i have a very strange feelings about following these guys talking on the screen in the me just talk about that so we can put this in perspective i worked as as sarah mentioned i was a legislative director in the u nelson the founder of earth day when i was and i was also a legislative director and directed staff in the house and i have a very checkered career you know this is bad worked at the highest levels of the state department doing policy planning for the united united nations policy that was in the past so i come out of straight politics although it's a most constant kid so i come out of scots and politics which is pretty progressive form of liberalism and i've left that world some time ago honor it i rather have obama in office and i'd rather have a good liberal program going i prefer that i think of big important for us but what i've listened to these guys in particular romney who you know give me a break the cycle of kid in school bang bang bang bang bang but also a bomb of that trap that we can get lost in and it's a hard one to grasp and i think that they are working in such a constrained space what they are allowed to talk about what they may care about and what we are allowed to he is itself so limited that it tells you that there is a profound deeper problem a systemic problem that is constrained the whole discussion both of what is possible and where we are in history and what we might do so it just corners us and that was my first reaction so so for instance this is the wealthiest economy in the history of the world it currently produces currently with massive unemployment and massive recession one hundred ninety two thousand dollars for every family of four there is no economic problem let me say that again we do not have an economic problem we have a political problem managing the wealthiest system in the history of the world that those numbers will go up and up and if we can handle the resource questions the technology will continue to generate about a seven fold interest increase over the century as it did in the last century so the most bountiful possibility even in a time of resource scarcity is lost we can't even think about it and it becomes utopian just to say what economists know the numbers are so put it another way what can't be said and the first part of this talk of briefly to say why i why we are in a very unusual systemic crisis and why if we understand that it might allow us to move in a different direction the first part i want to get that briefly on the state and then talk about what i think is really interesting the positive things that are exploding per force of in the sesame out of the pain of the crisis building forward in a way that i think is really interesting but in terms of the crisis itself how do you tell a systemic crisis it's not only about the way the chatter is in the political sphere if you see wages going steadily down and the top income for thirty years thirty eight long trends tell you there's deeper mechanisms at work so for instance over thirty years the top one percent has increased its share by ten percent meaning the bottom ninety nine percent has lost that but it's a steady trend over time something's driving it power relationships are driving it the top the number that i find most unusual and gives you a sense of what is systemic about it is the top four hundred people individuals four hundred people could get them in this space if you squeeze just a little bit have more wealth now than the bottom hundred and eighty million americans taken together that's a medieval number and i don't mean that rhetorically i mean medieval structure society was structured with the ownership of wealth in that case land at that level of concentration and giving it power relationships of that kind if you look at a different question people looked at civil liberties if you want to know what liberties about you actually look to see who gets deprived of their liberty and if you look at the long trends which tell you about underlying mechanisms the united states started about fifty thirty years ago fifty people per hundred thousand in jail it's now up to seven hundred forty three over time going up a lot of black and brown people there we have eight times as many people in prison or jail per capita than any other advanced country including russia the loss of liberty is a trend we see it in terms of the legal and civil liberties right you can go into the legal matters of it but just look at the bottom indicators climate change over the last thirty years the increases in the various forms of gas that are increasingly increasing global warming have gone up steadily in the last two years alone three percent and you all know the numbers there is no trend change it's all going in the wrong direction so something is generating the larger trends that you see and they are not being ameliorated there is a problem of the power level of power so that presents kind of they can't manage the economy in and we just give you one last one just as a stagnation question people often going to economists and don't quite know all these numbers deficit so forth i think the best person who ever explained would you remember she said you know during the depression there wasn't much money around just wasn't much money around and then they had a big war and all of a sudden is lots of money around and the point of it was that it is not beyond the capacities of policy to run of an efficient economy it is beyond the capacities of the politics in the political structure which makes it a systemic problem you could run you could put high levels at paul krugman says every day you could invest heavily and you could do it in a green way and you could put everyone back to work and you could manage it that's not a difficult problem the problem is the politics of doing it that nobody can manage in the system so let me just say one more word about that and and why i think we can begin to get a handle on why it is a particular odd kinds of kind of systemic crisis that it's difficult for people to get