be determined in state capitals and municipalities as community advocates and their allies battle industry lobbyists and their minions in industry-funded think tanks. The competitiveness of our national economy and the health of our global habitat lie in the balance.

Working Toward Factory Takeovers:

Plutonomy and the Precariat

By Noam Chomsky
SolidarityEconomy.net via The Nation

May 8, 2012 - The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead—because victory won’t come quickly—it could prove a significant moment in American history.

The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.

I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s—although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today—nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it,” even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that “it will get better.”

There was militant labor union organizing going on, especially from the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are frightening to the business world—you could see it in the business press at the time—because a sit-down strike is just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. The idea of worker takeovers is something which is, incidentally, very much on the agenda today, and we should keep it in mind. Also New Deal legislation was beginning to come in as a result of popular pressure. Despite the hard times, there was a sense that, somehow, “we’re gonna get out of it.”

It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

On the Working Class

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back. If you’re a worker in manufacturing today—the current level of unemployment there is approximately like the Depression—and current tendencies persist, those jobs aren’t going to come back.

The change took place in the 1970s. There are a lot of reasons for it. One of the underlying factors, discussed mainly by economic historian Robert Brenner, was the falling rate of profit in manufacturing. There were other factors. It led to major changes in the economy—a reversal of several hundred years of progress towards industrialization and development that turned into a process of de-industrialization and de-development. Of course, manufacturing production continued overseas very profitably, but it’s no good for the work force.

Along with that came a significant shift of the economy from productive enterprise—producing things people need or could use—to financial manipulation. The financialization of the economy really took off at that time.

On Banks

Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college. That changed dramatically in the 1970s. Until then, there had been no financial crises since the Great Depression. The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

And it was egalitarian. The lowest quintile did about as well as the highest quintile. Lots of people moved into reasonable lifestyles—what’s called the “middle class” here, the “working class” in other countries—but it was real. And the 1960s accelerated it. The activism of those years, after a pretty dismal decade, really civilized the country in lots of ways that are permanent.

When the 1970s came along, there were sudden and sharp changes: de-industrialization, the off-shoring of production, and the shift to financial institutions, which grew enormously. I should say that, in the 1950s and 1960s, there was also the development of what several decades later became the high-tech economy: computers, the Internet, the IT Revolution developed substantially in the state sector.

The developments that took place during the 1970s set off a vicious cycle. It led to the concentration of wealth increasingly in the hands of the financial sector. This doesn’t benefit the economy—it probably harms it and society—but it did lead to a tremendous concentration of wealth.

On Politics and Money

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle. The legislation, essentially bipartisan, drives new fiscal policies and tax changes, as well as the rules of corporate governance and deregulation. Alongside this began a sharp rise in the costs of elections, which drove the political parties even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector.

The parties dissolved in many ways. It used to be that if a person in Congress hoped for a position such as a committee chair, he or she got it mainly through seniority and service. Within a couple of years, they started having to put money into the party coffers in order to get ahead, a topic studied mainly by Tom Ferguson. That just drove the whole system even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector (increasingly the financial sector).

This cycle resulted in a tremendous concentration of wealth, mainly in the top tenth of one percent of the population. Meanwhile, it opened a period of stagnation or even decline for the majority of the population. People got by, but by artificial means such as longer working hours, high rates of borrowing and debt, and reliance on asset inflation like the recent housing bubble. Pretty soon those working hours were much higher in the United States than in other industrial countries like Japan and various places in Europe. So there was a period of stagnation and decline for the majority alongside a period of sharp concentration of wealth. The political system began to dissolve.

There has always been a gap between public policy and public will, but it just grew astronomically. You can see it right now, in fact. Take a look at the big topic in Washington that everyone concentrates on: the deficit. For the public, correctly, the deficit is not regarded as much of an issue. And it isn’t really much of an issue. The issue is joblessness. There’s a deficit commission but no joblessness commission. As far as the deficit is concerned, the public has opinions. Take a look at the polls. The public overwhelmingly supports higher taxes on the wealthy, which have declined sharply in this period of stagnation and decline, and the preservation of limited social benefits.

The outcome of the deficit commission is probably going to be the opposite. The Occupy movements could provide a mass base for trying to avert what amounts to a dagger pointed at the heart of the country.

Plutonomy and the Precariat

For the general population, the 99 percent in the imagery of the Occupy movement, it’s been pretty harsh—and it could get worse. This could be a period of irreversible decline. For the 1 percent and even less—the .1 percent—it’s just fine. They are richer than ever, more powerful than ever, controlling the political system, disregarding the public. And if it can continue, as far as they’re concerned, sure, why not?

Take, for example, Citigroup. For decades, Citigroup has been one of the most corrupt of the major investment banking corporations, repeatedly bailed out by the taxpayer, starting in the early Reagan years and now once again. I won’t run through the corruption, but it’s pretty astonishing.

In 2005, Citigroup came out with a brochure for investors called “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances.” It urged investors to put money into a “plutonomy index.” The brochure says, “The World is dividing into two blocs—the Plutonomy and the rest.”

Plutonomy refers to the rich, those who buy luxury goods and so on, and that’s where the action is. They claimed that their plutonomy index was way outperforming the stock market. As for the rest, we set them adrift. We don’t really care about them. We don’t really need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state, which will protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but other than that they essentially have no function. These days they’re sometimes called the “precariat”—people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. Only it’s not the periphery anymore. It’s becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere. And this is considered a good thing.

So, for example, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, at the time when he was still “Saint Alan”—hailed by the economics profession as one of the greatest economists of all time (this was before the crash for which he was substantially responsible)—was testifying to Congress in the Clinton years, and he explained the wonders of the great economy that he was supervising. He said a lot of its success was based substantially on what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If working people are insecure, if they’re part of the precariat, living precarious existences, they’re not going to make demands, they’re not going to try to get better wages, they won’t get improved benefits. We can kick ’em out, if we don’t need ’em. And that’s what’s called a “healthy” economy, technically speaking. And he was highly praised for this, greatly admired.

So the world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat—in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Not literal numbers, but the right picture. Now, the plutonomy is where the action is and it could continue like this.

If it does, the historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. And the Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that could avert this. But it’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long, hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to form the structures that will be sustained, that will go on through hard times and can win major victories. And there are a lot of things that can be done.

Toward Worker Takeover

I mentioned before that, in the 1930s, one of the most effective actions was the sit-down strike. And the reason is simple: that’s just a step before the takeover of an industry.

Through the 1970s, as the decline was setting in, there were some important events that took place. In 1977, US Steel decided to close one of its major facilities in Youngstown, Ohio. Instead of just walking away, the workforce and the community decided to get together and buy it from the company, hand it over to the work force, and turn it into a worker-run, worker-managed facility. They didn’t win. But with enough popular support, they could have won. It’s a topic that Gar Alperovitz and Staughton Lynd, the lawyer for the workers and community, have discussed in detail.

It was a partial victory because, even though they lost, it set off other efforts. And now, throughout Ohio, and in other places, there’s a scattering of hundreds, maybe thousands, of sometimes not-so-small worker/community-owned industries that could become worker-managed. And that’s the basis for a real revolution. That’s how it takes place.

In one of the suburbs of Boston, about a year ago, something similar happened. A multinational decided to close down a profitable, functioning facility carrying out some high-tech manufacturing. Evidently, it just wasn’t profitable enough for them. The workforce and the union offered to buy it, take it over, and run it themselves. The multinational decided to close it down instead, probably for reasons of class-consciousness. I don’t think they want things like this to happen. If there had been enough popular support, if there had been something like the Occupy movement that could have gotten involved, they might have succeeded.

And there are other things going on like that. In fact, some of them are major. Not long ago, President Barack Obama took over the auto industry, which was basically owned by the public. And there were a number of things that could have been done. One was what was done: reconstitute it so that it could be handed back to the ownership, or very similar ownership, and continue on its traditional path.

The other possibility was to hand it over to the workforce—which owned it anyway—turn it into a worker-owned, worker-managed major industrial system that’s a big part of the economy and have it produce things that people need. And there’s a lot that we need.

We all know or should know that the United States is extremely backward globally in high-speed transportation, and it’s very serious. It not only affects people’s lives, but the economy. In that regard, here’s a personal story. I happened to be giving talks in France a couple of months ago and had to take a train from Avignon in southern France to Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris, the same distance as from Washington, DC, to Boston. It took two hours. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken the train from Washington to Boston, but it’s operating at about the same speed it was sixty years ago when my wife and I first took it. It’s a scandal.

