Posted on Facebook 07/22/10

Posted on Facebook 07/22/10


By now, it should be clear to EveryOne, we need to supplant "the Administration" and Congress and work with all our Friends in the International Community to do the same. It will take a lot of organization and we are not ready to take the reins of the World Treasuries, yet.

The idea is a World Congress for Community Economic Development where we can work towards neighborhood/community, inter-community, and inter-regional solidarity and cooperation with local ecological economic redevelopment plans based on need and bypassing the International Finance "Community" as represented in the US by the Federal Reserve and participating Financial domineers and exploiters.

We bitch a lot on Facebook, and elsewhere, yet I have yet to see much in the way of bold leadership in defining an alternative, educating about it, and setting up an alternative National and World around Council of Elders to provide the dearth of Leadership that the cooperative communitarian/socialist/peace movement needs.

I'm hearing much too much silence. There is no need for you all to feel helpless and hopeless regarding an irrelevant and obsolete elite and the power that they yield over you. There is no room for complicity and tinkering with their system.

Please, I'm serious!!!

Cindy, Dan, Billy, Carl, EveryOne, let's stop wasting our precious time. The future is too important for the youth and the children and whatever hopes we have for our progeny!


In Peace, Friendship, Community, Cooperation, and Solidarity,

Mike Morin

Hold It! Advise Regarding the Use of Fossil Fuels

It is very important to the people of Nigeria and Venezuela and elsewhere to let social/environmental policy supercede "economic". In other words, be ecological about your economics and don't fall prey to the dictates of the so-called "free market"

Fossil fuel and potential fossil fuel producers are facing a dilemma in that if they want to grow their revenue streams they must yield to the gluttonous demand, mostly being perpetrated by the USA.

The USA must yield and commit to a massive reduction in their gluttony.

It is good advice that you all protect the cleanliness of your land and waters and to whatever extent it is relatively environmentally acceptable to extract (desert environments) that you steward those resources for optimizing your own habitat improvements and for future generations the whole world round.


In Peace, Friendship, Community, Cooperation, and Solidarity,

Mike Morin
Eugene, OR, USA

Letter to Fred Redmond ("Civil Rights" Rep.): AFL-CIO Blog 12/11/09

Liked your s'peach, Fred.

S'peace!

USW has signed a letter of intent with Mondragon. To me, and hopefully for the enlightened all, that should translate USW to United Socialist Workers.

IWW would best be International Workers of the World, until that ideal day when there are no borders. It should also be Industrious Workers of the World, because the concerns of humanity strongly translates to much happier workers (and May I add Equity holders) when there is artisanry in their occupation.

I have tried to communicate with Witherell, Garrard, and Trumka (and others). The following may be of interest:


12/7/09 Post to AFL-CIO Blog


Yes, Cherry, you are correct.

There have always been these tendencies relative to Labor/"Management" Relations, and the real exclusion of thinkers, organizers, agitators, and brave strikers and fighters who often if not most of the time had the best interests of workers and the benefit of the poor, and more recently the natural environment/resource base in their minds, their hearts, their bodies.

You are right that Organized Labor has been, as we so colorfully say, "blown out of the water", particularly in the last thirty years. I would venture a guess that many if not most who built the once strong labor movement in the USA, if alive, would admit that their complicity with Capitalists after they achieved a relative parity was a huge strategic mistake.

Did you know that Lawrence Summers, who was Clinton's Treasury Secretary and Geithner's boss and mentor, before the latter became Chief of the Federal Reserve of the Empire City was one of Ronald Reagan's Chief Economic Advisors?

Anyone who had a good introductory Economics course would know that Say's "Law", which supply-side economics is based on, is totally fallacious.

We now find ourselves in the very precarious position of a post over-supply side economy, where the off-shoring has deadened demand and accompanied by an imploding finite resource supply.

That's all for now.

It looks like the best we can do, these days, is keep chippin' away.

I have a sincere Cynical hope that that will change soon.


In Peace, Friendship, Community, Cooperation, and Solidarity,

Mike Morin
Peoples' Equity Union
Eugene, OR
(541) 343-3808

Response to AFL-CIO Report on Columbian Union Deaths

It's probably a safe assumption that the PSUV and their associated and high solidarity Unions are not in the least way responsible for the death of Union members in Columbia.

Au contraire, whatever tension being minded, felt, and experienced between Venezuela and Columbia stems from the basic fundamental paradigm difference of "Free Trade" (i.e. USA and mostly European Lackey Capitalist Corporate dominated) and lack of "Fair Trade" and owner/worker relationships and environmental stewardship concerns (the puppet International Capitalists' resistance to the popular ALBA Movement).