their heads around in most political systems the way in which the power of the corporation and the leitz has been balanced throughout the western world throughout the western world and it's studied to death by political economists is that it is not only politics and movement building and organizing for elections that allows some balance to the system against the four hundred and the corporations they own it is in fact an institution and that institution has been the labor movement throughout the western world strong labor movements have allowed the election even of environmentalist nelson you needed the labor institution and that's why governor walker in wisconsin and every republican governor's going after labor because if they cut that out that institution they pulled the muscle out from under any kind of progressive politics that they know what they know what the game is and they know just what the political economists know and what's happened and why the odd the t of the systemic crisis needs to be looked at in a new way i think is that in fact labor has gone down from thirty five point four percent of the labor force in unions in one nine hundred fifty three at the peak it's not eleven percent and declining less than seven percent in the private sector and we'll go further down if you want to ask one simple question about why the system has no capacity to manage and why the underlying trends are increasing in the direction they're increasing it's that the old balancing mechanisms that worked sort of in this in the third quarter of the twentieth century and then began to decay over the next thirty years it is the decline of labor and the decline of that institution which has pulled the whole system in a different direction this is not just corporate capitalism throughout the western world it has been corporate capitalism balanced sort of by parties politically resting on the institution of labor and that is dying that is the name of the american systemic crisis as it deepens for all of the problems and advantages of labor that's what's going out the window and that's where the trends are a lot of reasons why labor has gone down the most and they've been attacked they've been race issues at the bottom of a lot of this we could get into that there's the chinese there's the the trade problems that cetera et cetera but the thing the notice is that the system has lost its old way of managing a liberal political economy and we are facing the trend result of that a systemic crisis is one that doesn't get solved by politics as usual to put it another way is there any institutional way to alter the trends other than build a movement you need a movement absolutely but we also know historically then unless we build new institutions with power over time they win and it could get very ugly now what makes it a very odd and strange crisis and then we'll go on to what's interesting about happening but the context is critical and i think as a historian so i have to burden you with this it is my marxist friends see all this and they say there will be a crisis and a collapse and maybe a revolution and i honor some of the really good marxist thought but what's interesting about this particular crisis is in one nine hundred twenty nine the economy was supported by a government that was eleven percent of the g d p not very big and the crisis was a collapse there was no floor the floor  thirty four percent we may get decay and stalemate and stagnation but we're not likely to get that collapse that's going to cause the bigot's motion in my opinion there's also the problem that the big explosion might go to the right rather than the left but the most important point is we may get the stagnation that you're seeing and stalemates politically and i'm going to k but that's a very different context it's a very unusual context so a minute just to think about it and i'm burdened people with this it isn't a period of reform where the trends are moved forward in the old way but it's not a period where there's a crisis collapse like the depression or marxist theory is very unusual it decaying in stalemated and stagnating in what we experience day to day unemployment underemployment poverty global warming environmental issues all over the place odd painful but strange crisis and i want to stress to you that it's important i think to grasp the nature of how odd it is because it has certain properties one of which is the pain levels are forcing people to do new things because they have to do in a crisis that isn't what happens you get explosions but what we're seeing in this is the part that's very interesting to me what we're seeing is an explosion of activity both political some social but above all economic in a way that i think could matter let me say a bit about that all the systems all systems run on the basis one way or another of property and in this one the property concentrations are as i've said extreme and getting worse the medieval ones as i said land was at the core of it in one nine hundred centuries capitalism small business ownership of capital was the dominant form of a very strange kind of competitive capitalism corporate capitalism has comes in different flavors corporate domination the end of the one nine hundred centuries pretty much just corporate power the balancing game that the mid mid century in all the advanced countries and now decaying social democracy or liberalism was called that was another form of corporate capitalism still another one was fascism corporate capitalism with oppression but did the cave we're seeing but look at the core of these systems all is the question of property who owns the wealth and simply as one element of the way to think about what might be the possibilities of the next system and what might be the possibilities of building institutional power and pushing back over time the dominant power of the system it would have to revolve i think and i we could have a long discussion around some way to democratize the ownership of wealth if it's one percent or four hundred people owning