9 name is gar alperovitz, professor of the economy at the university of maryland and i write books but i am trained as a historian and local economists. background, ph.d. at cambridge university, fellow at teams college cambridge and different politics at harvard and became much more interested in doing activist work along with my riding and i moved to washington. and wisconsin native at the university of medicine and also director of the great senator from wisconsin and bob, a liberal congressman. my last introduction, policy planning work on united nations at the state department.

and history and economics and different universities. i have written this book, i should say this is the famous institution, small, small bookstores like this in my view are the future and the backbone of america, at mit, duke, and why you and come in -- the real places things happen are places like this so it is a pleasure to be here. is book "what then must we do?" the title taken from tolstoy and drawn from luke and the question is what is it shall we do, what must we do? that is a question a lot of the blood being asked and asking themselves around the country particularly. i wrote this book in a very

strange way. as some of you know i wrote a long book about the underground, 700 pages of scholarly work and books are very scholarly and my wife teases me, how long will this book takes you? five years, ten years? that kind of thing. what became the basis of this book for a longtime, five or ten years, something like that, i wrote this particular book in something that never happened to me before. i wrote it in 31/21/2 months. just for out and i did it partly because of the mood that is developing in the country and because young people are beginning to get into action. occupy was one symbol of that but a lot of other things are going on that i have been involved with. it seems time to speak to the possibility of change and activity and what is beginning to happen. and i wrote it in a style i had

never written before. it is very common-sense vernacular like having a conversation, a few jokes on the side. very fast-paced but based upon heavy research and if you look at the end nodes you will find that. now background, i tell you what this book is about and we will do some back-and-forth discussion. the first argument in the book is the kind of straightforward argument most people don't often takes seriously but is time to take seriously, i told you i come out of conventional politics, i worked in legislation, house, senate, government, so forth, that period is over. i have done politics, been there, done that. first argument in the book is the problems growing up in this country are not strictly speaking political problems. they are political problems but a better way to understand them,

this is the first argument, we are facing a system crisis, not simply a political crisis, thing it means is the next guy will not be able to do much. if we try to build a movement to shifted a little bit, another way to look at what a systemic crisis is, we will get to "what then must we do?" if politics doesn't move the ball, another way to look at it is long, long trends that don't change but get worse over time tell you you are dealing with something deeper down in the system than what an election will do. for instance the distribution of income has been getting steadily worse for 30 years. is not about whether the congress right now has blockaded the, the tea party, that is a

problem but a 30 year trend tells you something else is going on much deeper or for instance virtually all of the economic gains, give or take small amounts for the last 30 years you really have to think about this, virtually all the games of the american economic system, virtually all, give or take have gone to the top 1%. that is an extraordinary change, get into criticizing the top 1% but more interesting is what is it in the system that generates long trends of that kind? there is another one, virtually very marginal increase in average worker pay. a little bit over 30 years but less than $1 overtime. the same long trend has decayed there. poverty has gotten worse, not better over this period of time

and if we use 14, 16% range, if you use standards that are common in europe or any other country in the world poverty would be twice as high as it is in the united states. we use a very artificial standard of poverty which was invented oddly by the government bureaucrat who picked up in the late 50s, takes a food budget of a poor family multiplied by 3, no reason to multiplied by 3, that is poverty increased by inflation. poverty is defined by half of the median income, and by the world standard we have doubled and it is an increase, not decrease, over time. these are the trend data that tell you that something is going on the dirt down in the economic system and in the political

system than you can tell by an election here or there. or take it another way. co2 production has gone up steadily 20%, 30%, civil liberties of gone down over time. imprisonment, if you are interested in vote value of liberty, imprisonment per 100,000 people in the united states is higher than any other advanced country by eightfold, eight times, depends which country including russia and china. it has steadily gone worse so those are just some of the introductory things that make use a electing democrats, republicans, something deeper in the system driving the long trends we face. got to change the system and that is the problem we face.