AFL-CIO has a window of opportunity to align correctly with the signing of a letter of intent between the USW and Mondragon (like the Basque region of Spain the ore and the energy for furnace fires was/is depleted and the heart mind bodies were/need to be dedicated to new solutions which were/will be libertarian cooperative communitarian in design, form and materialism.

The USW acronym needs to be redesignated as United Socialist Workers and become the direction of AFL-CIO and our relation to international with the goal of world unity and cooperation.

Whereas, the "One Big Union" was the slogan of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) so should it be as the Industrious Workers of the World and in transition the International Workers of the World, as resource constraints and humanity moves us more towards the relocalization artisanry opportunities for everybuddy, leaving none behind.

We can unite with the now aligned nations or you can hold out for a White House USA Summit of the G(one).

It's our choice.


In Peace, Friendship, Community, Cooperation, and Solidarity,

Mike Morin
Peoples' Equity Union
Eugene, OR, USA

With Respect To World/European Social Forum

With Respect To World/European Social Forum

Regarding the planned European Social Forum of 2010:


Good to see World Organizing manifesting itself in a regional context.


To whatever extent we can get people together to introduce, discuss, inculcate, and progress the ecosocialist agenda and that of world unity and cooperation, the forums will hopefully continue to serve a purpose.


One problem that I have is the "jet set" modality of the participants. I could be and hope to be and probably am very wrong about that statement.


We need to move beyond the world round organizing and communicating and bring such to local and regional levels. A good conceptual initiative is The Peoples' Agenda for Alternative Regionalisms www.alternative-regionalisms.org/?page_id2 . They have an excellent agenda. Not surprisingly those of us within the belly of the Leviathan (The USA Economic/Military hegemony) have no representation in the organization.


It is very frustrating trying to organize within the local community and region in the Eugene, OR, USA. People here are either brain-dead, complacent with their current competitive advantage, drugged, tobaccoed, and alcoholic, cowardly, and/or otherwise non-committal. To many, the concept of peace means withdrawal and the absence of hassle. The monster is too damn big in the USA.


Hugo Chavez has been relatively successful in organizing the ALBA coalition, the Latin American/African Alliance (ASA), cooperative ties with Iran and Russia and China. The USA and his European allies are still too uncooperative and hell-bent on their premier role in a world hierarchy to join such an alliance of world unity, equity, and cooperation.


They (the USA and their Fascist complicit media) will continue to obfuscate and pathetically beat the war drum while continuing a self-interested ecocidal, suicidal and attempted genocidal linear trajectory Capitalism. They will fail, but how much damage will they do in the mean time?


In Peace, Friendship, Community, Cooperation, and Solidarity,


Mike Morin


Peoples Equity Union

Eugene, OR, USA

Peace Flag Project

Here's a great socialist project and I'm serious about doing it.

Let's replace all the national flags (at the UN General Assembly and everywhere else) with the Rainbow Peace Flag in all the languages of the world and in regions/locales.

Anybuddy want to work on that project?


In Peace/Paz, Friendship, Community, Cooperation, and Solidarity,

Mike Morin
Jefferson Westside Neighborhood
Eugene-Springfield and Vicinity
Willamette Valley Watershed
Pacific NW of the North American Continent
Finite Planet Earth
Solar System
Infinite Universe

Comparative Economic Systems - Community/Worker Ownership and Benefit

It has been a long time since I studied Comparative Economic Systems (in the 70's) and, needless to say, much has changed in the former Soviet Union sphere, and not much was ever known and/or documented in the "Western world" about "economic systems" in the Peoples Republic of China and in Cuba and other places. Much of what we hear or ever heard about changes in China, especially since the passing of Mao must be filtered through the lens of Western propaganda. With respect to Cuba, we get both reactionary Capitalist propaganda and eutopian socialist propaganda (such as the organic gardening and farming movement).

With regard to China we get charges of "State Capitalism", with respect to Cuba, we get promising reports of cooperative communitarianism in action.

Suffice to say, there is no perfect model, nor in a dynamic world rife with the horrors and continuing horrors of human history, could we expect such.

I hope that there are people on this list that remember and understand more about the economic systems in the second (Soviet sphere) and third (China, Cuba, and others) world when they were functioning at their best and their deterioration and/or adaptation in relation to the Capitalist pressures that have been applied. Such could lead to some interesting discussion and perhaps, at the risk of losing my ultimate cynicism, move us forward towards world unity in the hope of realizing an economic democracy.