as much as the bottom hundred and eighty million or one percent now owning more investment capital this wins another one percent owns now more investment capital than the bottom ninety five percent of the society either there is a way to democratize the ownership of wealth or it stays as it is and either there's a way to do it in a democratic decentralized way or you end up with state isn't of the so the soviet union style the conservatives are right about that the state owning the capital under state socialism as it was practiced did concentrate power so there's a problem stagnation stalemate decay if you want another system in the press you on this let me press you on this we haven't done this you and i what is it that you want you don't like the system what do you want it's no good to say change the system and then say well i we need to think it through and one element and i'm it's a real challenge to all of us one element of it in my view is how do we begin decentralizing the ownership of wealth both as a principle and democratizing it but also as a way to begin the step by step to building new power bases and new cultural bases in the system what i just said in the sixty's which would have been called a heavy rap so let me repeat it because i take it very seriously i'll bet my life on it as a matter of fact i'm going to ask you to if there is a way forward and if we know this is kind of simple logic if we live in a systemic crisis which means that you need to develop an alternative systemic response then either we have a view of what that looks like more than rhetoric and an idea of a path or we aren't talking about anything real so what does it look like and how do we begin to think about it i don't think anybody's got the real answer to this i don't expect that but i think directions are beginning to emerge largely because of the odd structure of the crisis and it's pain levels that is forcing people to innovate so one of the things we do in the democracy collaborative as we cover it we cover this field pretty closely the press doesn't cover it because it doesn't have the money to in time or interest to cover what's going the grassroots level in terms of democratizing ownership but we try to grasp it so here's a here's a website for your community dash wealth but the dash and there's another one without it's a different one it's good when it's not the subject and we're what we look at is what's going on the grassroots level and around the country that is beginning to suggest a direction for changing the ownership of wealth in a democratic form so when you begin to look some odd things that come up first there are one hundred and thirty million americans now involved in co ops and co op credit unions one hundred thirty million people who have some involvement in a cooperative institution one person one vote many of those are credit unions i was in burlington vermont a couple months ago and the occupy movement was looking at the credit union which is many credit unions let's be honest a very boring standard they are doing much interest they could one person one vote the went on why don't they fund interesting work or own co ops or other developed really interesting projects going to be funded with some of the capitals in this credit unions so a number of these folks became members and voted in some new board members you could do that by the way so interesting thing going on but one hundred thirty million people already involved in one person one vote because there are ten million people eleven million actually involved and ten thousand worker own companies around the country some good some bad some some that could be better but they're on the ground and they exist and nobody knows about it they're there are four or five thousand neighborhood owned corporations around the country some good some bad some very interesting indeed we could talk about some large scale ones or a hundred with the last number i saw was thirteen hundred people working in new communities inc in new jersey making money from the community based structured and using the money to hire other people f services health care etc in a mini ownership democratized ownership structure that's another one there are social enterprises popping up everywhere which profits are being turned into social good there are more and more of these kinds of elements all are share the idea that somehow to change and democratize the ownership and use of wealth in a radically decentralized way now what's interesting to me is first just to notice this this isn't one phenomena that's happening and second to watch the path of development and this is the thing i would suggest you do probably there's a lot of it going on here although i know there's something we're going on with slice and i'm just beginning to hear about some of the other things going on in this community but every place we've gone there is a phenomena that isn't quite spoken of as a phenomenon it's just good projects but if you look at it slightly back what you see is a trend line of development and sophistication and increasing sophistication and a path that is beginning to build towards innovation and power let me give you some personal example of that give you this idea of how i think about it as a historian and how i propose you think about it with me because my own view that we're building into the prehistory of the next great american revolution and what we are doing just as in the two decades before the new deal we are developing experimentally in my view the potential for the great transformation that could come if we're serious but let me tell you what i see in states like ohio because it gives you a kind of a model or a template of this i was involved with the steel workers in one nine hundred seventy seven in youngstown ohio their first big steel closing in the united states youngstown sheet and tube closed five thousand people were thrown out in the street that was huge dues in one nine hundred seventy seven because it hadn't been happening now it happens every day but in those