what is to be done? that is an overwhelming challenge. a good part of the book plays that out and tries to explain some of the reasons that is so. one part of that and it is important particularly in wisconsin because of the difficulties you have in terms of labor and the fights that have gone on over unions and public unions and so forth. traditionally the solution to economic and political problems in wisconsin or in the united states in the last 50 years and in europe in the last 50 years in europe they call social democracy and in the united states we call the liberals or progressive. the way the process works is very simple. you structure the economy and give over ownership of large amounts of capital to the corporations. they get to own the capital and

the elites get to own the capital. that is the nature of the economic system. then when there are difficulties, inequality, resources for public purposes, environmental difficulties, when there are difficulties, there are more coming in, in and sit down and we will carry on, please come in. the way the system is designed and the way the politics of the system is designed is who gets to own the capital, who gets to own the wealth. corporations and tiny elites in the united states and in most capitalist system's own the large corporate productive part of the economy. not give or take, but let me give you a number. this number is so staggering that you have to just let it sit in your lap for a minute and look at it. in the united states today 400

people, not% but people, you could probably get some in this bookstore, own more capital in corporate stock, the corporations, then the bottom 1 eighty million people taken together. let that one sit there. that is the system or one element of the concentrated ownership of largely corporate wealth in this system. that is the medieval design. i said that an election recently and some historians, medieval historian came up to me and said it was never that concentrated in medieval times. but you live in an extremely concentrated system of ownership. what is interesting is that system when i worked in congress and most liberals still think about, we can organize politics

to either tax, they own the capital, we tax them and spend for good things or we regulate them to deal with the environment quote we try to constrain and manage the system, that is called liberalism and social democracy in the design of the system abroad and it is that process which i was deeply involved with in the house and senate and many people are still involved with, that is the process that is failing and the reason it is failing, not marginally is the trends don't change, they just get worse. that is a very challenging set of arguments and even more challenging reality. at the core of the progressive countervailing power, corporations have countervailed, manage, regulate, tax and spend.

at the core of that power was an institution called american labor unions and that gave muscle to the progressive movement along with the movement activities. the difficulty is, this is happening all over the world but nowhere as badly as here, labor has gone from 34.5% of the labour force as members of unions in peak year 1953, it has now gone down to 11.3 in the private sector and something in range of 6.6% in the private sector so the labor organizations, unions, money and muscle for elections and liberal politics like gaylord nelson, that whole system that kept the system in balance is detained before your eyes. obviously this book "what then must we do?" goes into more detail than i can sketch briefly

but the argument we face a systemic crisis is the old way of trying to bend the trends doesn't work anymore. now you have a problem. there may be no way forward. that is the logical option. if there is a way forward, probably it would have to get at the underlying issue in all systems which is who gets to own the wealth and probably it would have to alter in some way the benefit of the vast majority the wealth, somehow that would probably have to be done. systems largely, very briefly are characterized largely by who does own the wealth so that in feudalism was landed wealth and the wealth of the church and the king don't the wealth and control the system. in nineteenth century capitalism small farmers, small business

farmers, operated as business men who served not like peasant farmers but produced something like jacksonian ownership of wealth, private ownership and that was a different nineteenth century kind of capitalism. in the soviet union the state-owned the wealth envy concentrated power undermined democracy and liberty in that system. the conservatives, i am not a conservative but the conservatives are right about that. all the wealth in the state you have a real problem and said do the anarchists' but that is the model, very different, so the compromise case which was corporations own the wealth and we try to countervail that is the one that is failing to. what you going to do? those are the systems we know something about so either there is a new systemic direction that changes the ownership of wealth,

or the pain continues. very hard problem. i think we live in an extremely challenging moment in world history because not only here this is happening all over the world is happening faster here. what is interesting about the period and this is the second major argument of the book is if you look beneath the surface of what is going on with the press coverage, the press can't cover this because the press is under tremendous pressure, they are literally broke, don't have reporters that cover anything local and don't want to in many cases the newspapers don't have reporting staffs to do anything in depth anymore but if you were able to do that and we do a lot of research on this at the university of maryland it turns out there's a lot going on that isn't being covered and what is really interesting about it is if you think about systems and you think about systems as they relate to who owns the wealth,

