There are also various types of cooperatives. These are:
Housing
Utility
Agricultural
Credit Union
Federal or Secondary Cooperatives
Ultimately, the primary advantage of the co-op model is that it allows us more freedom from the corporations and a model that could eventually lessen the impact of the sociopathology of the corporate empire. It is well known that the "mom and pop" stores and services, selling groceries, medicine, clothing, etc, were taken over by the monstrous growth of corporations such as Walmart, Monsanto, and Rite Aid. Perhaps it is time to move back to the local businesses of the old "mom and pop" stores. If you want to grow relatively bigger (not so gigantic that you monopolize and colonize the world!), then you incorporate as a cooperative enterprise, in service to the workers, patrons, communities, and Earth whose work supports them.
There is no service that is being provided that is not currently governed by megalithic corporations. Even in fields such as mental health, there are overseers of services that are through private, for-profit enterprises. Thus while mental health services to the people are cut, a second layer of management has been inserted that oversees what used to be overseen by government auditors. Thus we contract out much of our administrative care to private organizations. The result of this is that we have systems such as APS Health Care. These secondary corporations were initiated to oversee the billing and to help police the potential for fraudulent business and consumption. Instead, they have been co-opted by the primary corporations to optimize profits. The benefits of wealth are funneled from those in need to those in greed.
Such corporations are another spoke in the corporate wheel, creating another layer of abuse of the common wealth. As such, APS Health Care in February of 2011 was required to p ay $13 million to settle a false claims act case because they failed to provide services to Georgia's medicaid population. In relationship to this case, United States Attorney Sally Quillian Yates said of the $13 million settlement:
In this time of tight budgets and rising health care costs, the state of Georgia tried to improve its services to its Medicaid recipients by contracting with APS Healthcare. But instead of providing improved efficiency and effectiveness the company billed for, APS Healthcare took Medicaid's money for itself and left some of our most vulnerable citizens without the aid they deserved.
This is what happens in privatization and corporatization. In the mental health field, this oftentimes goes even deeper than billing. Many times externalized for-profit corporations will supervise the work therapists are doing and will serve as supervisors to supervisors (though they are oftentimes called "consultants"). These services are at extra cost during a time that money is being cut from programs.
Privatization is not cost effective. Nor are corporations more cost effective. All the costs are externalized onto the workers, tax-payers, and the environment, while all the profits are internalized to the management and stock-holders. Money rewards money, not work or service. We end up with the 1% vs. 99% conundrum, so recently pointed out by the disempowered and squelched by the powers-that-be.
Therefore, it would be advantageous for us to begin adopting business models such as cooperatives to get our needs met. Furthermore, I would argue for a diversity of ways in which to help people get their needs met in addition to cooperatives, such as time banking (see link below) , local currencies, and gift economies.
Perhaps we are just plain stuck in thinking that the way things are is the way things will always be. This is an unnatural, unsustainable, and impossible assumption. Nature is forever changing. Indeed, one of the Native American tribes called her "Changing Woman". The Way of Changing Woman entails death. There is no change without a death of sorts. A baby is not born if he refuses to die to being a fetus. As everything vital dies, then so too must corporate capitalism.
When it does die, people will look at this era of time and feel the horror of our psychopathology. Just as we labeled many of our ancestors as being ignorant, our descendants will label us as ignorant barbarians...a despicable tapeworm sucking the life-blood from this beautiful blue planet. That is, of course, if humankind survives the psychopathology of Corporate Rule so that we even have any descendants! If we continue in our current pattern, there will be nobody to look back at us and marvel at how stupid we were. And, if some of us do survive, is this how we want our future generations to look upon us?
We have a model that renders class and cultural warfare obsolete: Cooperative Enterprise. Let's use it! With true cooperation on a personal, social, political, and business levels--recognizing the common ground we stand upon--we can bring about an evolution rather than revolution, and step beyond the "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" vicious cycle. We can build a political economy in which governance of, by, and for the people (and planet) replaces oppressive bosses altogether.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
1
1