days it was a big deal and the workers and and the churches and ecumenical coalition in that town they knew the town was going to go down and youngstown has gone down since so they said it why can't the steelworkers why can't we run this why can't we have a worker own company five thousand guys why can't we do it there was mostly guys that were very few women in those days and so they organized and they got the carter administration to back them up with enough money to come up with a very very sophisticated plan and a promise of one hundred million dollars in loan guarantees did very good political work around an idea i just learned but by the way that when obama was organizing as a young organizer in chicago when he was working out of the steel mill inspired by the youngstown case someone's doing a history of his early days but the youngstown story was a big story in those days and they put on the map this real plan they got even the conservative governor forced into supporting it and then of course after the election in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight the money disappeared and the carter administration backed off and did the usual political thing and they didn't get their money however and this is what's what's interesting about it for those of you who want to play this game they understood that they were might lose this game you want to play for big stakes you don't always win and so they did a huge political education project along with what they were doing and now in the state of ohio you probably have more work or own companies than any other state per capita all over the place because they understood the task was to build for the long haul as well as what they were doing so second thing the international steelworkers union in one thousand nine hundred seventy seven saw these young activist upstart union guys in youngstown and they didn't want them getting their jobs back they played a rough game they said these guys are going to win that game they're going to challenge us at the international level we're going to have trouble what do we need those guys for they fought the international union fought the local guys and said so they lose their jobs and people are going out in the garage and killing themselves and their families at that point and the internationals of us and we're not going to do this and though no one can prove it but we think that they and the steel companies went together to the carter administration to kill the deal after the election but any case they were publicly opposed to it played a rough game now thirty years later you think as a historian or as an activist or maybe even a revolutionary now the steelworkers have come around in the steel workers are now working hard to set up worker own companies that's happening in many unions by the way that's a big tilt because they realize that they are either there's a new direction that builds institutional power and not just politics that democratize is the ownership of wealth really work or own companies in that case or the game's over so the steel workers over time have flipped and in the state of ohio there's always work or own companies that came out of this interesting fight more interesting still there's innovation building on it and this is how i see it in terms of developmental thought and an urge you to think about it this way in the city of cleveland and i don't know if any been been to cleveland letter or detroit or st louis or baltimore they look like bombed out cities you know detroit where my wife is from a million people gone and they all look at the trite and say oh my god it's terrible they also don't ask where did the people go were  he cares it's of detroit's but any case cleveland lost three hundred thousand people from one hundred thousand to almost four hundred thousand people in one of the poorest neighborhoods of cleveland this  i mean by four neighborhood average family incomes eight hundred thousand dollars forty percent unemployment high level of crime extreme poverty in that area there is a development in c of very sophisticated worker own firms not small scale building over time and building a whole complex that is extremely innovative building on the experience of development going on over the last thirty years and adding to it so what i mean by that so for instance they are just about to open the largest largest greenhouse urban greenhouse partly solar in the united states is in a tokens three million heads of lettuce a year will be a top put cleveland is an area that it in ohio imports almost all of its lettuce for instance from the west coast on enormous carbon costs an enormous waste and a very great cost and they are now setting up worker owned advanced company another one in the solar installation company worker owned is about to install over the next two years double the capacity of solar solar capacity in the entire state of ohio they will put in twice as much in the next three years work on company and the grid another one of the greenest laundry in the entire midwest there's about a third of the energy in a third of the water that's an astral scale laundry can help conserve hospitals and so forth is on the ground in a in a platinum lead building and it is also work or own it's part of this complex moreover they've taken the idea of worker ownership to a very different level this is democratizing wealth were grown companies i'm an advocate of worker own companies and co ops but i don't get too romantic about them the plywood companies that sarah was talking about have been well studied worker own companies tend to sometimes become very insular and just protect the workers in that company without interest in the community often without environmental interest sometimes and in the case of the plywoods the start if you look at the profile the politics is republican so work around companies on their own may be positive they may be negative but one has to be thoughtful about it but what's interesting about the cleveland model is that they are linked together with a community