one of the dominant characteristics is changing who gets to own the wealth but in a radically decentralized way that maybe permits democracy to grow along with wells ownership unlike state ownership. what do i mean? i will give you some statistics and some illustrations that are partly the result of past developments in american history and partly an explosion of things going on at the grassroots level but most people don't know about the we don't a lot of research about and reported in the book. the most obvious example particularly in this state, a cooperative is a democratic ownership of wealth structure, very decentralized but it is not a corporation, not a state and it does change who gets to own and control wealth. 1 thirty million americans are members, most people don't know that. credit unions, one person, one

vote banks, right out here, very american. and the potential of what the cooperative unit might do. for instance, let me give you an interesting example, they have been talking around the country people keep sending me an example after example after example this is in burlington, vermont. many traditional credit unions are kind of stuck in the mud. they are very good institutions but they don't do much creative. they give you a loan for your car or house and that is it, they don't do much more than that, investing -- i will give you ideas of creative businesses being developed, they are not taking risks at all. they are being much more cautious than most bankers. that is kind of odd, you would think it is something more progressive but a little deeper, most credit unions are run by very kind of run of the mill guys who have been doing it year

in year out, there's no democracy because nobody ever comes to board meetings or elections at the meeting because there is nothing to talk about. why bother? the same people have been running at the same way for a long time. but they are one person, one vote banks and moreover the credit unions in the united states combined have more capital than any one of the biggest banks in the united states, bank of america must, they have more capital, they are big deal. in burlington activists who want to do something more creative start going to board meetings, said going to annual meetings and electing their own people and that can be done and is being done in many parts of the country to take an existing possibility and begin to democratize it in fact rather than in theory. the 1 thirty

ready. 10,000 workers and companies in the united states, eleven million people involved. three million more than are members of unions and the private sector and nobody knows about it and some of them are good, some of the mark bad, some are evolve in but they give you another way to think about the proposition that if systems are about who gets to own the wealth because power flows from wealth and if you don't want to in the state because it overcentralizes it then either there is said decentralized way or there isn't. co-ops, worker owned companies, credit unions begin to suggest another possibility. i will give you another illustration. the book says a lot about this. when stressed are an interesting model. you draw a circle around urban neighborhood or rural neighborhood, put up a nonprofit corporation and you own the land. you take social and ownership of

the land through something like a nonprofit corporation. that allows you in a city for instance you can control lane inflation and price inflation and housing inflation because instead of the developers taking money on it by running it a nonprofit corporation democratizing the ownership you can control profits, you don't have to kick people out of their houses or that part of the land go up and sell it to the high-rise, use the profits to subsidize housing because if you own the land or the capital you can take the profits and use them for other purposes, that used to be an idea, very oddball ideas. there was one in vermont 35 years ago and one in georgia 35 years ago and people thought that was crazy. they are all over the country now because you can't solve the problem. can't get enough political power to tax and spend so you get gentrification. goes to a city like irvine,

calif. where you would not expected. 5,000 units of housing in land trust's ownership, chicago is doing it, washington is doing it because, and here's the thing to note, because there is no other way to answer the problem. you can't regulate, can't tax and spend. what is left is actually taking over ownership in some decentralized way. land trusts are really interesting because they are popping up everywhere, most people don't pay attention. i will give you a few more illustrations and won't bore you with this endlessly but give you a couple. most people are not aware 25% of american a lecture city is socialized. you probably didn't know that. public utilities and cooperative's produce 25% of american electricity, as common as grass throughout the country including the south and the blood beginning to say why don't we build on that tradition rather than just ignore it?

