What would democracy look like if it first existed at the workplace rather than in the woesome consignment of America’s party-politics, which renders our dreams for The Golden Square into Squalid Shit-mash? For this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt have a discussion about this paradise where workers actually experience freedom, equity and solidarity with two folks who’ve jump-started one of the first media co-ops in Southern California: Dan Nowman Niswander, co-creator of The Nowman Show and Dr. George Kallas, a political analyst and Political Science Professor at Miramar College in San Diego. We’ll learn about their chance-encounter and their epiphany to do the mind-meld by creating Arete Media Productions. Principally though, they will discuss why we mislabel democracy in Da Yankeelands, define what co-ops are, and also explain what makes worker-owned co-ops so very visionary in our Age of Workplace Tyranny & DollarDoom.
Mentioned In This Episode:
Erick Olin Wright in Jacobin: “How to Be an Anticapitalist Today”
Jim McGuigan’s Cool Capitalism
How Neoliberalism Ramps Up Status-Games in University Life, and In Doing So, Creates Hierarchies of Abject Misery for the Rest of Us:
Mike Rose for Inside Higher Ed: “Who Is Smarter Than Whom?”
Benjamin Ginsberg in the Washington Monthly: “Administrators Ate My Tuition”
Academic Rankings for Various Teaching Levels of Status
Brandon Jordan in The Nation: “Building Student Power Through Participatory Budgeting”
Participatory Budgeting Project: What Exactly Is It?
Jason Rhode in Paste Magazine: “Kamala Harris Offers No New Hope”
Sherwood Ross in Veterans Today: “U.S. Imperialism Abroad Creating Police State at Home”
E. Douglas Kihn in Truthout: “The US Is Not a Democracy and Never Was”
Naked Capitalism: Interview with David Graeber on Democracy in America
Does “UC” Stand for the University of California or the University of Capitalism?
Lawrence Hunter in Forbes: “Why James Madison Was Wrong About a Large Republic”
Ellen Bresler Rockmore in The New York Times: “How Texas Teaches History”
Gail Collins in The New York Review of Books: “How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us”
Home of Eugene Debs: Terre Haute, Indiana
Biography of Eugene Debs: A Man Who Received a Million Votes for President While Still in Prison
To Paraphrase Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Real Duty in Gaining a University Education Is to Ask, ‘Why?’
David Graeber on Why Going to University Is About Returning to the Questions You Had as a Child: “Lecture by David Graeber: Resistance In A Time Of Total Bureaucratization / Maagdenhuis Amsterdam”
Is the Internet Killing Critical Thinking? If Not, What Is? Nicholas Carr in Wired: “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires the Brain”
Dr. Paul Cartledge in BBC News: “Ancient History in Depth: The Democratic Experiment [in Greece]”
Joshua Kurlantzick in The New Republic: “The Great Democracy Meltdown”
The Nowman Show: KPFK Presents Richard Wolff at the Musician's Union, Hollywood
Democracy at the Work: A 501(c)3 Organization Created by Richard Wolff to Inspire the Growth and Expansion of Unitary Worker Co-Ops. This Non-Profit Educational Organization Was Inspired by Wolff’s Book, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism
Matthew Snyder’s First Confrontation with Crunchies & Organic Granola: Bellingham, Washington’s Community Food Co-Op
Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story, which details two well-regarded unitary co-ops: Alvarado Street Bakery and Isthmus Engineering
Noam Chomsky’s On Anarchism
Equality of Opportunity Versus Equality of Outcome: Dylan Matthews in Vox: “The Case Against Equality of Opportunity”
Matt, Not Michael Dukakis! It Was Vice-President Dan Quayle Who Flunked a Kid By Suggesting the Incorrect Spelling for ‘Potato’ as ‘Potatoe’
First Nations and the Indigenous Did Not View Land as Personal Property or an Economic Fridge: Woo Hoo! A Lesson Plan for 6th to 8th Grade Students
Europe’s Diseased Paperwork as Freedom: A Title-to-Land
A Historical Guide of Worker Cooperatives: Past, Present and Possible Futures
Dan Niswander’s Clever Lyrical Reference to Pink Floyd’s Song “Brain Damage”: “The lunatic is in the hall./ The lunatics are in my hall./ The paper holds their folded faces to the floor/ And every day the paper boy brings more.”
Mondragon’s Miracle Backlight: A Documentary About This Gift from the Basque Region
Gar Alperovitz’s America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, Our Democracy