It could be done here as it’s been done in Europe. They had the capacity to do it, the skilled work force. It would have taken a little popular support, but it could have made a major change in the economy.

Just to make it more surreal, while this option was being avoided, the Obama administration was sending its transportation secretary to Spain to get contracts for developing high-speed rail for the United States, which could have been done right in the rust belt, which is being closed down. There are no economic reasons why this can’t happen. These are class reasons and reflect the lack of popular political mobilization. Things like this continue.

Climate Change and Nuclear Weapons

I’ve kept to domestic issues, but there are two dangerous developments in the international arena, which are a kind of shadow that hangs over everything we’ve discussed. There are, for the first time in human history, real threats to the decent survival of the species.

One has been hanging around since 1945. It’s kind of a miracle that we’ve escaped it. That’s the threat of nuclear war and nuclear weapons. Though it isn’t being much discussed, that threat is, in fact, being escalated by the policies of this administration and its allies. And something has to be done about that or we’re in real trouble.

The other, of course, is environmental catastrophe. Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps towards trying to do something about it. The United States is also taking steps, mainly to accelerate the threat. It is the only major country that is not only not doing something constructive to protect the environment, it’s not even climbing on the train. In some ways, it’s pulling it backwards.

And this is connected to a huge propaganda system, proudly and openly declared by the business world, to try to convince people that climate change is just a liberal hoax. “Why pay attention to these scientists?”

We’re really regressing back to the dark ages. It’s not a joke. And if that’s happening in the most powerful, richest country in history, then this catastrophe isn’t going to be averted—and in a generation or two, everything else we’re talking about won’t matter. Something has to be done about it very soon in a dedicated, sustained way.

It’s not going to be easy to proceed. There are going to be barriers, difficulties, hardships, failures. It’s inevitable. But unless the spirit of the last year, here and elsewhere in the country and around the globe, continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/167763/plutonomy-and-precariat

Links: [1] http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175539/ [2] http://eepurl.com/lsFRj

MIT’s Rodney Brooks outlines his vision of the future to student entrepreneurs.

By David L. Chandler
MIT News Office

April 24, 2012 - When industrial robots were first introduced in the early 1960s — initially on automobile assembly lines — computers were still in their infancy, so the robots were designed to perform only the most rigidly predetermined set of repetitive movements.

Despite a half-century of exponential growth in computational power, that’s pretty much still the state of industrial robotics.

But according to Rodney Brooks, who last year left a tenured position as MIT’s Panasonic Professor of Robotics to focus on his latest company, that may not be true for much longer.

Brooks’s “lips are sealed,” as The Economist put it last week, about what exactly he and Heartland Robotics are up to in a converted warehouse in South Boston’s Innovation District. But venture capitalists have already gambled $32 million on the premise that whatever it is they produce, it’s going to set a whole new direction in the field.

Brooks, now the chairman and chief technology officer of Heartland Robotics, spoke at MIT on April 20, addressing a recently formed student entrepreneurship group called do.it@MIT.

In robotics, “today’s technology is going to look so incredibly primitive in a couple of decades,” Brooks told a crowd of about 400, mostly students, gathered at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium. And, he added, “you’re the ones who are going to invent” the new robotic technologies that will transform the field.

Robots down under

The former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) described growing up in in Adelaide, Australia. While he had never heard of MIT, he was an inveterate tinkerer who became intrigued early on by robotics.

In the early 1960s, Brooks recalled, he built

a very primitive computer, using vacuum tubes, that had a total random access memory capacity of 64 bits (or 8 bytes) and took a year and a half to build. He then went on to build a very simple robot that remained in his mother’s garden shed for the next 30 years, he said.

After seeing the 1968 movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” he became intrigued by HAL, the movie’s intelligent, responsive computer. “He was a murdering psychopath,” Brooks quipped — but nonetheless an impressive portrayal of machine intelligence.

Brooks’ first exposure to the Institute came when he read that an MIT professor named Marvin Minsky had been a consultant to filmmaker Stanley Kubrick; he immediately decided he wanted to attend MIT.

That dream took a while to realize: Brooks was turned down for graduate school at MIT, and turned down again — twice — for faculty positions after earning his doctorate at Stanford University. “Rejection is not the end,” he advised the students, saying that it’s important to persevere in pursuit of one’s dreams: “Persistence pays off.”

In 1994, on his third try, Brooks finally did get an MIT faculty appointment, and quickly set about upending the world of robotics research.

Out of control

Brooks’ first major contribution to the field came from an insight based on nature: the idea of building swarms of tiny, inexpensive robots with autonomous control systems. Initially intended as an alternative to NASA proposals for huge planetary rovers, the concept was described in a research paper called “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control.” Soon thereafter, Brooks became a central character in a documentary film of the same name by Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris.

The concept of smaller, simpler robots did ultimately have an impact on NASA, and led to Brooks’ work on the first mobile robotic device ever to land on another planet: a Mars rover called Sojourner.

Working with MIT students and postdocs, Brooks developed a variety of robots that could watch people’s facial expressions and gestures and make inferences about their meaning and emotional state — for example, sensing when people were frustrated or bored. The goal, then as now, was to create robots that could more easily interact with human beings.

Over the years, Brooks set up several companies; his first big success was one that became known as iRobot, which introduced the vacuum-cleaning robot called Roomba. The company also produces military robots that are widely used by U.S. forces to disarm explosives and explore dangerous areas.

Brooks’ latest concept for next-generation robots could, he thinks, revolutionize manufacturing. Instead of huge machines that need to be kept inside protective cages so they won’t injure nearby workers, he envisions smaller, nimbler, more responsive robots that could work alongside people, helping them with tasks. The new robots, he says, will compare to today’s lumbering industrial robots in much the way that an iPhone compares to an earlier, room-sized mainframe computer.

Brooks isn’t revealing anything yet about what his new robots will look like, or what they’ll be capable of doing. But based on his comments at MIT, don’t expect them to look much like people. “If you make them too humanlike, people’s expectations go up, and they’re easily disappointed,” he said. “You don’t want to make it look like Einstein!” Print

The product: Molds holding half-sections of composite turbine blades fill the floor of TPI Composites' plant in Newton, Iowa. It makes blades exclusively for General Electric wind turbines. Photo by Daniel Cusick.

Wind Turbine and Blade Makers Grow Corn Belt Jobs

By Daniel Cusick
SolidarityEconomy.net via E&E reporter

April 11, 2012, WEST BRANCH, Iowa -- Were it not for the National Park Service's requisite brown sign directing highway travelers to the nearby Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, there would be nothing outwardly remarkable about this gas-and-go exit along Interstate 80 in the heart of Iowa flyover country.

Iowa City, the humming university town 8 miles up the road, offers far more to the discerning tourist. And just beyond is the commercial center of Coralville, where it's easier to book a hotel room or find a restaurant serving Iowa's signature food, pork tenderloin.

Looks deceive. As home to wind turbine manufacturer Acciona Windpower NA, West Branch has emerged as one of a handful of Midwestern communities on the vanguard of the U.S. clean energy economy. The small city of 2,300 has found an economic niche that's the envy of thousands of other small towns across the nation. Turbine blade molds

Herbert Hoover, the former Commerce secretary who later became the 31st president, might swoon at the economic pluck of his boyhood home, where the Spanish energy giant Acciona Energia invested $23 million in April 2007 to build its first North American manufacturing facility.

The decision by Pamplona-based Acciona to anchor its U.S. manufacturing operations at West Branch was made after an extensive review of potential sites, ultimately narrowed to a few locations in the Midwest.

"It was the geographic center of the wind industry," said Joe Baker, Acciona Windpower NA's CEO, who joined the company in 2010. "We're here because this is where the wind blows."

Iowa is also where major railroads running east and west meet major rivers running north and south, giving the state a logistical edge for the shipping of very large pieces of equipment that make up the core components of a wind farm -- the turbines, blades and towers. Its primary interstate highways, I-80 and I-35, are also less congested than those of its eastern neighbor Illinois, aiding in the transport of turbine blades that require special trailers to accommodate their 165-foot-long spans. Convenient to transportation.

Indeed, several experts noted that Iowa -- and particularly the I-80 corridor in eastern Iowa -- has emerged as the backbone of the U.S. commercial wind power sector, much the way that New York dominates the U.S. financial sector and the Gulf Coast anchors the oil and gas industry. Since 2005, the state has enticed four global wind energy firms to establish core manufacturing facilities here, while dozens of secondary supply chain firms have followed the leaders into the cornfields.

