This is not the first time I’ve come across negative responses to articles about co-ops and cooperative endeavors. The problem is not that these comments are critical of co-ops. The problem is that they are superficial, ignorant, and lack nuance. These comments take a complex idea and try to simplify it, bypassing meaningful discussion along the way.
There are certainly things to critique about co-ops, but too often people don’t have that conversation. Those who are making these simple critiques have loud voices, and it seems that the strength of their voices are directly correlated to the weakness of their arguments.
Believing that capitalism and big business are good for the economy and for workers is naive. This leaves people expecting that if they just work hard enough in their cog factory, someday they’ll get to be the cogmaster. But the system isn’t set up for mass success—it’s beholden to majority failure and stagnation.
Once we face the fact-based world, we see how our economic system enriches the few at the expense of the rest of us. From 2007 to 2011, there was an 8.7 percent decline in median household income. During this same period, income increased 1.6 percent for the top fifth of earners. As the majority of us were struggling to make ends meet this past year, CEOs saw their pay increase by 5 percent.
A 2011 study by economists Jon Bakija, Adam Cole, and Bradley T. Heim revealed that “the incomes of executives, managers, supervisors, and financial professionals can account for 60 percent of the increase in the share of national income going to the top percentile of the income distribution between 1979 and 2005.”
How can we address this? Co-ops are one solution, as they offer a way for people to take control of their economic futures and keep money within their communities, instead of giving it to CEOs. People in co-ops aren’t sitting in circles singing Kumbaya for handouts. They don’t hang around the cog factory idealizing the cogmaster—they actively try to make things better. Co-ops offer communities ways to pull themselves up through collaboration and innovation.
Workshop on cooperatives with TESA’s Andrew Stachiw.
Take, for example, workers in Argentina who took over their factories after the 2001 financial meltdown and have been lifting their region out of an economic slump. Or the fact that two million jobs are created each year in the U.S. because of cooperatives, according to National Cooperative Business Association interim president Liz Bailey.
Does that mean co-ops are perfect? No. We should be critiquing in the interest of improving, asking questions about how to make co-ops more viable and looking for solutions to the economic quagmire we’re in. This is the conversation we need to be having. But we can only have it if we get past the superficial and ignorant and dive into what it would really mean for all of us to become active, democratic participants in our economy.
Taliesin Nyala is a worker-owner at The Toolbox for Education and Social Action (TESA), which created and published Co-opoly: The Game of Cooperatives. You can follow them on Twitter and Facebook.
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The Times explains that:
Despite sanctions and trade embargoes, over the past decade the United States government has allowed American companies to do billions of dollars in business with Iran and other countries blacklisted as state sponsors of terrorism, an examination by The New York Times has found.
But Jo Becker, Ron Nixon and William Yong’s Times article never produces any evidence to suggest that trade with Iran — or any blacklisted country — has actually worked against U.S. interests of pressuring the Iranian leadership to end its alleged nuclear program.
Stuart Levey, the Obama administration’s Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at Treasury, calls out the absurdity of the reporters’ forensic level interest in sanctions loopholes. He tells The Times that their focus “misses the forest for the trees.”
And the American Popcorn company defended itself against its decision to avail itself of sanctions loopholes.
Henry Lapidos, export manager for the American Pop Corn Company, acknowledged that calling the Jolly Time popcorn he sold in Sudan and Iran a humanitarian good was “pushing the envelope,” though he did give it a try. “It depends on how you look at it — popcorn has fibers, which are helpful to the digestive system,” he explained, before switching to a different tack. “What’s the harm?” he asked, adding that he didn’t think Iranian soldiers “would be taking microwavable popcorn” to war.
The reporters didn’t find any solid evidence that the sanctions loopholes had directly helped either the Iranian nuclear program or the Iranian Republican Guard Corps (IRGC). But they did track down details of how a medical-waste disposal plant in Honolulu may have exerted political influence to gain an exception for its contract for 200 graphite electrodes from a Chinese government-owned company which had been penalized for providing missile technology to Pakistan and Iran.
The Times put a lot of effort into proving, once again, that people in capitalist societies have an incentive, and some would say a responsibility, to seek access to foreign markets. None of the companies listed in the article are exporting weapons to Iran or North Korea, an activity that might be of legitimate concern to U.S. national interests. Instead, they were participating in free trade. Iran, an active member of the global economy whether the West likes it or not, presents a desirable market for U.S. companies wishing to export products.
While The Times is quick to portray this trade in a negative light — they failed to mention that Israel, a country whose leadership has repeatedly called Iran an “existential threat” continues to import Iranian marble. So the main takeaway from the article appears to be that U.S. companies have no particular desire to curtail their foreign trade with Iran.
The ongoing lesson of the attempts to impose sanctions on Iran are that Iran is more than capable of substituting its Western trade relationships with trade from South America, Africa and Asia, and that no one outside of a small community of Iran-hawks and sanctions architects appear very concerned about the limited trade between the U.S. and Iran.
Perhaps this ongoing trade with Iran is a function of participating in a globalized economy. Sanctions are simply more difficult to implement and nearly impossible to enforce in an increasingly interconnected global trading system.
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