vision so it's a nonprofit corporation that owns part of these companies they can't get up and leave that ten percent of their profits go back to a revolving fund to set up new companies they're going to do about two a year the goal is five thousand over the next fifteen years and they're building a community building structure integrating worker ownership into a different model that's really interesting that is very interesting of those are you interested in design problems you want to design a system and you think community and community important there's a real interesting model there and again for those of you want to talk about what what's the system look like tell me about it well here's another feature of this cleveland development you probably didn't hear about the press doesn't cover the stuff in that neighborhood with that level of poverty there are big hospitals and universities cleveland clinic was mentioned tonight cleveland clinic is right there in the middle isn't it poor neighborhood university hospitals there case western reserve is right there right now middle they have a lot of public money medicare medicaid education funds they purchase in that particular area three billion dollars with a b and m of goods and services a year leaving aside their salaries and leaving aside their construction budget just what they buy none of it from that area until now so all of a sudden the light bulbs go on why don't we use this enormous publicly funded purchasing power to help stabilize and buy from these co op and build out the whole system and develop it and that is in fact what's now happening in this area and in atlanta and in pittsburgh and in washington d c and in amarillo texas of all places very conservative picking up on this model and there are discussions following it in milwaukee and chicago and several other cities looking at this model now it's six the greenest model and it democratizes wealth and very interesting to me as a political economist in that we urge this on you some of you might think about models one thing but if you don't know where you what is it you want if you don't know why should we listen to you want to change the system that model is very interesting because it it is a partial planning system purchasing power stabilizing work or own companies in a community building design still using part of the market to keep them in check that's not state socialism that's not corporate capitalism it is a mini version of a systemic design of a very sophisticated order we could go into that if we had time but think about it and think about this the politics of it working even the small business men like you get below the level of ideology washington you get back to racine wisconsin where i'm from you talk to the kids i went to high school with very conservative very smart and they get it it helps the community it changes ownership why not it's very american as well but it is also an extremely interesting design if you project it up so for instance we've been writing about this and doing research on it in our next system which will have a lot of mass transit and high speed rail all publicly paid for and all publicly paid for and we have no capacity whatsoever to build it now the united states we import what we do we do some assembly structures just upscaling what's going on in cleveland using that planning principle in those markets so it's just a sketch of how you begin to think of the political and political economy of the next system if you don't like capitalism you don't like socialism they want to move in a new direction etc it's a community building structure based on changing the ownership of wealth but i do grass that's a long vision what's interesting to me is the process that you see and i've sketched all too briefly in ohio is a process that i believe you're going to see happening or could happen this is where we come in or could happen when we actually rise to the knowledge that we actually could make a difference moving to the level of systemic change it can be done anyplace and that's only one model but the conditions in ohio are being replicated in many parts of the country and on my view come back to the beginning of this discussion in a context of ongoing stalemate stagnation and decay rather than collapse which could go to the right just as easily as the left and rather than reform which was the old thing we liberals were able to do for a little while when we saw the labor movement but in this odd strange place where the pain levels increase the decay increases people get that either they invent and create or it gets worse and then there's some interesting models some of them i mean there's a whole nother side of this which wonderful things going on in smaller co ops and green in the food movement in the cultural aspects of this all this ties in building community in many other forms but some of the structural ingredients of  actually a political economic system that could in fact get us the kind of ideas we want in place are also beginning to suggest themselves out of real experience and out of the pain levels of this context  i'm not naive five run political real campaigns i've been in the middle of washington i'm hipp i get it so i'm also cynical i do not take ideas about you can change the system seriously and utopian ideas without something some bit of thought so a suggestion to you most of us have a built in notion that we really can't i'm talking a person in your chair who us change the system and i don't mean rhetorically i mean as a real viable doable thing like other people have done in many other countries that we might actually do something like that and alter the power relationships in the most powerful corporate capital system in the history of the world so my suggestion to you is yes that's the question on the table and it is not beyond human capacities to think about it in a rational way so my suggestion to you is this possibility one of the other things that's happening in the development of these projects i've been emphasizing the ones that