Within an hour's drive of West Branch, Acciona's rival, Clipper Windpower of Carpinteria, Calif., occupies a 330,000-square-foot plant at Cedar Rapids where it builds its 2.5-megawatt Liberty wind turbine. Meanwhile, two blade manufacturers -- Siemens Wind Power at Fort Madison and TPI Composites of Newton -- have become the largest employers in their communities, revitalizing local economies that were deflated by the retrenchment of Midwestern manufacturing in the 1980s and 1990s.

And more could be coming, as leading Chinese manufacturers like Goldwind seek to solidify their place in the U.S. wind energy supply chain.

"These plants are obviously attracted to the same geographic locations, and we've been able to sell them on the idea that Iowa is at the center of where this industry is now and where it's going to be in the future," said Harold Prior, executive director of the Iowa Wind Energy Association, whose 200-plus members are meeting in Des Moines this week.

While difficult to pinpoint, the wind supply chain may also be helping Iowa outpace its peer Midwest states in terms of economic growth. According to recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Iowa outperformed Illinois, Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin for personal income growth among nonfarm employment sectors in 2011. And it ranked second in the region behind Indiana for gross state product in 2010, with a 3.1 percent growth rate.

Experts attribute that growth at least in part to the emergence of the wind energy supply chain, which now employs an estimated 5,500 Iowans directly. Thousands more have benefited from wind energy land leases, which according to the state have generated roughly $14 million in additional revenue for farmers and landowners.

Five years after its opening, Acciona's West Branch plant -- which assembles the firm's 1.5 MW turbines and will soon expand its line to assemble larger 3 MW units -- is keeping pace to meet orders from wind farms in Iowa, the greater Midwest and points beyond. Last month, its factory floor was filled with dozens of hulking turbines bearing the logo of NaturEner USA, which selected Acciona as a partner on its 189 MW Rim Rock wind farm in northwest Montana.

A dozen of the plant's 125 employees walked atop the turbines, roughly the size of Bayliner Cruisers, fine-tuning the hydraulic and electrical systems that will drive the wind turbines in western Montana's harsh, unforgiving environment.

The work at plants like Acciona's is more technical than assembly-line, and employees are paid accordingly. Average wages in plants like these, according to industry and government estimates, are between $50,000 and $75,000 a year, considerably higher than the average manufacturing wage in the Midwest.

Hard times not long ago

But the picture isn't entirely rosy for Iowa, which has witnessed economic boom-and-bust cycles in manufacturing before, including layoffs at Acciona and Clipper as recently as 2009.

And while the state has been more insulated from the latest economic downturn due to a more stable farm economy driven by robust demand for corn-based ethanol, its interstate exits remain pocked with empty prefabricated metal buildings with "for lease" signs tacked to their windows.

Eighty miles up I-80 from West Branch, the vestiges of economic hard times are still evident in Newton, population 15,500, which built its reputation as the headquarters of Maytag Corp.

The Maytag appliance manufacturing plant at Newton, shuttered in 2006 when Maytag was acquired by Whirlpool Corp., sits as a hulking shell on the city's northeastern flank, and its former 400,000-foot corporate campus remains in search of a new tenant. After Maytag's departure, Newton became a poster city for economic hard times, drawing the attention of CBS News' "60 Minutes" in 2010, which in turn caused a sprinkling of cash gifts on local residents and businesses from celebrity billionaire Donald Trump.

But there is optimism in Newton these days, created by the emergence of two significant players in the wind industry supply chain: TPI Composites, which builds composite turbine blades exclusively for General Electric Co., and Trinity Structural Towers, which occupies a wing of the old Maytag plant where it manufactures tubular sections used to construct wind turbine towers.

Neither firm has had an entirely smooth run in Newton, where labor tensions have affected both operations, including lawsuits brought by a small number of employees over wages, overtime pay and wrongful termination. TPI, which employs roughly 700 workers at Newton, is defending itself in federal court, while Trinity has settled one case and a second one remains in state court, according to a plaintiffs’ attorney involved in the cases.

On a recent Tuesday at 10 a.m., the parking lot at TPI's quarter-mile-long blade manufacturing plant was filled to capacity, and on the work floor, employees were busy assembling the long, narrow composite blades used in GE's 1.6 MW wind turbines, each one stretching half a football field, while in nearby offices, other employees were busily manning phones and laptops.

'Scary' to be in the midst of a policy debate

The plant's general manager, Mark Parriott, an energetic executive who joined TPI after 26 years at Maytag, isn't a standard-bearer for Newton's hard times story. He's busy trying to build a new manufacturing base in the community, one bound to the state's commitment to wind power.

Walking the floor of the TPI plant, Parriott shows a reporter a white turbine blade bearing the signatures of several Republican presidential candidates -- including GOP front-runner Mitt Romney -- who at least tacitly expressed support for Iowa's wind energy industry before the Iowa caucuses in 2011.

Parriott turns more steely when the topic of federal energy policy comes up, particularly the ongoing uncertainty over the federal production tax credit (PTC) for wind energy developers -- the firms that write multimillion-dollar checks to firms like TPI to keep turbine blades coming off its factory floor.

He recoils at the term "subsidy" to refer to the PTC, arguing that tax breaks on the part of the federal government are in fact strategic investments in an industry that has proved it can create sizable amounts of clean energy as well as significant numbers of manufacturing jobs in the Midwest.

"It's one of my great frustrations because I look at the PTC as something that shouldn't be partisan," he said, noting support for the PTC from Iowa's politically divided Senate delegation, Republican Chuck Grassley and Democrat Tom Harkin.

"We know from experience that when these tax credits go away, there's a dramatic drop in manufacturing. We're just a bunch of regular working folks here. To be caught up in the middle of this policy debate, it's scary for people."

How the Big Energy Companies Plan to Turn

the United States into a Third-World Petro-State

By Michael T. Klare
SolidarityEconomy.net via AlterNet.org

April 4, 2012 - The “curse” of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land.

Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century “new Saudi Arabia” for “tough energy” -- deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas. 

But here’s a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere? Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World?

Once upon a time, the giant U.S. oil companies -- Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco -- got their start in North America, launching an oil boom that lasted a century and made the U.S. the planet’s dominant energy producer.  But most of those companies have long since turned elsewhere for new sources of oil.

Eager to escape ever-stronger environmental restrictions and dying oil fields at home, the energy giants were naturally drawn to the economically and environmentally wide-open producing areas of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America -- the Third World -- where oil deposits were plentiful, governments compliant, and environmental regulations few or nonexistent.

Here, then, is the energy surprise of the twenty-first century: with operating conditions growing increasingly difficult in the global South, the major firms are now flocking back to North America. To exploit previously neglected reserves on this continent, however, Big Oil will have to overcome a host of regulatory and environmental obstacles.  It will, in other words, have to use its version of deep-pocket persuasion to convert the United States into the functional equivalent of a Third World petro-state.

Knowledgeable observers are already noting the first telltale signs of the oil industry’s “Third-Worldification” of the United States.  Wilderness areas from which the oil companies were once barred are being opened to energy exploitation and other restraints on invasive drilling operations are being dismantled.  Expectations are that, in the wake of the 2012 election season, environmental regulations will be rolled back even further and other protected areas made available for development.  In the process, as has so often been the case with Third World petro-states, the rights and wellbeing of local citizens will be trampled underfoot.

Welcome to the Third World of Energy

Up until 1950, the United States was the world’s leading oil producer, the Saudi Arabia of its day. In that year, the U.S. produced approximately 270 million metric tons of oil, or about 55% of the world’s entire output. But with a postwar recovery then in full swing, the world needed a lot more energy while America’s most accessible oil fields -- though still capable of growth -- were approaching their maximum sustainable production levels.  Net U.S. crude oil output reached a peak of about 9.2 million barrels per day in 1970 and then went into decline (until very recently).

This prompted the giant oil firms, which had already developed significant footholds in Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, to scour the global South in search of new reserves to exploit -- a saga told with great gusto in Daniel Yergin’s epic history of the oil industry, The Prize. Particular attention was devoted to the Persian Gulf region, where in 1948 a consortium of American companies -- Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco -- discovered the world’s largest oil field, Ghawar, in Saudi Arabia.  By 1975, Third World countries were producing 58% of the world’s oil supply, while the U.S. share had dropped to 18%.