the new york times, two weeks ago, three weeks ago, the business page section had a front-page big article power to the people and was all about the movement to make for mop ties the ownership of utilities. there is a hot one going on in colorado, 16 or so have been taken over so i am giving you a picture of something developing at the grassroots level the press isn't covering but the most important characteristic is it is about who gets to own wealth, changing the power base of the system and it is spreading, why is it spreading? because the pain levels are spreading and people are desperate that you can't do it the old way. can't tax and spend, it doesn't work so you have got to either roll up your sleeves and begin acting and changing things yourselves or it won't change. virtually all of this has an ecological flavor. all projects, not all but most are green and also connected

with this is an agricultural movement, urban agriculture, from farms that cell to cities and groups in cities, there's a food movement that is part of this, another piece of it is -- takes on various forms, social enterprise, don't know if that is a term you know. there are thousands of these popping up, just reporting the news at the moment what is going on the social enterprises somebody sets of the business to make money, the only purpose of which is to drive social-service. that is what the business is about. untraditional one, there are some old ones and thousands of new ones, pioneered human services in seattle. you probably don't know about it. it was set up to do drug rehabilitation, very seriously ill people, they started 35 years ago, mostly grants, help people with drug problems and slowly they realized if they were going to get anywhere

people needed jobs and job training so they started building stores, restaurants, hotels, factories in order to give these people job-training route. because the therapy works in the future and then they realize they could make enough money out of the businesses that road socially to begin financing their drug rehab programs, do you get the model? transformed the ownership and that is an old one that has been there 50 years, those things are popping up all over the country too. another way to transform the ownership of wealth, etc. etc. etc.. one reason i'm giving you this kind of detail and i will give you a website, it is in the book "what then must we do?" because it is being done here and can be done anywhere in the country when people begin to realize they are doing it over there, we could do it here. people are beginning to get information. here is a website, community-wealth.

and this simply surveys the stuff, if it is not very collegial another web site with more detail than land trusts and the way i think about this as a historian, this process, may have larger implications it is beginning to train and laid down foundations over time which are building up knowledge and people and awareness and if the conditions continue, that process is likely to go on. if you looked at the deal--when the new deal took place, what did it built on? it built on the things that were happening locally at the so-called state and local laboratories of the nation like wisconsin where people were working on things that became social security, the principals at the state level, labor law, principles that developed at the state and local level and when the moment was right, enough experience was unavailable to

move that to the national level. i think that analogy is very important. i will give you another analogy, more than experiments, take on a different feel when you say "what then must we do?" because you can do this. if they can do this in cleveland, come to cleveland or real for city it can be done by anybody who wants to do it. another analogy, in the nineteenth century the prehistory of the populace and progressive era looked exactly the same. lots of things that local level that began building politics and extending to the national level last time when done. third analogy, the feminist movement in the nineteenth century looked to the women. year by decade by decade, state by state by state for 50 years, until they had enough power and moved nationally and took over the national constitutional debate. as a historian i pay attention

to this kind of thing particularly when there are signs it is likely to continue because the pain levels continue and there are no answers. that is one level. i won't go into so much detail of other processes the work. they all have this characteristic changing the ownership of wealth and doing it in a way that democratizes it but doesn't state it. very american. very american way of changing and transforming ownership. this is not the soviet union. it is down home, in wisconsin, the kind of thing we find in madison and did is much more important in my view and it is spreading more than most people think. at the state level too. this is most grass-roots neighborhood level. i mentioned one city level that is public ownership of utilities, that is getting to the city level. at the state level something else is happening and here is another development. you all know about the bank of

north dakota. bank of north dakota has been there for 90 years, it is a socialized bank, the state-owned the bank. is supported -- a very supportive conservative state supported by small business, farmers and cooperatives because it is a functioning public bank, 20 state to introduce legislation to set up a bank like the bank of north dakota. if i am not mistaken you still have a very small public insurance company in this state. it has been hedged in but there it sits from the progressive era and could be expanded upon. banking at the state level and the city level, every city has money, tax money. where do they put it? they usually put it in a big bank because somebody knows somebody. you could put it in the credit union and use it for community purposes or put it in a small city bank and say if you use it for community purposes we put the money in and have that for