democratize ownership that are popping up out of the pain levels but one of the there are many other forms and many of them much more it very interesting the kind of talked about earlier in terms of food movement and other environmental parts of this but one of the things that's also happening and it's at the level of what people call the sociology of knowledge or the germans call delton show world views out of this is also coming a process which is grinding up the traditional worldview people don't believe anymore in the old stuff they don't quite believe if you like either one of these guys and i'm for obama that much is going to change it's very big deal when people don't believe the old stuff it's a very big deal when it doesn't than quite register anymore that is that to put it in different language what i think you're seeing is a legitimation crisis in this for me formative years legitimation crisis is one in which the guiding ideals of the system liberty equality democracy ecological sustainability when those ideals are contradicted by the reality of the trends then the  existing system becomes eroded because the real world does not fulfill the ideas that give a genesee to the system and then people say something's wrong i believe we're entering a period where people even the tea party liberty there's some in that there's a lot of nonsense going on but there's also this concern about liberty that some of it's real a system that begins to enter that phase historically is really at a place where people can begin either to make a disk difference or you know it could go a different direction so there is that's the negative but the positive is what's happening on the ground and particularly on young people where a whole different vision of how to live and how to build society and how to build relationships and culture in the environment of projects that's also developing not only in what i called project ism lots of projects developing an idea system is developing the preliminaries of a vision of what we might want that is heavily oriented to community to the ecological sustainability to a different way of treating each other and to some ideas about democracy and democratization as well so it is only the stuff on the ground that i see bubbling up in the press doesn't cover it and i see advancing to more and more levels of sophistication in the unions coming in and picking up and that process that isn't being covered and which would take decades to develop its power it is the double level declining vision of ideas at the level of sociology of knowledge or legitimation crisis and also a recurring build up of where we're going to take this a majority of people between the age of eighteen and thirty when asked do you prefer capitalism or good for perverse socialism in most recent surveys a majority say socialism odd i don't think they know what they mean by that term i don't think it tells you much it tells you something that people don't believe the old stuff may think those are the people going to build and you know people like us are getting on people in that age are going to build the next society and people are open i think to thinking big thoughts over time so my suggestion to use this there are several if the processes i'm talking about and we could add them and give you some additions to it because it in all this brief there are many many states now are trying there are twenty states that have introduced legislation to try to set up state banks like the state bank of north dakota another twenty states have set up legislation have are considering legislation to do single payer likes going to happen in vermont and it was twice vetoed passed the senate house and senate in california was vetoed twice by schwartz and hear what what's happening at that level of institutions banks and health and health care i believe is going to intensify health care particularly because the cost pressures  so severe that the only way you can get added the single payer and probably be done state by state and some of the big corporations will be for it too because it changes their cost structure and international competition so i think if you look at a thirty year swing which is going to play this game the chips are decades of your life you wonder system change that you have that you have to be willing through a decade anyway i think the next few decades you're going to see that whole healthcare system forced into single payer because the pressures are so great you're talking twenty percent of the economy not small change hopefully we can revise it to make it ten percent when you get the efficiencies out of it but that's the number and some of those big banks are beginning to move at that level and in many cities are setting up city type banks or using city deposits to support credit unions that their local development so that's another trend going on in the financial sector there's another big trend going on every financial expert i know left right and center predicts with certainty they shouldn't be quite that certain but that they are very certain that there will be major national financial and international financial crises repeat recurrent and at some point you're going to see the big guys in new york take it on the current austrians break them up and probably that will happen at some point when the next big crisis hits or maybe the one after that and then they'll regroup and the you know the big fish will eat the little fish and at some point the end of that line is nationali there because there is no option that particular line of development by the way is a conservative argument put forward by the chicago school of economics because they understood that they understood better than most liberals that regulatory strategies were regularly captured by big corporations and they concluded explicitly that in many cases better to nationalize them if you couldn't break them up and you couldn't regulate them why because they were interested in free enterprise small business capitalism and big guys are screwing that up