Environmental concerns also drove this search for new reserves in the global South. On January 28, 1969, a blowout at Platform A of a Union Oil Company offshore field in California’s Santa Barbara Channel produced a massive oil leak that covered much of the area and laid waste to local wildlife. Coming at a time of growing environmental consciousness, the spill provoked an outpouring of public outrage, helping to inspire the establishment of Earth Day, first observed one year later. Equally important, it helped spur passage of various legislative restraints on drilling activities, including the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. In addition, Congress banned new drilling in waters off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico near Florida.

During these years, Washington also expanded areas designated as wilderness or wildlife preserves, protecting them from resource extraction. In 1952, for example, President Eisenhower established the Arctic National Wildlife Range and, in 1980, this remote area of northeastern Alaska was redesignated by Congress as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Ever since the discovery of oil in the adjacent Prudhoe Bay area, energy firms have been clamoring for the right to drill in ANWR, only to be blocked by one or another president or house of Congress.

For the most part, production in Third World countries posed no such complications. The Nigerian government, for example, has long welcomed foreign investment in its onshore and offshore oil fields, while showing little concern over the despoliation of its southern coastline, where oil company operations have produced a massive environmental disaster. As Adam Nossiter of the New York Times described the resulting situation, “The Niger Delta, where the [petroleum] wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates.”

As vividly laid out by Peter Maass in Crude World, a similar pattern is evident in many other Third World petro-states where anything goes as compliant government officials -- often the recipients of hefty bribes or other oil-company favors -- regularly look the other way. The companies, in turn, don’t trouble themselves over the human rights abuses perpetrated by their foreign government “partners” -- many of them dictators, warlords, or feudal potentates.

But times change.  The Third World increasingly isn’t what it used to be.  Many countries in the global South are becoming more protective of their environments, ever more inclined to take ever larger cuts of the oil wealth of their own countries, and ever more inclined to punish foreign companies that abuse their laws. In February 2011, for example, a judge in the Ecuadorean Amazon town of Lago Agrio ordered Chevron to pay $9 billion in damages for environmental harm caused to the region in the 1970s by Texaco (which the company later acquired).  Although the Ecuadorians are unlikely to collect a single dollar from Chevron, the case is indicative of the tougher regulatory climate now facing these companies in the developing world.  More recently, in a case resulting from an oil spill at an offshore field, a judge in Brazil has seized the passports of 17 employees of Chevron and U.S. drilling-rig operator Transocean, preventing them from leaving the country.

In addition, production is on the decline in some developing countries like Indonesia and Gabon, while others have nationalized their oil fields or narrowed the space in which private international firms can operate. During Hugo Chávez’s presidency, for example, Venezuela has forced all foreign firms to award a majority stake in their operations to the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A.  Similarly, the Brazilian government, under former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, instituted a rule that all drilling operations in the new “pre-salt” fields in the Atlantic Ocean -- widely believed to be the biggest oil discovery of the twenty-first century -- be managed by the state-controlled firm, Petróleo de Brasil (Petrobras).

Fracking Our Way to a Toxic Planet

Such pressures in the Third World have forced the major U.S. and European firms -- BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and Total of France -- to look elsewhere for new sources of oil and natural gas.  Unfortunately for them, there aren’t many places left in the world that possess promising hydrocarbon reserves and also welcome investment by private energy giants. That’s why some of the most attractive new energy markets now lie in Canada and the United States, or in the waters off their shores.  As a result, both are experiencing a remarkable uptick in fresh investment from the major international firms.

Both countries still possess substantial oil and gas deposits, but not of the “easy” variety (deposits close to the surface, close to shore, or easily accessible for extraction).  All that remains are “tough” energy reserves (deep underground, far offshore, hard to extract and process). To exploit these, the energy companies must deploy aggressive technologies likely to cause extensive damage to the environment and in many cases human health as well.  They must also find ways to gain government approval to enter environmentally protected areas now off limits.

The formula for making Canada and the U.S. the “Saudi Arabia” of the twenty-first century is grim but relatively simple: environmental protections will have to be eviscerated and those who stand in the way of intensified drilling, from landowners to local environmental protection groups, bulldozed out of the way.  Put another way, North America will have to be Third-Worldified.

Consider the extraction of shale oil and gas, widely considered the most crucial aspect of Big Oil’s current push back into the North American market. Shale formations in Canada and the U.S. are believed to house massive quantities of oil and natural gas, and their accelerated extraction is already helping reduce the region’s reliance on imported petroleum.

Both energy sources, however, can only be extracted through a process known as hydraulic fracturing (“hydro-fracking,” or just plain “fracking”) that uses powerful jets of water in massive quantities to shatter underground shale formations, creating fissures through which the hydrocarbons can escape. In addition, to widen these fissures and ease the escape of the oil and gas they hold, the fracking water has to be mixed with a variety of often poisonous solvents and acids. This technique produces massive quantities of toxic wastewater, which can neither be returned to the environment without endangering drinking water supplies nor easily stored and decontaminated.

The rapid expansion of hydro-fracking would be problematic under the best of circumstances, which these aren’t.  Many of the richest sources of shale oil and gas, for instance, are located in populated areas of Texas, Arkansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. In fact, one of the most promising sites, the Marcellus formation, abuts New York City’s upstate watershed area.  Under such circumstances, concern over the safety of drinking water should be paramount, and federal legislation, especially the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, should theoretically give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the power to oversee (and potentially ban) any procedures that endanger water supplies.

However, oil companies seeking to increase profits by maximizing the utilization of hydro-fracking banded together, put pressure on Congress, and managed to get itself exempted from the 1974 law’s provisions. In 2005, under heavy lobbying from then Vice President Dick Cheney -- formerly the CEO of oil services contractor Halliburton -- Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, which prohibited the EPA from regulating hydro-fracking via the Safe Drinking Water Act, thereby eliminating a significant impediment to wider use of the technique.

Third Worldification

Since then, there has been a virtual stampede to the shale regions by the major oil companies, which have in many cases devoured smaller firms that pioneered the development of hydro-fracking. (In 2009, for example, ExxonMobil paid $31 billion to acquire XTO Energy, one of the leading producers of shale gas.) As the extraction of shale oil and gas has accelerated, the industry has faced other problems. To successfully exploit promising shale formations, for instance, energy firms must insert many wells, since each fracking operation can only extend several hundred feet in any direction, requiring the establishment of noisy, polluting, and potentially hazardous drilling operations in well-populated rural and suburban areas.

While drilling has been welcomed by some of these communities as a source of added income, many have vigorously opposed the invasion, seeing it as an assault on neighborhood peace, health, and safety. In an effort to protect their quality of life, some Pennsylvania communities, for example, have adopted zoning laws that ban fracking in their midst. Viewing this as yet another intolerable obstacle, the industry has put intense pressure on friendly members of the state legislature to adopt a law depriving most local jurisdictions of the right to exclude fracking operations. “We have been sold out to the gas industry, plain and simple,” said Todd Miller, a town commissioner in South Fayette Township who opposed the legislation.

If the energy industry has its way in North America, there will be many more Todd Millers complaining about the way their lives and worlds have been “sold out” to the energy barons.  Similar battles are already being fought elsewhere in North America, as energy firms seek to overcome resistance to expanded drilling in areas once protected from such activity.

In Alaska, for example, the industry is fighting in the courts and in Congress to allow drilling in coastal areas, despite opposition from Native American communities which worry that vulnerable marine animals and their traditional way of life will be put at risk. This summer, Royal Dutch Shell is expected to begin test drilling in the Chukchi Sea, an area important to several such communities.

And this is just the beginning. To gain access to additional stores of oil and gas, the industry is seeking to eliminate virtually all environmental restraints imposed since the 1960s and open vast tracts of coastal and wilderness areas, including ANWR, to intensive drilling. It also seeks the construction of the much disputed Keystone XL pipeline, which is to transport synthetic crude oil made from Canadian tar sands -- a particularly “dirty” and environmentally devastating form of energy which has attracted substantial U.S. investment -- to Texas and Louisiana for further processing. According to Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute (API), the preferred U.S. energy strategy “would include greater access to areas that are currently off limits, a regulatory and permitting process that supported reasonable timelines for development, and immediate approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.”

To achieve these objectives, the API, which claims to represent more than 490 oil and natural gas companies, has launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to sway the 2012 elections, dubbed “Vote 4 Energy.” While describing itself as nonpartisan, the API-financed campaign seeks to discredit and marginalize any candidate, including President Obama, who opposes even the mildest of version of its drill-anywhere agenda.