your funding. that is happening all over the country. use of public funding of that kind. another piece of the puzzle to finance some of the things we are talking about. in many parts of the country there is talk of citibank, city-owned banks. why not? taxpayer money is there any way. if you put it in a bang, don't know how much you guys know about banking, you will comply with bank does with your deposit, given $10,000 in deposits, they get to lend out $90,000. that is how it works, that is how money is created. that is how the federal reserve board does it. most people don't know enough, money is really crazy but that is how it works. it is creating usually in a multiple size. city depositing money in some bank or the bank of north dakota has that power to invest large capital in these things to make it grow. another example, the health care

system. this is one to pay attention to. health care system is almost 20% of the u.s. economy, 18% right now. no small change. think of it as an industry, a fifth of the economy almost. that system is in terrible shape and it has huge cost problems and will be throwing people out of the health care system when employers say i don't want to pay for it and finding ways to get people to pay the fine in said. the pain levels are already beginning to grow and the costs grow. there is no solution available in my judgment. there's a whole chapter about this, accept the costs and payne will increase. where the rubber hits the road is in the state's. state-by-state, many states are beginning to consider one or another form of approach, single payer health care. what is single payer, public ownership of basic insurance

system. connecticut is close, calif. did it twice under arnold schwarzenegger but the pressure creating it, that is the ball to keep your eye on. it is not simply because folks say it is a good idea. we have a lot of good ideas that politics won't deal with. the pain levels are growing and solutions are not easily available and what then can be done? the title of the book, is in fact being done in many states, one by one. sometimes i use the phrase in the book in checkerboard fashion. they get some of the states and do nothing with them and it will go to the right but that isn't the whole story. the checkerboard has a lot of other squares where people are doing interesting things and building up models and when their model fails they may find other models have been developed as the basis of the next political movement of this kind. so some local things, some at the city level, some at the state level. i suppose you noticed that we

have nationalize two of the biggest auto companies in the world and nationalized the biggest insurance company in the world, general motors, chrysler, aig. nationalization in the united states? we just did that. we still own a ig. when the money began to flow and we gave back general motors and going back after the taxpayers paid for it, those models, major systemic problems, the system doesn't collapse but huge systemic risk problems occur, are likely to go on in future. it is not be on the possibility in my view of a long developing movement that burns enough's on the ground about how you actually do these things, how you actually manage democratically and institutions but at some point some of those institutions paid for by the taxpayers will become significant institutions that

may become public utilities. that is way down the line. i am a historian, two or three decades is the usual time frame of that. the progressive movement developed. if you are facing a systemic crisis, that is the argument of the book and the truth, either you buildups that by step-by-step the free conditions of the next transformation or it doesn't happen. what is interesting is slowly step-by-step the the evidence is more and more things are accumulating partly out of pain, partly out of young people and older people rolling up their sleeves and doing it, the pain will continue unless we do something and that is beginning to generate what is called the, quote, new economy movement. don't know if you have heard that term. a lot of young people, laudable but people are involved in trying to do these things with intention. politics' begins when you get to this age of intention, not

simply watching the development unfold but saying something is going on here. if we then began to move as a movement we could accelerate and build upon what is beginning to happen. let me tell you a little story to give you an idea where this goes over time, how if you look at a 30 year pattern rather than a snapshot i just gave you you get a different sense. i was involved in ohio. 1977, when the first major collapse of the steel industry occurred in ohio. some of you may remember youngstown went down. 5,000 people were off the job in one day in 1977. black monday they called it. 5,000 people mend the community would go down too so the steelworkers in that town and the city, the ecumenical coalition of the city, catholic bishops and priests and rabbis got together and formed a joint

worker ecumenical coalition strategy to put the seal notes back on track. they said american, very american idea. why can't we do this? why can't we put this together? 5,000 people will look your sleeve, let's do it. we need to recognize that is an american cultural idea. we are -- french people don't think that we. we are ahead of a lot of european people in the sense that culture, go culture, a big asset. a side bar story. one guy, a steel worker named gerald dickie, it was his idea. why don't we do that? one of the businessmen took him aside and that you want a steel mill? i can tell you much better stock to buy and steel mills. that wasn't the name of the game. they wanted to take over the mill. they are organizing and did their politics and got the purchase involved and got the community involved and the local pressure and press and did the