too so believe it or not  the new york times or take a piece on that which they write that but i believe without saying that with i believe that the pattern in the financial sector is going to be that pattern of being massive challenge crisis and at some point some parts of that's going to be made public because there is no option  i'm not interested in rhetoric or kind of we ought to do things i'm interested in whether it's situational logic that is emerging permits different possibilities in that's another health care in banking or another one so if you want to just open up the stage again if you're looking down the thirty year perspective and some of the big stuff than any of you noticed we happen to nationalize two of the biggest auto companies in the history of the united states in crisis happened we gave them back if they start making money but do not forget that it has happened and will probably happen again with some bigger industry now i'm blue skying for you but what i'm suggesting is that if it is the case and i think it is that we are entering an extremely strange systemic crisis in which the old model of balancing the corporation sort of with a labor union base politics and social democracy or liberalism is cane but it doesn't collapse and it's forcing people and let me put it another way that kind of a crisis has one very positive feature it allows people to learn to develop a crisis you know my friend chomsky's on to this one big time a crisis often produces the kind of reaction it turns out to be just as bad as what you had or maybe but a period in which learning of actually how to democratize things really it's not easy you have to learn that's a positive feature of an odd crisis of the kind i think is emerging very positive because people learn how to do things really in their guts and in the reality it's deep and you project those principles and that culture forward maybe so not enough k k k to rome decayed that is one option may happen it is possible that out of the decay and the inevitable violence it will engender there will be a right wing smash in some form of corporate state friendly fascism was a term that used to be used by one sociologist that's possible it is possible look at latin america and those of you who think by the way that even corporate state fascism is the end of the line look at all those dictators that are gone it is is possible that if people like us actually can say you know really begin to get serious about this stuff we may be able to in practice and in ideas and in culture and in institution building lay down the foundations irrefutable and irreversible possible so that this becomes the genuine prehistory of a transformation that's also one of the logical possibilities so that's obviously the one to bet on but that not too lightly please i did mean that about the existential issue my experience in myself and in my friends and in most of the people i know is that we don't quite really want to take ourselves at that seriously i am just doing my project here it's a nice project really good friends what do you say so my suggestion to you is yes it is possible that we are right is that we are living in a systemic crisis it is a very unusual one it is also generating january gen u generating a whole series of interesting possibilities that begin to suggest power relationships and cultural relationships and practices that could be generalized and that the context we are entering may very well be such that it may be possible for determined people who take themselves seriously to lay down south consciously the foundations of next transformation i could leave it at that but i do want to remind you it's purpose a good place to stop and we can get into questions that ate with those guys we're talking about they're working and i feels somewhat sorry for them they're living in i mean i've been watching they're living in this little frame of a decaying system boxed in by the changing power relationships and not able to actually open up some of the things probably barack obama would love to think about maybe not quite as far as i've been suggesting to you but the frame is tiny and the loss of real energy that explodes when people actually get the possibility that they might have that's also evident in the can of chitter chatter the tone of it all is lost because what comes along i think and this is the last thing i'll say about this don't trust me ever say that again because i usually go on what's interesting about the possibility  and i say this very coldly as a historian some of you from the sixty's will remember this what's really interesting about the possibility when a viable possibility begins to be taken really seriously is it unleashes extraordinary energy movement energy that is something that is powerful when you it's palpable when you actually see it happen or part of it and the  movement was part of that the environmental movement for a while the civil rights movement the anti war movement of the sixty's explosive and you see it in some countries where they begin to see a flame is touched and then you see human energy added to this whole equation of a very different order but it takes a lot of building up to get there so just on the final note on that and this is the last thing i will say about that you know chairman mao used to say power comes from the barrel of a gun and in the one nine hundred sixty s the american women's movement said something very different they said none and power comes from six women getting together over coffee or something reading something talking to each other digesting the ideas figuring out a project and then supporting each other to do it i think they were they were right and i think that is the message for the building of the next american system so thank you very much a world war two the debt was far greater as a percentage of the economy just to notice in all these countries the debt you know there's one thing in the last five it was the last vice president dick cheney dick cheney once said deficits don't matter i'm a left