“There [are] two paths that we can take” on energy policy, the Vote 4 Energy Web site proclaims. “One path leads to more jobs, higher government revenues and greater U.S. energy security -- which can be achieved by increasing oil and natural gas development right here at home. The other path would put jobs, revenues and our energy security at risk.” This message will be broadcast with increasing frequency as Election Day nears.

According to the energy industry, we are at a fork in the road and can either chose a path leading to greater energy independence or to ever more perilous energy insecurity. But there is another way to characterize that “choice”: on one path, the United States will increasingly come to resemble a Third World petro-state, with compliant government leaders, an increasingly money-ridden and corrupt political system, and negligible environmental and health safeguards; on the other, which would also involve far greater investment in the development of renewable alternative energies, it would remain a First World nation with strong health and environmental regulations and robust democratic institutions.

How we characterize our energy predicament in the coming decades and what path we ultimately select will in large measure determine the fate of this nation.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author of The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources just published by Metropolitan Books. © 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/154787/

By Nyegosh Dube
United Steelworkers Blog

We’re once again witnessing an American election campaign dominated by big money and wealthy candidates.

The Republicans are trying to sell unregulated, low-tax (for the rich), free-market capitalism as the solution to the nation’s economic woes, when in fact it’s exactly this system that has landed the country in deep water. They blame government, when the problem is Big Business and Wall Street – and their influence over government.

Newt Gingrich has accused Mitt Romney of “vulture capitalism,” but Gingrich and other Republicans have done everything in the past 30 years or so to give vulture capitalism free reign. The result is a major economic crisis that has badly affected tens of millions of middle and working class Americans.

What’s the real solution to America’s economic troubles? I believe it’s economic democracy, taking the economy out of the hands of the super-rich 1 percent (and the mega-rich 0.1 percent) who siphon off a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth.

Who makes the big investment, financial, production, and hiring decisions in America? An unaccountable, unelected oligarchy – wealthy owners, shareholders, investors, executives, bankers. They own and control the country’s corporations, banks and investment firms, and have tremendous power over the political system as a result.

Let’s change this by democratizing the economy; for example, turning corporations into worker-owned cooperatives, like Mondragon in Spain (with whom the USW has teamed up – a laudable initiative), and by turning investment into a social mechanism that serves public priorities, rather than those of an oligarchy.

I’d like to go into more detail now about what economic democracy involves and how unions fit into the picture.

As we all know (well, maybe, except for a few Republican presidential candidates!), America’s economy is on the rebound and unemployment is falling – thanks in no small part to the massive federal stimulus packages and bailouts of 2008-2009. Of course, this is welcome news for American workers. But what isn’t good news is that the economy remains largely under the control of a corporate and financial oligarchy, and wealth and income differentials remain huge. In fact, a recent study by a UC Berkeley economist reveals that in 2010, a staggering 93% of income growth went to the top 1%.

This sobering statistic along with a job situation that’s still very serious, with unemployment over 8%, is an illustration of the fundamental problem: the economy is hostage to the business oligarchy’s power. With this class controlling companies and the investment process, and dominating the political system, average working people don’t have much power to steer the economy to their benefit. Economic democracy would change this. So, let’s have a look at what this concept is all about.

The cornerstone of economic democracy is empowerment of working people. This means working people gaining control over the economy at all levels and ensuring that economic processes serve their best interests, rather than the interests of a wealthy minority.

More specifically, I see economic democracy at three main levels:

First, at the micro or company level, workers gaining greater control of the workplace and participating in management, and going further, democratically managing and owning their companies;

Second, at the meso or intermediate level, workers on a wider scale collectively controlling investment funds to benefit local and regional economies and in the process gaining equity in companies and influence over their operations;

Third, at the macro or societal level, working people as citizens democratically allocating resources through a national investment fund to achieve social goals (e.g. supporting specific industries, helping depressed regions, promoting green energy, building high-speed rail), and also vetting investment decisions through state-level investment councils.

Within this tri-level framework there can be plenty of diversity, with various forms of democratic ownership and governance of companies as well as a range of democratic investment mechanisms and financial institutions.

Fortunately, there are some good models out there. We have co-determination and works councils in Europe, the Mondragon group of industrial cooperatives in Spain, the worker coops of Emilia-Romagna in Italy, and Britain’s Scott Bader chemical company (whose employees own the firm through a charitable trust).

But worker ownership can also take a multi-company form like the Quebec Solidarity Fund, a labor-sponsored pension fund that holds equity in small and medium-sized companies across the province, or the Meidner Plan proposed in Sweden in the 1970s where worker ownership in whole sectors is built up over time through annual allocation of shares to wage-earner funds. These two, along with the Coopfond in Italy (which funds development of the coop sector), are at the same time examples of meso-level worker-based investment funds. 

A particularly intriguing idea would be expansion of the Scott Bader trust model to ownership of multiple firms by a national-level public trust or union-sponsored workers’ trust, or a network of single-firm trusts linked under a common umbrella. In fact, the national investment fund (with governance representing a range of stakeholders) could serve as the public trust – getting funds from taxation of corporate assets, wealth taxes on the top 1%, and earnings from share ownership, and then disbursing funds in accordance with democratically set social priorities.

While there are no existing models for this kind of fund, we have a few partial models such as the State Pension Fund of Norway. (The Norwegian fund invests globally and is not focused on assisting sectors of the economy or particular communities or funding public projects.)

Large corporations are at the heart of the U.S. economy – and are the power base of the oligarchy. A fairer, more democratic society can’t be built unless they are transformed. This can be done through economic democracy, the antidote to corporate power.

I propose a “pincer movement”, from inside and outside, from below and above:

1) instituting co-determination (i.e. putting worker representatives on boards of directors), or even setting up workers’ councils as a counterweight to boards;

2) placing one-third of each of the top 200 American corporations under public trust ownership (in exchange for abolishing corporate income tax for these companies);

3) instituting the Meidner Plan to build up worker ownership to a point where wage-earner funds and the public trust together own a majority of equity. The state investment councils I mentioned before (also with multi-stakeholder governance bodies) add another layer of democratic control, ensuring that major investment decisions don’t harm workers and communities.

Finally, what would be the role of labor unions in all of this?

Without strong unions, it will be hard to build a more democratic economy, but I think unions can become stronger if they take up the cause of economic democracy. This concept provides a compelling vision of the future, a clear set of goals to work towards.

Trade unions should push for workers’ empowerment on all the levels I’ve identified. To a considerable degree, the three levels are independent from each other, but if we want to seriously tackle corporate power and reduce the 1%’s control over capital, we need to move on all three levels simultaneously. So, labor unions will not only carry on defending and expanding workers’ rights as they do at present, but they’d gain a major new set of tasks aimed at the transformation of the economy and its power structure.

I’m aware that the USW has been active in developing strategies for investing workers’ capital to revitalize local economies (especially through the Heartland initiative) and, in collaboration with Spain’s Mondragon, is exploring the idea of establishing unionized manufacturing cooperatives in the United States and Canada. These are both excellent initiatives, but the USW and other unions should go much further and promote full-scale economic democracy.

Let me add that in a democratic economy, unions would of course continue to play important roles as defenders of workers’ rights and as guarantors that the structures of the system are functioning properly and benefiting working people. In short, labor unions and economic democracy are a perfect fit!

***

Nyegosh Dube, an American citizen who lives in Poland, is currently developing a project that looks at existing examples of economic democracy in Europe and elsewhere within the broader context of promoting a democratic alternative to the prevailing economic system among certain constituencies, such as trade unions, political parties, and the co-op movement. For 8 years, he coordinated a pan-European project promoting an enabling legal-fiscal environment for foundations and other civil society organizations.

Steal This Idea: Floating Wind Turbines

to Produce Low Cost Renewable Energy

By Bridget Borgobello
SolidarityEconomy.net via Gizmag

March 28, 2012 - Altaeros Energies has announced the first testing of its Airborne Wind Turbine (AWT) prototype that resembles a sort of blimp windmill.

The test took place at the Loring Commerce Center in Limestone, Maine, USA where the AWT floated 350 feet (107 meters) into the sky and successfully produced power, before coming back to earth in a controlled landing. The turbine was deployed into the air from a towable docking trailer, while demonstrating that it can produce over twice the power at high altitudes than generated at conventional tower height. There are hopes to energy costs can be reduced by up to 65 percent by harnessing stronger winds that occur at and above an altitude of 1,000 feet (305 meters).