work and got the carter administration at that time to finance $200,000 technical study of how to do it. $200,000 in 1977 is a couple million and it was a big highly professional study by top experts in the steel industry and you do that there is not to be competitive, all you need is a $200 million and they got the carter administration to pledge a loan guarantee for $200 million against his professional study under worker community ownership. incredible achievement because money went away after the election of 1978. we don't quite know why the money went away but probably it went away because you can't prove this, because the steel corporations went in and so did the labor national international union. the international steel workers union was publicly opposed to

the local guys. they also didn't like these upstart activists getting involved because they might challenge the international so they cut it to ribbons. we think they went to washington but they certainly went public against it. they didn't get the mill. but they knew the name of the game was not just what we can do today. a huge educational campaign around the state of ohio, national religious groups, wherever they could, student groups and in the states of ohio there are more worker owned companies more or less than any state in the country because they did their work to spread the idea and at penn state university, a little non-profit to help people, how to build worker owned companies out of this experience so that is a developmental process that went on, 30 years later in cleveland you had the most sophisticated development so far in this movement so we welcome worker

owned companies developing piece by piece. as you go to cleveland here is what you see in the following neighborhood and it is really interesting and it comes out of developmental trajectory. you want to play this game look at it as a developmental problem. not something that will happen in one election. you have to fight the let durrell battles. we are talking historical change in terms of institutions and systems. that means there are a couple decades on the table. in cleveland out of the ohio experience starting with youngtown, and i was one of the guys who helped design youngstown. you find in the following neighborhood 40,000 people in cleveland, 40% unemployment. and a group of worker owned company which include for instance the largest urban

hydroponic, largest urban hydroponic greenhouse in the united states. by largest fine means a produce three million heads of led as per year. you want to get your head around that. to do that you must plant 26,000 heads of letters every single day. that is a big operation. there is the large scale industrial laundry worker co-op in a complex and it is probably the greenest laundry, a third of the water, a third of the heat and meets the competition in terms of costs and pays reasonable wage. that is another of the worker owned companies and a solar installation company on line to produce something like more installation capacity that exists in the entire state and they are planning to do one or two more every year so that is the scale of it but what is interesting is not only that the

idea of worker ownership has gone further and changing who owns the capital, by practice and reality, it has a couple other features partly drawn upon the famous cooperatives in the vast country of spain for those who have been falling at, 80,000 people in a very sophisticated cooperative structure competitive on world markets are many markets but partly drawing on that experience these worker owned companies were not adjusted for themselves in cleveland but linked together with a non-profit corporations shows some of them go back to the community and as to the community possibilities they are trying to use profits to build a community not simply to make specific workers rich or wealthy in some sense but they are advancing themselves and another part of the profits go into a fund to capitalize, provide

investment capital for other worker owned companies to build new ones and would accomplish of growing worker owned companies event at rebuilding the community and multiplying in time and blinked together with the revolving fund of non-profit corporations so it is a more sophisticated integrated model that over time has been developed. even more sophisticated than what i just said and by the way you can do this any place. many cities are doing something like the following. add to that what else, the developmental path which they thought about this earlier experience as they learned overtime in the middle of this poor community are three major, lots of major institutions the cleveland clinic, one of the world's leading hospitals, case western university and university hospital.

big institutions. they all have a lot of taxpayer money in from. education money, medicaid money, hospital money, medicare money, they are sitting there and unlike big corporations that can come and go they can't go anywhere. the chart a weaker institutions. you have them too. every city has got them. in that core neighborhoods they buy $3 million in goods and services every single year. did i say million? i meant billion with the beat, not an m. leaving aside their salaries that is separate, their construction is more, just what they buy. none of them from the community. taxpayer money, for community, why not ask them or request more organized pressure or force --