From this point on, I want to discuss attempts to democratize the economy in the Capitalist world. There have been attempts at succession in the form of utopian communities such as New Harmony and various others that I can't remember to name. There have been attempts to compete, with mutual organizations (one person/one vote), the most salient being credit unions (which are very far from exemplary because they are in the business of making loans (reduced usury is still usury in a Capitalist Financial System which is fundamentally usurious)) and mutual insurance companies, which by their very existence in the Capitalist system have to compete for "investors" and therefore, and by definition of the workers' cooperative, can only hold Capitalist portfolios (for-profit companies).

There are marketing cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, and producer cooperatives (not really owners' cooperatives because they are (or were?) found mostly, if not exclusively, in the farming sector and it is well known about the history and existence of the dominance of the credit sector relative to farms. Such producer cooperatives really can't be considered workers' cooperatives because of the nature of their relationship to wage labor (particularly burdened by seasonality).

There appears to be an effort, if not a tiny minority of success of workers' cooperatives, in Capitalist Europe, Africa, South America, and Asia. I say this because of the existence of offices of the International Cooperative Alliance in these areas.

The ALBA Initiative may be a promising one, with the initiative of the Bolivarian Latin and South to form the Bancosur (or Bank of the South) as a counter-action to the World Bank, IMF and hegemonic usurious domination of the dollar. The one exception that I take to Bancosur is that they are calling it a Bank, implying that there is an investor class, although it being perhaps State Monies garnered fron Nationalized Oil Companies and other such firms, and that it will make by definition usurious loans. If they are loans, they are by definition usurious and equity sharing arrangements as I have proposed via a Peoples Equity Union would be preferable, more equitable, and more constructive.

Furthermore nationalizations are border arbitrary and based on a certain amount of State Fascism and confiscation. While, the argument can be made that such is necessary in the face of the unfair Competitive Advantage, inequitable, and ecologically irresponsible practices of neo-liberal International Capitalists, the ideal is not the nation-state, but the locale, the village, the neighborhood. I think that our world leader, Hugo Chavez, is hip to this, having read about his understanding and appreciation of Maoist principles.

I wonder how we, in the Financial North, escape from under the crush of Centuries of Capitalist domination, especially in light of the fact that we have such a relatively large minion of ownership class/consumers amongst us. They are not likely no listen to, or try to understand, an economic system based on human needs not their selfish gain and one with a mission and principles of inclusion, humanity, equity, quality of life, environmental/public health and wellness, sustainability, and peace for the purpose of ecological economic redevelopment.


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A very famous recent experiment in economy of scale has been the Mondragon Cooperative Society in the Basque Region of Spain. Suffice to say, as they continued to expand, they ran into non-cooperating Capitalist pressures, coupled with the overall deteriorating economic conditions in the Capitalist world, it has caused them to buckle; to compromise their ideals, and to begin to experience business failures.

In the United States and elsewhere, Corporations sometimes offer Employee Stock Ownership (ESOP) Plans to workers, thus making workers into small-time Capitalists. Such workers probably tend to hold these relatively small holdings closely. So, if the Corporation is faring well then the workers reap some of the benefits of being Capitalists (dividends and to a much lesser extent profit-taking on speculation and equity trading). In the past twenty years or so, particularly in the Midwestern United States Capitalists have negotiated increasing use of ESOPs in lieu of wages to sell obsolete capital to workers (including management).

There have been some initiatives to organize workers into workers' cooperatives in the failing mill regions of northern New England to sell the obsolete capital to the workers' cooperatives. Semi-fortunately, they were repeatedly advised by a Consulting Group in Boston, not to buy. However, when the mills closed they were left out of work.

In a quasi-syndicalist "movement" by Labor Unions in Capitalist Europe, the Unions in some countries bargained for or legislated equal representation with the Capitalists on the Boards of Directors of Corporations. This is called co-determination. In the United States, the only known or well known instance of Union Representation on a major Board of Directors was ONE SEAT given to the UAW as part of the US Government bailout of Chrysler (before they were bought by Mercedes).

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Summing up, I implore you all to consider the Peoples Equity Union concept, working together with the Bancosur as the model for fundamental economic restructuring.

Community Betterment everywhere!

If we work together, finally we can realize a world of unity and cooperation based on such purpose not the defeat, extinction, exploitation, and dominance of others and their resources as has been the modus operandi of the Capitalist Colonialist status quo.


Mike Morin
Peoples Equity Union
(for Community Betterment)