"For decades, wind turbines have required cranes and huge towers to lift a few hundred feet off the ground where winds can be slow and gusty," explained Ben Glass, Chief Executive Officer of Altaeros, a company led by alumni of Harvard and MIT. "We are excited to demonstrate that modern inflatable materials can lift wind turbines into more powerful winds almost everywhere—with a platform that is cost competitive and easy to setup from a shipping container."

The AWT features an inflatable shell that is filled with helium, allowing it to float to higher altitudes where winds are often five times more powerful than those closer to the earth’s surface. The employment technology has been inspired by aerostats, the industrial cousins of the well-known blimp, that commonly raise heavy communications and radar equipment into the air. Traditionally aerostats have survived hurricane-level winds and employ safety features that ensure a slow descent to the ground.

The AWT prototype, which has been developed in partnership with Doyle Sailmakers of Salem, Massachusetts, has been designed to have little impact on the environment while creating minimal noise pollution. When deployed, it's claimed that the AWT requires minimal maintenance and will displace expensive fuel used to power diesel generators at remote industrial, military, and village sites.

Source: Altaeros Energies

(Click to enlarge)

Cuba’s Alternative to Privatization

By Marce Cameron
SolidarityEconomy.net via GreenLeft Weekly

March 11, 2012 - Cuban President Raul Castro has urged the Caribbean nation's citizens to contribute to a free and frank debate on the future of Cuba’s socialist project.

For the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), the aim of this debate is twofold: to strive for consensus on a new Cuban model of socialist development and to empower Cuba’s working people to implement what has been decided.

In other words, to advance a socialist renewal process in the face of entrenched opposition from within the administrative apparatus.

It is first and foremost a debate about the economy. A draft policy document, the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines, was submitted to a national debate for three months before to its adoption by the Sixth PCC Congress in April last year.

The core principles and objectives of the draft were conserved, but the final version of the Guidelines was substantially modified on the basis of this public debate.

The PCC said total attendance at the 163,000 local debates held in workplaces, study centers and neighborhoods was about 8.9 million, with many people attending more than one.

More than three million interventions were noted and grouped into 781,000 opinions, about half of which were reflected in the final document. A summary detailing each modification and its motivation, and the number of interventions in favour, was published after the congress.

The Guidelines is not a theoretical document. The government commission responsible for overseeing its implementation has been charged with drafting, as Castro put it, “the integral theoretical conceptualization of the Cuban socialist economy”.

Rather, the Guidelines is a set of principles and objectives that point to a new Cuban socialist-oriented economic model.

Yet implicit in them is a reconception of the socialist-oriented society in Cuba’s conditions.

Transitional society

The ultimate objective of the socialist revolution is a global classless society in which technology enables minimal human labour to produce goods and services, allowing these to be freely distributed to satisfy people’s rational needs.

Socially owned, this system of production would free everyone from the compulsion to work for others. It would allow a flowering of the human personality that is stunted by capitalist exploitation and alienation, both of which are embodied in the capitalist market.

What blocks this transition is not a lack of technology, but private ownership of most productive wealth and the class rule of the corporate rich over society.

The transition from capitalism to socialism is marked by tension between planning and the market. Democratic planning to meet social needs first becomes increasingly dominant, then ultimately the sole determinant of economic activity.

Without revolutions in advanced industrialised societies, socialist revolutions in industrially underdeveloped countries such as Cuba — inheriting economies stunted by centuries of plunder — are confined to the beginnings of the socialist transition.

This implies a mixed economy with various forms of ownership and management. The only absolute requirement is that the “commanding heights” of the economy are owned by the socialist state — described by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto as “the proletariat organised as the ruling class”.

A caveat must be added in light of Soviet bureaucratic “socialism”: socialist state ownership has no automatic bias towards socialism. There must also be socialist democracy.

Nowhere did Marx, Engels or Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin argue that self-employment and small-scale private and cooperative enterprise are incompatible with progress towards socialism.

For Lenin, in his 1923 article “On Cooperation”, assuming socialist state ownership of large industry, the socialist-oriented society is “the system of civilised cooperativists”.

The notion that building socialism requires state ownership and management of almost the entire economy was born of Stalinist totalitarianism. Far from beginning to wither away as anticipated by Marx, the Soviet state from Stalin to Gorbachev assumed monstrous proportions.

Revolutionary offensive

In March 1968, Cuba’s socialist state expropriated nearly all urban small businesses in an episode known as the “Revolutionary Offensive”.

This was justified at the time by the need to combat hoarding and speculation by petty proprietors. The US economic blockade, the emigration of skilled workers and revolutionary inexperience had led to shortages of consumer goods.

It was also aimed at depriving US-sponsored counter-revolutionaries of points of support among urban small traders and business people.

Yet it was also seen as a step towards a classless society. As it turned out, it was a premature step and therefore counterproductive.

A great deal of planning goes on in big capitalist enterprises. The socialisation of the labour process embodied in large-scale industry is the basis for social ownership and democratic planning in the socialist-oriented society.

Yet even in developed capitalist societies there are economic sectors in which labour is not socialised on a scale that would allow for rational planning.

Rather than seeking to “outgrow” the market in step with the objective socialisation of labour arising from economic development, Cuba’s Revolutionary Offensive abolished the market at a stroke.

In recent years this has been the subject of much public debate in Cuba.

Debate

As one reader argued in a December 9, 2009 Granma letter: “Following their nationalisation by the Cuban state in 1968, small businesses and retail firms were converted, little by little, into a source of illicit profit, the robbery of the state, inefficiency and maltreatment ...

“Arguably socialism, by definition, necessitates social ownership of the fundamental means of production, and this is not at odds with personal, family or cooperative property in some means of production or services.

“The state must free itself from the yoke of these entities which, far from being social property, have become a means for the enrichment of a minority that exploits [the majority] to the detriment of the satisfaction of the needs of the client, that is, the people.”

In other words, these entities have undergone de-facto privatisation at the hands of corrupt administrators who pay no taxes on their illicit earnings.

The opposing view is that expanding the scope of cooperatives and other small-scale private enterprise is unnecessary and unwise. The solutions proposed lie on the subjective plane — replacing corrupt administrators with honest ones, for example.

Such solutions don’t address the material roots of the problem: the inability of the socialist state to centrally manage such entities with quality and efficiency, and average state wages that don’t cover all basic living expenses in Cuba’s post-Soviet Special Period.

Widespread petty theft from the socialist state is an inevitable consequence of the latter.

The Guidelines rule out privatisation and the concentration of productive property ownership in the hands of a new Cuban capitalist class.

At the same time, they give the green light to an expanded small-scale private and cooperative sector that is projected to embrace almost half the workforce by 2015.

How can these two objectives be reconciled?

Avoiding privatisation

The idea is to lease small productive and service entities, from bakeries to beauticians, to self-employed individuals, small private businesses and cooperatives. At the same time, social ownership of these premises would be retained, which belong to the municipal People’s Power governments.

These governments and the socialist state will regulate leased entities to ensure that they fulfill certain social objectives.

Responsibility for running these enterprises, however, passes from the state to their workers, who operate them in a competitive environment where prices are set by the market rather than central planning.

In agriculture, the government is promoting a large-scale “return to the land”, leasing farmland rent-free on a long-term basis — an arrangement known as usufruct — to individual farmers, cooperatives and state farms.

This puts farmers, rather than Havana-based administrators, in the driver’s seat while avoiding a concentration of land ownership.

Castro summed up Cuba’s alternative to privatisation in the Main Report to the Sixth PCC Congress: “The growth of the non-public sector of the economy, far from an alleged privatisation of social property as some theoreticians would have us believe, is to become an active element facilitating the construction of socialism in Cuba.

“It will allow the state to focus on raising the efficiency of the basic means of production, which are the property of the entire people, while relieving itself from those managerial activities that are not strategic for the country.”

[Marce Cameron runs the Cuba's Socialist Renewal blogsite. Read more of Green Left's Cuba coverage.]

By Scott Tucker
SolidarityEconomy.net via Truthdig.com

Feb. 28, 2012 - Stewart Alexander believes fair elections are worth a fair fight and he’s asking for your vote. The Occupy Wall Street movement encouraged a more honest discussion of class and capitalism in this country, but Alexander is not simply a critic of big banks and high finance. He is a democratic socialist, a military veteran opposed to militarism, an African-American community activist and the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party in 2012.