helped develop an entire economy based upon worker ownership or building of the community as a whole, using this public money to do that and that is what is happening in cleveland, ohio and in atlanta and in many other cities around the country including amarillo, texas of all places, and many other cities, the light bulb has gone on. we are not did ended if we look at different models and use what is available land developing the theory that you better transform who gets to home the wealth or the power is going to go back to where it was. all this is about practical ways to begin democratizing wealth. in real terms and in an expanding basis in real american communities. i don't want to talk too long about this because i want you to read the book, it is much more interesting than this talk about what must we do is we can build

on this and what people learn from this, this is really interesting, i worked in cleveland model as well and folks out there in cleveland and part of our staff has been involved, the really important thing for people to understand, because they don't understand it is if you cannot do it there, we can do it here. and bring people in and say this is what we're doing, you guys could do it and this is how we do it if you need some help, all of a sudden instead of becoming aspect -- abstract theory it is down home clearly can be done and got to be done because other people are doing it. that is how movements get built. we need to illustrate this. sent back from this. and won't:too much longer because you're getting tired of this but let me give you a broader sense. i am a historian and political economist. i think of things in time dimensions. i think about those guys in

youngstown, ohio, the steelworkers in the third year process to get to more sophisticated and what can you build on that, it conditions power right so thour right so that is the next argument. these developments could be sidebar interesting experiments, not more. it is possible that the trends that i outlined will simply d k. that could happen to the system. it is possible there will be violence and oppression and fascism. probably white violence firsthand then maybe oklahoma city and boston. that is the possibility.

i always like to stop here and remind people because people have a vested interest in pessimism. vested interest because if nothing can be done you don't have to do anything. i just want to remind people, these are options, logical options. if you look to latin america for the last three decades you will find repressive fascist regimes, they had them and they are gone in most countries. so fascism is not the end of history but it can be extremely ugly and painful. that is another option. it is also possible if the conditions are right that we are laying foundations for something much larger that could be transformed of. that is the hard one for people to get their heads around. you mean us? we americans might be laying the groundwork in transforming

ownership in a radically decentralized way piece by piece and beginning to develop a theory and vision? i want to remind you what i said at the outset. i have managed house and senate staff and been in very messy political fights, been there, done that, know about real politics. now returning to what i am suggesting. you mean you are saying maybe historically we may lay the groundwork for a larger transformation over 30 years or so building upon this emerging trends formative potentially transform of vision, changing who gets to own the capital? socializing the capital might collapse, in a radically down-home american way that doesn't end up centralizing everything but does change and transformed who gets to own, that might be possible? in might be possible. that is what i am contending.

maybe. who knows? spend your money and see what happens with the game. that is how it is always done. you never know historically whether anything will change. you always are looking into the future that is not known. my hero in all of this to give you a little insight and if you want to think about the latest game, the chips are decades of your life. you don't play unless you understand long-term change. my heroes are civil-rights workers in mississippi, in the 1930s. they lay the groundwork without which the 1960s could not have happened and you don't know their names but that is where the hard work was done. not that civil-rights was not hard work but potentially we are in an era where the possibility of laying a transforming of possibility, did you say transformative? system changing. it is in the realm of human

possibility that we are laying the groundwork and could with intention, the person sitting in your seat and mine, with intent finality books to try to build a system in a very american, radically decentralized democratic way that respects the traditions of this country and is different from any of the traditional, boring nineteenth and twentyth century models. it is not like the soviet union or corporate capitalism and doesn't look like holding things together. it may be very american if we so create it. pretty utopian stuff. the interesting part for me as a historian is the key emerging political economic context in my judgment for the reasons i gave at the outset, decline of

liberalism, failure of lower labor unions, change in power, likely to continue to give us conditions of growing inequality, growing pain, growing ecological difficulty and more and more people waking up and saying like the occupy people did, something is really wrong here and more and more young people can't find jobs beginning to roll up their sleeves and say either we do it or it is not going to change. the conditions we are facing are not going to be resolved and that nature of that particular kind of historical context is a peculiar one. it is not like a classic collapse or marxist revolution. it would probably go to the right, not the left or the pendulum will swing, the liberal power will come again. it is detained, stagnating context like we are beginning to

