Consideration of the Coopertative Enterprise.

Americans have been brainwashed into thinking of a bi-polar world with Economic Liberalism on the "Conservative" side and State Socialism on the "Liberal" side. In America, we have a plethora of ahistorical terminology that is nothing more than rhetorical fodder for political demagogues.  Our current definition of conservative and liberal, as anyone can see by exploring the embedded links, is a victim of this stupefying rhetoric. Toxic rhetoric endangers the integrity of the whole body politic.

I believe the real threat to American liberty to be the accumulation of power in the hands of an unchecked elite. As we accumulate economic and social power into large corporate structures, we are drawing power away from the people and toward a ruling oligarchy. The fallacy of economic liberalism is that somehow a continual upwelling of new competition will keep the oligarchy in check. In fact, the oligarchy holds out the promise of riches to the middle class while doing everything possible to establish barriers to social mobility. The poor, segregated from mainstream society both spatially and economically, tend to go to poor schools and have little access to jobs and housing in middle-class neighborhoods. The middle class
has increasingly found that the middle class sustaining employment has been moved overseas, access to capital is limited to those who come up with extraordinary ideas, and even then is still controlled by the venture capital elite. We have virtually closed the door to "self-made" men or women. In sheer desperation, we turn to models like Bill Gates, who though a college dropout was still the son of two successful Seattle are lawyers. Our American success story myths constantly ignore the role of upper-class networking in entrepreneurial success, as well as ignoring how the elevation by success inculcates the successful individuals into the elitist club.

The concept of "cooperative enterprises," which, in part, has its origins in Utopian Socialism, is a third social-economic-political way. Cooperative movements tend to be anti-State-Socialism and inhabit a political spread from right to left that includes John Stewart Mill and Alexander Herzen. Cooperatives can and do exist within traditional capitalist societies. One such successful example is the Mondragon Co-operative Federation which has had some ties with similar domestic worker cooperative movements. Domestic worker cooperatives are for the most part immune to outsourcing. Cooperatives in general compliment traditional American values regarding hard work and working together.

I have argued that we should be looking at "open" cooperatives to replace many of the elements of infrastructure that have traditionally been held by corporate monopolies. Electrical distribution systems replace with "open" cooperatives of electrical power producers, can decentralize power production and increase the diversification of power sources.  Passive Optical Ethernet Networks (POENs) established as "open" cooperatives of Internet Service Providers have the potential of eliminating both cable TV and telephone monopolies. If high-speed passenger rail infrastructure was built as an "open" cooperative, then multiple rail service providers could then compete for passengers. Cooperative infrastructures can be used to turn monopolized services into open marketplaces, increasing the quality and variety of services while maintaining downward pressure on pricing.