Alexander believes the candidate of “hope and change” is a defender of the status quo and of corporate rule. In his words:

“The phrase that came to mind immediately upon hearing President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech is ‘too little, too late.’ After spending the last few years coddling the banks and the richest 1 percent, Obama has the nerve to now call for ‘economic fairness.’ To him, this means tweaking payroll taxes and making a rhetorical call to reverse the Bush tax cuts for the rich. For working people in America, real fairness means the right to a job, a guarantee of health care for all and an end to the military-industrial complex. Obama won’t deliver this. That’s why I am running for president against him.”

The boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism require a semblance of representative government, even though Congress has become the front office of the corporate state. Even the most “progressive” reforms of the tax code now proposed by career politicians remain a form of institutionalized robbery of the working and middle classes.

“This is why,” Alexander says, “we propose creating a progressive tax structure where the rich pay far more than the average working person. In a democratic socialist society neither Obama nor Romney would be allowed to pay an effective tax rate of 26 percent and 17 percent, respectively. Corporate taxation, financial gains taxes and personal income taxes will be modernized—all loopholes will be closed and the rich will pay a steep tax on their income. This is what economic fairness looks like to a socialist.”

Is a radical revision of the tax code the whole program of democratic socialism? No, but it is certainly one reform consistent with social democracy in the realm of the economy. Alexander is not simply a “left-wing Keynesian” reformer. After all, economist Paul Krugman plays that part admirably in the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times. Krugman repeatedly insists that the Obama administration must ramp up a “stimulus package” that might actually stimulate, rather than stifle, the economy. But Krugman would need genuine social democrats in the White House to listen to his advice, whereas Obama has filled his inner circle with Wall Street aristocrats such as Timothy Geithner. Alexander’s reform of the tax code has a much deeper foundation in workplace democracy, and in working class solidarity across national borders.

Alexander has also been a strong critic of Obama’s “continuation of the Bush era security state policies.” He has the same moral fire and political clarity as Eugene Debs, a Socialist presidential candidate who won 6 percent of the national vote in 1912, and gained more than 900,000 votes in 1920 even when he was behind bars at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Debs called for working class unity against war and imperialism, and he paid a high price. We now live under a regime of escalating state surveillance and police repression, and Alexander’s class conscious policy of peacemaking will not earn him a Nobel Peace Prize:

“Obama’s approval of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) annihilates centuries of civil rights protections,” Alexander writes. “The president now has the right to indefinitely jail any citizen in America without having to work within the protections of habeas corpus. Added to the NDAA is the fact that, as I write this, Bradley Manning is rotting in a jail cell. Manning is Obama’s prisoner—a moral testament to the president’s commitment to continue the job of restricting civil liberties.”

Alexander was born in Newport News, Va., in 1951. He was one of eight children of Stewart Alexander, a brick mason and minister, and Ann E. McClenney, a nurse and housewife. In 1953, the family moved to the community of Watts in Los Angeles. Bricklaying and masonry jobs were scarcer in Los Angeles, and the family endured some hard times. At the age of 16, Alexander worked nights with his father cleaning airport terminals.

In the late ’60s, Alexander attended George Washington High School in Los Angeles County. Though integration of public schools had become public policy, the foundation of the educational system fractured along lines of race and class. By the time Alexander graduated from high school in 1970, the school had fewer than 50 white students. This was part of a wider social pattern that became known as “white flight.”

In December 1970, Alexander joined the Air Force and trained as a transportation and cargo specialist. Later he attended college full time at a Cal State University campus. One professor actively discouraged his studies, and when he quit college he began working 40-plus hours a week as a stocking clerk. During this time he married his first wife, Freda Alexander, and they had one son.

After working as a licensed general contractor and with Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank, Calif., he returned to Los Angeles and applied for a job as a warehouseman and forklift driver. Though his military experience made him well qualified for the job, the warehouse manager refused to interview him. Only the threat of a lawsuit (including filing a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) gained him the interview and the job.

The manager later confessed to Alexander that it was his policy to hire only blacks who were “twice as good” as whites on the job. Having fought to get that job, being “twice as good” also meant that Alexander (one of only two African-Americans among 200 employees) had to work more than twice as hard.

During this time Alexander began working with civic and community groups, including the NAACP. He later traveled to Tampa, Fla., working as a grocery clerk and as an organizer with the Florida Consumer Action Network (FCAN). In 1986, Ralph Nader was the guest speaker at the state convention of FCAN, and Alexander joined him in political discussions during the event. Alexander also worked briefly with an affiliate organization, the Long Island Citizens Campaign. Both groups were formed to protect the environment and the health and safety of consumers.

In 1986, Alexander moved back to Los Angeles and immediately got involved with local organizations. For more than three years he hosted a weekly radio talk show on KTYM-AM in Inglewood, discussing crime, gangs, drugs and redevelopment issues. Working with Delores Daniels and other community activists, Alexander brought public attention to local communities that were losing billions of tax increment dollars, while redevelopment tax revenues were funneled to well-connected capitalists and to big projects in downtown Los Angeles.

In 1988, Alexander moderated a public forum in Los Angeles that gave more than 200 community groups and activists the opportunity to meet with elected officials and to address redevelopment issues. At the same time, Alexander launched a campaign to become mayor of Los Angeles and knocked on more than 14,000 doors to get the minimum 1,000 signatures needed to qualify for the citywide ballot. Alexander’s campaign dealt with reducing crime, creating jobs for communities of color and the economic redevelopment of Los Angeles. The social and economic divisions Alexander had warned about for years finally erupted in riots and arson on April 29, 1992.

Alexander began looking and thinking beyond an electoral system dominated by two big corporate parties. He was briefly inspired by the campaign of Ross Perot, and in 1991 he attended a rally in Orange County, Calif., where Perot spoke to a crowd of about 5,000. But his political life then grew less active for several years. In the life of individuals and in the history of nations, there are times when still waters run deep. In 1998, Alexander met Kevin Akin of the Peace and Freedom Party, and Alexander’s class conscious politics became explicitly socialist. In 2005, Alexander ran as the Peace and Freedom Party’s candidate for lieutenant governor of California. Shortly after, Alexander was elected to the state executive committee of the Peace and Freedom Party.

Alexander has worked with the Socialist Party since 2007, and was its vice presidential nominee in 2008. At the National Convention for the Socialist Party USA in October 2011, Alexander was nominated for president of the United States. Alejandro “Alex” Mendoza, his vice presidential running mate, was born in Riverside, Calif., to parents who emigrated from Mexico. Mendoza served in the Marine Corps for four years and now lives in Texas where he owns a sustainable lawn care business and is pursuing a master’s degree in geosciences at the University of Texas.

Stewart Alexander is happily married to his second wife, Vicki Alexander. They have four children and six grandchildren. A resident of Murrieta, Calif., a community that leans quite far to the right, Alexander is openly committed to the democratic left. The program of the Socialist Party of the United States is both class conscious and civil libertarian, and Alexander will give American voters a chance to truly make our votes count for democracy and socialism.

I am a member of both the Socialist and Green parties of the United States, and I have met Alexander several times at meetings of the Los Angeles chapter of the Socialist Party. That is considerably more disclosure than most readers get from the regular columnists in major newspapers, or than most viewers get from the expensively groomed anchors of TV broadcast networks. The price of journalistic “access” to many career politicians is quite simply the professional prostitution of journalists. For this Truthdig article, I addressed five questions to Alexander.

Scott Tucker: As many jobs have been shipped offshore in the corporate chase for the lowest wages, the percentage of United States workers who belong to labor unions has fallen to roughly 12 percent. What are your views about rebuilding a base of manufacturing jobs in this country, beyond the sector of military industries?

Stewart Alexander: I am running this campaign in order to offer a democratic socialist alternative to American voters. What this means in real terms is that I believe that we can make real on the great possibilities offered by this society. For instance, I believe that we can rebuild the manufacturing sector in the United States and, even better, I believe that it is possible to do so in a democratic way that allows us to build a society based on solidarity and justice. Yet, since the 1970s, Democrats and Republicans have been firmly committed to the plans of their benefactors in the corporate world who have sought to destroy the manufacturing sector and ship production sites overseas.

This plan worked quite well for the 1 percent in society. Manufacturing overseas allowed them to avoid the environmental, civil rights and labor laws that have been built up by social movements in the United States. Capital restored its profitability by globalizing itself. However, the production sites and communities it left behind, especially in the Rust Belt of the U.S., have now been reduced to Third World level standards with deep unemployment, decaying infrastructure and rampant drug use.

