Waitrose, Gore-Tex, and various Euro co-ops haven't been "captured by various management groups."

And they're certainly more economically effective than corporate welfare queens like Boeing.

But do please keep waving your concern trolling around in the vain hope that it's going to persuade someone.

If nothing else, It's a useful education in how not to do rhetoric successfully.

This suggests that he is refighting the last war rather than fighting the next. Being good at extensive, material intensive growth is not going to be as handy a trait to have over the next fifty years.

And indeed, the "markets" that most of the very poorest low income nations need are not the "license for corporations to run amok" so-called "markets", but rather well regulated local food markets in agrarian producing areas, supported by grower cooperatives to maintain local roads to the markets and run credit unions and government job guarantee health clinics, schools, and agricultural proving fields and extension.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

    Oh, of course, that would be Gintis's argument; but it wouldn't be yours, would it?  You'd disagree with Gintis, wouldn't you?  

    It's just that you sound so much like you're a tout for Gintis--especially when you seem to align yourself in "implying" that you subscribe to a view which has it that " as much as some of us would like coops to be a real alternative to capitalist firms, they seem to not work so often and also to be easily captured by a management group - as the Comrade from Sweden's example makes clear. Perhaps there is no "real left" because we don't actually have a credible alternative to offer and all the angry signifying can't close the gap.

   I have a different theory.  There is a "real left," and you are dedicated to its character assassination. By my theory, you consistently employ dishonest techniques which include shilling for dishonest arguments against real left-wing opinion (pretending to mildly criticize them).  You cite as worthy of our time and attention those who declare themselves so, so sorry that "we can't do better than Krugman," and who allow as how it's such a gosh darn shame that co-ops just don't really work.  In fact, co-ops work fine when they're allowed to.  You, however, aren't interested in their having a reputation for effectiveness.  You're dedicated to, in your puny way here, trying to discredit what is an emintently creditable idea.

   You don't approve of Krugman or Stiglitz or Naomi Klein.  They're just not something-or-other enough for you; and yet, they're at once the best of the lot and the best of a heart-breakingly small lot.  There should be more like them and it would help significantly if there were.  But, instead of championing all that is worthy about their work, you denigrate everything about them and meanwhile after damning them with faint praise, you tout the likes of Gintis here, with faint damning.

   As character-references for leftist opinion go, I'd rather take my chances with Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly than with you.  

  May every passing innocent reader who chances here beware of taking you as an actual advocate of left-wing principles.

   You specialize in diversionary sterile arguments, time-wasting nonsense, fatuous representations of respectable views which are actually worthwhile--as this thread so well shows.  You're a spoiler, pissing in the village well and then complaining about a shortage of potable water.

"In such an environment it is not surprising that the ills of technology should seem curable only through the application of more technology..." John W Aldridge