experience now. talk to young people feel it yourself. it is the period where people really begin to say something is going on here. this is not the way it was supposed to be. this is the richest country in the history of the world and people begin to say either there is the new path forward or it is going to get worse. i look at it as a historian. the possibility-the argument in this book is we enter an era where the real possibility, not the abstract possibility, this drives people crazy, i am saying real possibility, systematically laying the foundations for a possible transformation with us and is our responsibility to look at that and say maybe we could actually do this if we got serious. i talked to the person in your

chair, you know. with intention we were actually to get serious we might be able to get to the place where we thought we might be able to act historically as the civil-rights kids in mississippi and see themselves as historic actors, transforming the system. does that ever happen? soviet union collapsed, apartheid did collapse, small farmers, small merchants, and outgunned 1,000-1. things happen maybe sometimes. i am not -- i don't believe anything is inevitable including 9 don't believe the way things are now. we are tosh to believe nothing >> translator: 4 in the ability. it is possible also that what

will happen is we will do some useful the good things and help strengthen the society and help people by building things, that is useful but just possibly what might we do, what must we do, what can we do, the title of the books in various variations is we will build a movement peculiar to american culture. radically decentralized built on the can do spirit, built on the community sense in america, decentralized country. the decentralization into something new. the game is you get to try it if you want to and watch it if you don't. thank you very much. [applause] >> the occupy movement.

>> the occupy movement, he asked what happens to the occupy movement? if i may read characterized, they came and went and nothing happened. is that what you are saying? as a historian, things like that are often what happens in a row prehistory of a great movement. explosions occur and society is not ready to take them on even in a movement building way and they fade away. however, the press doesn't cover this because we don't have a press. if you actually look carefully at what is happening in the new economy movements, often what you find is people who met each other in the occupy movement and formed small groups they would not have otherwise formed and are actually doing the kinds of things i am talking about but i consider that a preliminary explosion, very important explosion but it would not be surprising if the first

explosion didn't disappear and leave something behind the there will be many many more, probably much quieter in my opinion. that is my judgment with happened to the occupy movement and some of it was very positive in the sense the i have been going around the country lecturing and talking about this book. everywhere i go you find people who were not doing anything political. they weren't doing anything political. occupied got them out of that. into doing something and they're struggling now, doing a lot of project. not all of them but it crystallized those things. very interesting in that respect. >> from the university of wisconsin, white water university used to be ways to decrease the amount of inequality in power society, and power people in the middle class, to achieve various things.

what is happening right now is we are creating a generation burdened by a trillion dollars of debt, service that never waived, inside the university, tenured professors decrease think, a number of individuals who are highly skills in working in an adjunct. are there ways we ought to apply about rethinking these institutions to the places where we both work at the university? >> that is another sign of the crisis, the ridiculous -- the public could pay but it is all loaded on the students, and believable debt and the adjunct and the adjuncts were rented. i think -- i live -- i think that system is collapsing of its own weight and i think it will

collapse and there will be a transforming of possibility or decay a tiny fraction. we all know what comes into this mess. >> online courses. >> which means two or 300,000 people taking a course around the world for free. it is a wonderful achievement but undermining the traditional structure of university systems. the whole model is blown apart and probably should be. how we get done research, how we finance is not clear. >> the co-op -- cooperative structure for education a possibility? >> i see co-op's trying to do educational work but haven't seen university research, funding research, by the way, in cambridge, i lead the country to

do economics because economics was so in my view bad. how do you think cambridge was started? a bunch of dissident young faculty from oxford, students hired professors in those days. little groups of students hired somebody to teach them. that is how it worked and they went across town and built up cambridge. we may see innovative things like that. the system is clearly in crisis. >> you seem to indicate a lot of change in the system, the two party system, the paper and plastic system we have with democrats and republicans, in the 30s there was a third large political party operating that was very much support of of civil-rights, members went to prison of red called the communist party and it posed a real threat to the advance of

the republicans. can you talk about that? >> it is really interesting because if you apologize and demonize the communist party, in the south and was important in integrating the black/white crisis and no one else would touch the race issue. there's a great history. ..