Home > Author > Gar Alperovitz
1 " The power of the big fish in general to regroup is hardly restricted to banking. When Standard Oil was broken up in 1911, the immediate effect was to replace a national monopoly with a number of regional monopolies controlled by many of the same Wall Street interests. Ultimately, the regional monopolies regrouped: In 1999 Exxon (formerly Standard Oil Company of New Jersey) and Mobil (formerly Standard Oil Company of New York) reconvened in one of the largest mergers in US history. In 1961 Kyso (formerly Standard Oil of Kentucky) was purchased by Chevron (formerly Standard Oil of California); and in the 1960s and 1970s Sohio (formerly Standard Oil of Ohio) was bought by British Petroleum (BP), which then, in 1998, merged with Amoco (formerly Standard Oil of Indiana).The tale of AT&T is similar. As the result of an antitrust settlement with the government, on January 1, 1984, AT&T spun off its local operations so as to create seven so-called Baby Bells. But the Baby Bells quickly began to merge and regroup. By 2006 four of the Baby Bells were reunited with their parent company AT&T, and two others (Bell Atlantic and NYNEX) merged to form Verizon.So the hope that you can make a banking breakup stick (even if it were to be achieved) flies in the face of some pretty daunting experience. Also, note carefully a major political fact: The time when traditional reformers had enough power to make tough banking regulation really work was the time when progressive politics still had the powerful institutional backing of strong labor unions.But as we have seen, that time is long ago and far away. "
― Gar Alperovitz , What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution
2 " Put another way, the deepening difficulties also suggest the possibility that we may now be well into the prehistory of the next American revolution, that Option Six may ultimately involve longer-term changes much greater than many have contemplated. It is never possible to know in advance what may or may not occur. Nonetheless, such a time is a time when it is also our responsibility to begin to consider the fundamental question of how a "next system" might and should be organized, a time to begin to explore new ways to achieve the great American values that can no longer be achieved by the dying system. "
3 " … our nation's truly critical problems are built into the very structure of the economic and political system; they are not something passing in the night that will go away even when we elect forward-looking leaders and actively pressure them to move in a different direction. "
4 " First, the very idea that there should be any serious kind of health insurance for Americans (beyond tiny elites) simply did not have much reality until World War II—and it was (again) the war that gave it reality. With wartime labor scarce, wage-price controls were enacted to keep bidding wars in check. Corporations, unable to offer more pay, tried to compete with benefits instead. The modern idea of widespread employer-provided health insurance developed as a strategy to attract wartime workers, and continued in many industries after the war, especially during the boom era. "
5 " But if the system is the problem, the truth is that there will not be satisfactory answers in the here and now for lots of people.That is one of the (painful) ways you know that the problem is systemic.Which means that either you build forward no matter what, or you lose. Period. "
6 " The institutional requirements of community pose fundamental issues that neither corporate capitalism nor state socialism ever took seriously. The critical point of departure is the question: Can you have Democracy with a big D in any system if you don't have democracy with a small d in the actual experience and everyday community life of ordinary everyday citizens? "
7 " We are not "merely" talking about nurturing democratic community practice; we are talking about community practice as the basis of fundamental experiences of critical importance to the nation as a whole and of democracy in general. The answer to the question "Can you have genuine Democracy with a big D in a continental nation if its citizens have little genuine experience of democracy with a small d in their own lives?" is simple: No. "
8 " The most recent estimate is that a mere 400 individuals in the United States now own more wealth than the bottom 180 million Americans taken together -- a degree of wealth concentration that is accurately, not rhetorically, properly designated medieval. "
