A coffee cooperative in Minnesota makes money by creating fair trade and cutting out corporate middlemen.
Family farmers in Vermont survive and prosper by going organic and cooperative.
Health clinics in rural New Mexico are community supported and succeed in ways corporate health care and insurance cannot.
A taxi cab cooperative in Madison, Wisc., run by the cabbies, brings in $6 million per year.
A pharmacist in Austin, Texas, works less and accomplishes more since he quit working for a chain and set up a pharmacy that ignores insurance companies and sells the least expensive generic medicine.
Strippers in San Francisco have unionized.
A community bank in Chicago has $5 million in annual profits and has invested more than $2.9 billion in underserved communities.
Oregonians have boosted voter turnout with encouraging results by getting together on a bus.
Six states and two cities hold clean elections in these dirty United States, with highly encouraging results.
Voters in Kansas and Pennsylvania have tossed out evolution-deniers.
A training camp based on the work of Paul Wellstone has trained tons of successful candidates, including four now in Congress (where, however, they've been huge disappointments). And lots of people are inspired to vote (albeit oblivious to the scourge of election fraud making the counting of their votes uncertain).
ACORN (The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) continues to do all sorts of tremendous work, including in the area of living wage standards. In Florida in 2004, ACORN's minimum wage initiative, which John Kerry refused to support, picked up 71 percent of the vote, while Kerry hauled in 47 percent (although this story, too, is told as if we can be sure that 47 percent was Kerry's real total). Disclosure: I used to work for ACORN.
Grannies are slowing military recruitment, protecting threatened trees, and all sorts of things young people should be ashamed we aren't accomplishing.
The Fightin' Bob Fest in Wisconsin is a party other states might want to emulate.
And, finally, religious people can become environmentalists if you don't call it environmentalism.
DAVID SWANSON is a co-founder of After Downing Street, a writer and activist, and the Washington Director of Democrats.com. He is a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, and serves on the Executive Council of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, TNG-CWA. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including Press Secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, Media Coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as Communications Coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Swanson obtained a Master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia in 1997.
There is such a thing as good old American entrepreneurship, and it comes to the fore when elements entrenched power try to run the board. Sometimes it seemed as if entrepreneurship was dead in this country, but it was just being discouraged.
If all the transnational corporations did a Bear Stearns today, well, it would hurt, but it would not be the end of the world. It would just be the end of the transnational corporations. American entrepreneurship would spring up to fill the vacuum in remarkably short order.
by
John Sanchez Jr. (3 articles, 0 quicklinks, 6 diaries, 897 comments)
on Monday, March 31, 2008 at 8:22:17 AM
It's damn sure the international corporations do not pay their share for the benifits of operating in our country. They get away cheap by their 'donations' to various congressman's campaign funds. Where it is that these payments are not considered flat out bribes is to me only nomenclature. We the people pay billions to support the rich, who seemingly don't actually need our help that much. They rake it in because they can.
by
Roger (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 303 comments)
on Monday, March 31, 2008 at 11:47:18 AM
Thanks for the heads up on Jim Hightower's latest book, "Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow." It sounds like a great read.
Sometimes it is easy to get discouraged when our leaders are unresponsive to the people they are supposed to serve. And the MSM makes truly note worthy stories vanish down the rabbit hole.
Here's to everyone working hard and making a difference!
Thanks for all you do, and for OpEd News!
by
August Adams (10 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 387 comments)
on Monday, March 31, 2008 at 6:51:34 PM