One of the reasons that the Alexander/Mendoza 2012 campaign exists is to say that another way is possible. We believe in the creation of an independent worker owned and operated cooperative sector that can be used to rebuild the manufacturing capacity of the United States. Public funds should be used to initiate this kind of project, instead of being poured into the financial sector through bank bailouts or into the expansion of the prison-industrial complex.

A vibrant cooperative network means that Americans will no longer have to be held hostage by multinational corporations. Democratically run cooperatives are rooted in local communities—they depend on local people to be their customers, they are supplied by other local cooperatives and they are not beholden to CEOs or boards of directors. Such enterprises also have a built-in incentive to care for the environment and enforce workers’ rights since the workers are owners, and they likely live in the same community they work in.

We think that an independent democratically run cooperative sector is a viable alternative to both multinational capitalism and the military-industrial complex. This is at the heart of our campaign.

Tucker: The Socialist Party has a strong tradition of commitment to democracy, both within the labor movement and within the realm of electoral politics. But the legal and corporate obstacles have grown greater with the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court and anti-democratic “reforms” such as Prop. 14 in California. In every big election the public is told, make your vote count. Yet in reality, many of our votes are discounted. How do we make our votes count at the state and federal levels especially? What reforms are necessary to challenge corporate politics and make electoral politics more democratic?

Alexander: As far as electoral reforms that are necessary to create a democracy in this country, we can divide them into two—first, those that need to be enacted immediately, and second, the longer term restructuring we would like to see. Obviously, both Citizens United and Prop. 14 need to be repealed. Consider Citizens United a kind of high point of neoliberalism—corporations as people capable of openly operating in the electoral finance arena without restraint. If the existence of the Occupy movement is any indication, neoliberalism’s life span might be in the process of being dramatically shortened by grass roots resistance. And this is the best way to think about overturning such undemocratic decisions—not primarily through a legal strategy, but through a democratic revolution from below.

Long term, we might learn some lessons from Latin America. In places like Venezuela and Bolivia, left-wing electoral parties were able to break through two party deadlocked systems. They did so by rooting themselves inside the struggles of poor and working class people. This is one lesson for the American left. However, what they have as yet failed to do is to transform the electoral system from one in which they are one of two parties into a pluralist political system where multiple views are represented.

This is why, in the longer term, we want to fight for electoral reforms such as public financing of elections, proportional representation and a uniform open ballot access law.  Even more importantly, we should, wherever possible, seek to encourage direct democracy through more radically democratic reforms such as participatory budgeting which will allow people to have a real say in how public money is spent. The current electoral system—from local to the federal levels—is rigged to privilege moneyed interests. The Democrats and Republicans monopolize every aspect of it from the process of getting on the ballot to the debates. It is going to take more than an electoral campaign to make such changes happen. It might take a revolution.

Tucker: In a New Yorker article titled “The Caging of America,” Adam Gopnik wrote: “More than half of all black men without a high school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal justice system—in prison, on probation or on parole—than were in slavery then. Overall, there are now more people in ‘correctional supervision’ in America—more than 6 million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.” What are your thoughts and practical proposals?

Alexander: I think we should keep in mind that in the 1970s, the prison population in the United States had declined so rapidly that there were serious discussions about placing a moratorium on building prisons and only slightly more utopian proposals about ending incarceration entirely. Prison populations had declined about 1 percent a year since World War II and reached a low of 380,000 inmates in 1973. This, of course, was not to be, as politicians and policymakers took what academics call “the punitive turn” leading to mass incarceration strategies that disproportionately targeted people of color.

This too did not happen in isolation from other factors. The rise of neoliberal economics meant the end of the manufacturing sector, the destruction of social safety nets and the privatization of the education system. The prison-industrial complex is then used to warehouse and discipline those who have been left behind by an economic system that only considers the needs and interests of the 1 percent. It has been poor African-Americans who have suffered the brunt of this turn.

I believe that we need to enact policies emphasizing decriminalization while also creating spaces for the self-empowerment of poor and working class people. We must immediately end the destructive drug war by creating a legal justice system based on prevention, mediation, restitution and rehabilitation. That’s why, as president, I would support heavy investment in programs of restorative justice and other community based alternatives to incarceration. Where neoliberal politicians use force through criminalization to deal with social problems, a socialist would see the welfare state, rehabilitative services and economic empowerment as alternatives.

Tucker: Ever since the First World War, the Socialist Party has taken the position that a class conscious movement of workers must by necessity also be a movement working against militarism in culture and in the economy. We have barely begun accounting for the human, environmental and economic devastation of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The semi-secret drone war in Pakistan is not consistently reported by major news networks. We do not know the true cost of military bases scattered round the globe, as this has also become something of a state secret. And now we are on the verge of escalating hostilities with the regime in Iran. What are your immediate demands to prevent war? What are your long-range proposals for transforming the war economy into a commonwealth dedicated to peace?

Alexander: I want to be very clear about what my campaign’s position is on war and the military-industrial complex. I’ll start by saying that it is very easy to hold an anti-war position. Ron Paul has one. Plenty of Democrats and Republicans have them. But what makes a democratic socialist position so distinct, and, I would add, so important, is that we are not only anti-war but we are also anti-militarist. In other words, we seek to put a permanent end to the role of the U.S. military-industrial complex in our country and in our world.

You are correct to say that such a position is deeply rooted in the history of American Socialism. Comrades such as Eugene Debs went to jail in the early 20th century because they opposed World War I and the role of militarism in U.S. society. And, as John Nichols documented in a recent book, it was Socialist Party of America comrades who saved the First Amendment when militarists sought to restrict the right to free speech. Socialists have been present in every anti-war movement since—from the burning of draft cards in the Vietnam War to opposing the invasion of Iraq.

These same reasons hold true today. Military spending is a monumental waste of resources. Nearly 50 percent of the annual federal budget is consumed by paying for current and past wars. These funds could be better spent on dealing with serious social problems such as inadequate housing, the lack of health care and the dire need to rebuild our infrastructure.

Deeper than that, the death and destruction that the U.S. military has caused throughout the world—most recently in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan—has destroyed millions of potential bonds of global solidarity. We want to repair these bonds with socialist values of solidarity, compassion and justice.

Policy wise, we think this means at least three things immediately. First, we support the immediate removal of all U.S. troops from foreign countries and the ending of covert actions such as drone bombings. We also call for a 50 percent reduction in military spending and a redirection of those resources into social needs programs. Finally, we believe that we can develop a new global good will by closing all foreign military bases and the responsible elimination of all nuclear weapons.

I want to emphasize firmly that being anti-militarist is about more than just opposing the latest war. It is about seeing the American military for what it is—a force for global destruction and a serious threat to civil rights in the U.S.

Tucker: How did you find your way into the socialist movement? I’m not asking if you had a single big epiphany, but I am always interested in the background story of how people break away from “our two party system” and commit themselves to class conscious and independent politics. What experiences shaped your political views, and which social movements were decisive in your life?

Alexander: There really is no one single way to get involved in radical politics.  For every active socialist I meet while campaigning, I hear a different story. Mine begins, funny enough, in the military. I saw the military-industrial complex from the inside and so did my running mate, Alex Mendoza, who was a Marine. My time in the Air Force led me to believe that the war in Vietnam was wrong—wrong for our country, morally wrong and politically wrong. This opened the door for me to ask some bigger-picture questions about how society works.

Perhaps, though, it started earlier. When I was a very young child I went with my father to hear Malcolm X speak when he visited a mosque in Watts. I cannot tell you that I remember anything that Malcolm said in particular, but I do vividly remember the presence that he commanded. He was a respected leader in that community, and I was impressed by how seriously he took that role. I hope to bring an equally serious approach to my presidential campaign since the problems we face as a society are just as serious.

As I grew older, I realized that there was political strength in numbers and I got involved first with the Peace and Freedom Party and later the Socialist Party USA. I liked the fact that both organizations place the interests of poor and working class people at the center of their political projects. Peace and Freedom provided me with the opportunity to run for statewide office, and I was quite happy to receive the nomination of the SP-USA convention to run a national campaign. I think that it is time to present a positive socialist alternative to the American people. I hope to play my role in doing so and ask you to vote Socialist in 2012!

Photo: Stewart Alexander, Socialist Party presidential candidate in 2012. A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman. Copyright © 2012 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.