 You know as the corporate capitalist system decays There's growing pain at one level of ordinary experience, but there's also growing Sense that the welfare state or the social democratic strategies are basically over and we could go into an analysis Why that is decline of labor globalization, etc in this country race issues But unlike a collapse which might have produced a crisis political shift Maybe to the right. Yeah, maybe to the left The stagnation and decay and pain is forcing people either to innovate Or things get worse. There's no solution from the state So what we're seeing is two three levels one. There are many many projects very practical. I can describe some of those There's also an explosion of ideas people thinking through what does this all mean? Where does it go and there's new activism around this? I would say the prehistory of a big movement is happening not them We're not yet at a place where there's an extraordinary political movement. It's the preamble to that preliminary questions so Examples the most the most pressing the most interesting example is the work in Cleveland which people have heard about evergreen. It's called It's a comp. It's a very poor neighborhood 40,000 people almost entirely black Average income maybe 20,000 a year, which is very low Unemployment rate of maybe 40% very hot. It's a very painful black community. So in that community is a series of worker owned cooperatives Connected by a nonprofit corporation so not just for the workers, but to build the community is the concept and then and they're large they're rather large one of them is the largest I think yes the largest Greenhouse in any urban area in the United States. So it produces three million heads of lettuce a year It's very significant. These are not little co-ops people often think of co-ops is only small Another one is an industrial scale Laundry maybe the greenest laundry in that part of the country a third of the water or a third of the heat Etc for in for hospitals and universities. It's a large industrial scale and then there's a solar installation company all cooperatives But what makes it unique is this connection with the community. So some of the profits go to the community not just to the workers and Also to start new ones in the same structure On top of that in this area are universities and hospitals very big ones One of the biggest in the world the Cleveland Clinic is there and Case Western Reserve University University Hospital They purchased they buy Three billion with a B in goods and services every year Not that's in addition to salaries in addition to construct just what they buy none of it from this area So this group has been able we've been helping them use some of these purchases a lot of it from public money for healthcare and education for universities Use these purchases to help stabilize Instead of big corporations a structure that is cooperative complex Community building and green and trying to use this process to recirculate and build an entirely different structure Radically decentralized but also aware of how to deal with the market in this sense It's like a planning system because you're using public quasi public purchasing So that's so-called Cleveland model. It's become a model that many parts of the country people are trying to replicate It's very interesting because once that we were talking earlier you get a model Many many people begin to say well you can do something They don't realize that you can do something until somebody does it and then many is it Lance of Georgia is doing this there's one in the Washington DC or one in Jacksonville, Florida's being again beginning to explore it Jackson, Mississippi then for many parts of the country or Pittsburgh are beginning to explore developing this kind of problem This kind of solution because they can't solve it the old way the old Social Democratic welfare state doesn't work And there is no other solution the market doesn't work. So the pain gets worse But there's no crisis So out of that process people are just beginning to say, you know We can do something ourselves and then begin to use the state and use other resources In this way to build a different structure. There's very participatory a very green very community oriented It's not this top-down state socialism. It's it's not the welfare state with Corporations and the social democratic structures. It's an attempt to rebuild a different vision But very practical Absolutely practical what we've discovered and our group has been involved in helping this is that in local communities This which is worker ownership of the means of production very radical But it's very practical and it's not state like the Soviet state So we find even people who think that of themselves as conservatives They think of themselves because they believe in individual hard work. They see people working hard. They see local structure They see participation. They don't see a big state. So they find it very positive not negative Nationally in the United States. We have a debate about ideological debate But locally it's very different because it has to be but I think the key is it has to be very practical And once it's practical, we find very very strong interest You can if we have time we can talk about the historic roots of these kinds of ideas in Anarcho-Cumulant commutal theory and there's many different traces that you can take it back or we talked about John Dewey but more important today is that it meets a need and Resonates with the democratic spirit as well as practical need So that would be an example There are many other things like that happening in the United States now out of this context of pain out of the difficulties