keynesian they don't matter if you can run and you can this is i mean get you complicated right now but if you can run a high growth system or even of not grow the growth in the production but it could be green growth so the actual output is different in terms of what you get so long as you keep that financing that's a number created by the federal reserve board money is money is created as you know by the waving of a war and in a computer the there's a wonderful read the work of alan brown or the what's called an l and brown is very good on this who writes about in popular but there's a whole school called to do a very new bought history theory and it comes out of left keynesian thought but look what's happening in the banks banking system in europe right now the central bank is creating money where do you think it comes from there's no little pot of money it's magically created what it is a promise to pay and those promises to pay can stay there is a deficit for to the cows come home if that's the way you want to run your economy i  had time to go into it but the conservative tallent politics of this is so wrong headed and they've got the public so banged up on this that i recommend helen brusqueness of a starting point in this you know talking about the trends in political economy that you were talking about in the extreme concentration of wealth at the top and the top one percent and now thanks to things like citizens united that even more greatly enables the concentration of political power at the top with that great wealth when you talk about these experiments in new systems in democratizing wealth presumably that it's not very appealing to those people who have concentrated a lot of power at the top what kind of pushback have we seen against that those democratizing experience  experiments and as they continue to grow and be become larger segments of the economy what kind of pushback do you expect well it's some you said two or three other things about that we haven't seen a great deal of pushback i expect if we if there's significant power there will be although the person mentioned banking many of the banks nervous and state of maryland the banks don't want to see it in many states they're fighting back against state banking but they may or may not win we'll see how that goes some states will win the language here i think is interesting and i'm been writing about this what you're getting is what i call checkerboard possibilities the first the things i mention but we're grown companies and so far there's an evolutionary reconstruction is the terminology this is not reform it is the construction in an evolutionary form of new institutions in case of the banks for instance it's a checkerboard for some states some cities but also in circl and circling in an odd way as the pain deepens i suspect they will fight and get tougher they may win but not always what's interesting to me if you if you think about this the internal empire of the united states that's what madison thought about it by the way as an empire internal empire and the way madison thought about it by the way to just parent that ecclesia was just a way i've been talking about the people with the property of the ones that control that's that's federal sten and the problem of politics is to keep the people out the property from taking and running the system and the way to do that is to spread them out and divide a shirt that's shorthand for  federalist ten however what's also interesting is in the farther reaches of the internal empire detroit cleveland they don't reach to every level and they can't solve every problem and the pain continues so it is certainly possible that they will crush everything and it is also possible to make that assumption at the outset and do nothing but it is also possible history is filled with places where those with power are toppled and you pays your money and you seize what happens say that you you or your community or owns like a community space and you see that in the future currently you hold this community space you may know it you may own it but you see that over time there is a trend that the property values will go up to the even if you own it question great question and indeed that's a question of being faced and there's a lot of experience on the ground the most part the most powerful tools will entrust where you actually thank you and that's another that's another one of the democratizing things that's popping up all of that by the way the land trust you draw a circle around the land and you set up a nonprofit corporation that owns the land that's the typical way you can actually do it through city government too and so that if you get property value increases they don't generate high cost housing because you can control that you can tilt the internal subsidisation within that land trust i'm going fast have to say it's a way to control what you're talking about and it is really interesting could also be really interesting ecological things with it and here's another example woman by the way who the who the secretary of agriculture kicked fired in the empire back she could see radical civil rights activist and that idea was crazy now you can find because there is no answer for the problems of gentrification in many areas land just are popping up everywhere there are irvine california is doing five thousand units washington's doing a thousand units chicago is doing it so it's another form of democratization of the decentralized way to solve a problem and it's another example of this evolution or reconstruction i'm talking about that is not it's very american practical stuff imam put it in a you know frame of evolution revolution all the system change you can drop that if you want it's very american style european guys  who don't quite get this this is this is one of the advantages of this country it has a kind of populist creative pragmatic streak and it's to be honest and used and land trust is one of the ways of dealing with a problem that at that website will give you a whole lot information