Socialism as a Cure for Exceptionalism

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/11/16/socialism-cure-exceptionalism

Environment: Drones Dropping Seeds Rather Than Bombs

China has planted 66 billion trees since 1978 in an effort to stem desertification. Their 'shelterbelt' program, which has shown mixed results, has its origins in a project implemented right here in the U.S., in the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, when the FDR Administration planted a thousand-mile line of trees to fight erosion on the Great Plains. The plan worked. In recent years, millions of federal dollars have been committed to restore and manage longleaf pine forests.

Banks: How Many Credit Default Swaps Does One Family Need?

Capitalism begets a financial industry with a quadrillion dollars in high-risk derivatives. The public bank of North Dakota, on the other hand, focuses on small business loans, often those unlikely to be issued by larger banks, except at prohibitive rates of interest.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, community banks, which hold less than one-fifth of industry assets, provide over half of all small business loans.

The Workplace: Closing the "Winner Take All" Wage Gap

The Evergreen Cooperative in Cleveland demonstrates the ability of a desperately poor community to succeed where a typical capitalist solution would appear to be unprofitable. Evergreen runs a solar-powered and LEED-certified laundry service for nearby hospitals and universities, and it is developing a hydroponic greenhouse for the cultivation of lettuce and other produce.

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A sense of exceptionalism drives our foreign policy, and distances the 'takers' in the 1% from the more social-minded and once-thriving middle class. The political revolution envisioned by Bernie Sanders will likely restore that social-mindedness.

As explained by Alperovitz: "What most people think of as socialism is that, with socialism, ownership of wealth and power is traditionally concentrated within the state and its national government. The vision that’s emerging in these experiments around the country is anathema to that. It begins in neighborhoods and communities, in cities and states. It’s about decentralizing power, changing the flow of power to localities rather than to the center."