"All I Wanted Was a Pepsi" The Decline of ‘Big Soda’

from The New York Times:



The drop in soda consumption represents the single largest change in the American diet in the last decade.
By MARGOT SANGER-KATZ

Five years ago, Mayor Michael A. Nutter proposed a tax on soda in Philadelphia, and the industry rose up to beat it back.

Soda lobbyists made campaign contributions to local politicians and staged rallies, with help from allies like the Teamsters union and local bottling companies. To burnish its image, the industry donated $10 million to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

It worked: The soda tax proposal never got out of a City Council committee.

It’s a familiar story. Soda taxes have also flopped in New York State and San Francisco. So far, only superliberal Berkeley, Calif., has succeeded in adopting such a measure over industry objections.

The obvious lesson from Philadelphia is that the soda industry is winning the policy battles over the future of its product. But the bigger picture is that soda companies are losing the war.

Even as anti-obesity campaigners like Mr. Nutter have failed to pass taxes, they have accomplished something larger. In the course of the fight, they have reminded people that soda is not a very healthy product. They have echoed similar messages coming from public health researchers and others — and fundamentally changed the way Americans think about soda.

Over the last 20 years, sales of full-calorie soda in the United States have plummeted by more than 25 percent. Soda consumption, which rocketed from the 1960s through 1990s, is now experiencing a serious and sustained decline.

Sales are stagnating as a growing number of Americans say they are actively trying to avoid the drinks that have been a mainstay of American culture. Sales of bottled water have shot up, and bottled water is now on track to overtake soda as the largest beverage category in two years, according to at least one industry projection.

The drop in soda consumption represents the single largest change in the American diet in the last decade and is responsible for a substantial reduction in the number of daily calories consumed by the average American child. From 2004 to 2012, children consumed 79 fewer sugar-sweetened beverage calories a day, according to a large government survey, representing a 4 percent cut in calories over all. As total calorie intake has declined, obesity rates among school-age children appear to have leveled off.

The change is happening faster in Philadelphia than in the country as a whole. Daily soda consumption among teenagers, a group closely tracked by federal researchers, dropped sharply — by 24 percent — from 2007 to 2013, compared with about 20 percent for the country. Last month, the city Department of Public Health reported a sustained decline in childhood obesity over the last seven years.

Those reductions are not accidents. The soda tax didn’t pass. But the debate about it, along with a series of related city policies, helped discourage people from drinking soda.

The Philadelphia school district forbids the sale of sugary beverages in schools and limits their availability in public vending machines. The city provides financial incentives for corner stores to highlight healthy foods. And it sends educators into public school classrooms to teach children about nutrition.

Philadelphia, which also has one of the country’s strictest menu-labeling laws, for two years ran radio and television ads encouraging parents to think twice about serving sugary drinks to their children.

“It’s a fight every day, and you just have to stick with it,” said Mayor Nutter, who will leave office in January. “You can’t give up, because it’s just really important.”

But while Philadelphia’s enthusiastic attention has led to outsize results, soda consumption is declining even in cities and towns that have not made big local investments in obesity prevention and public health. The public health community has coalesced around an anti-soda message, and health officials and industry experts agree that public attitudes about soda and consumer tastes are shifting in ways that may be permanent.

The beverage industry continues to fight these shifts — and especially to fight taxes on its products. But it is also aware that after decades of selling a handful of popular, iconic products, changing public attitudes are leading to a profound change in the nature of the business.
The New Tobacco

This summer, executives from the beverage industry gathered at the Harvard Club in New York City. The annual event, hosted by the trade magazine Beverage Digest, featured speakers from the three largest soda makers — Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group — along with smaller upstarts, like SodaStream, the home seltzer maker company, and Talking Rain, which makes no-calorie carbonated fruit drinks called Sparkling Ice.

Along the wood-paneled walls, croissants, fruit and silver urns of coffee were laid out. But the hot drinks were largely ignored. The industry’s rapidly expanding bounty was displayed in the center of the room. In an array of ice buckets were Snapple Sorta Sweet, Squirt, Tropicana Farmstand juices, Lipton Sparkling Iced Tea. In a back corner, attendees could make their own lime-basil and coriander apple blossom sodas with a SodaStream machine.

Such events give companies a chance to show their stuff and brag about their successes, but there was nothing bubbly about the atmosphere. This is an industry grasping to master the shifting market.

As John Sicher, Beverage Digest’s publisher, put it in his blunt opening remarks: “It’s been a really challenging decade. It would have been a lot rougher if not for bottled water.”

As sales of the companies’ mainstay products have declined in the United States, the companies have scrambled to offer new products better suited to consumer tastes. Iced teas, sports drinks and flavored waters are smaller but fast-growing segments of the beverage industry. Coca-Cola, for example, has nearly doubled the number of individual products it offers, to 700 this year from 400 in 2004. And companies are increasingly experimenting with smaller packages for sodas, for which customers will pay a higher price per ounce. At the Harvard Club, there was a 7.5-ounce Pepsi minican, which promised “real sugar” instead of high-fructose corn syrup, and a diminutive eight-ounce bottle of Sprite.

“There’s consumers out there that don’t want to consume too much,” said Regan Ebert, the senior vice president for marketing at Dr Pepper Snapple Group, in her presentation on how the company markets its products to Hispanic audiences. The small cans, she said, “do a good job of solving that need for consumers.”


READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/upshot/soda-industry-struggles-as-consumer-tastes-change.html?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email&referer&_r=0

10 Reasons to Hate Capitalism

from Dangerous Minds

 

10. Capitalist corporations suffer from a personality disorder characterized by enduring antisocial behavior, diminished empathy and remorse, and are rewarded by shareholders for acting that way. If corporations could be sent to a criminal psychologist’s office they’d be diagnosed as psychopaths and locked away forever.

 



 

9. Capitalism encourages greed. But greed is only good for capitalists. For normal people it is anti-social and soul destroying, not to mention very bad for our communities, which rely on altruism, compassion and a generalized concern for others.

 



 

8. Capitalism is a system of minority privilege and class rule based on the private ownership of means of livelihood. This gives a few rich people the power to buy and sell jobs, which means they can build or destroy entire communities that depend on those jobs.

 



 

7. Capitalists praise freedom and individualism, but they destroy freedom and individualism for everyone but themselves. The vast majority of us who work for a living are daily asked to uncritically follow orders, to act as if we are machines, and limit our creativity to what profits our bosses.

 



 

6. Capitalists denigrate cooperation and collectivism, but create mass production processes that rely on both from workers. Their system requires us to be cogs in a giant profit-making machine, but because they fear the power this gives us we are told working together for our own interests is illegitimate and bad. Thus capitalists undermine unions and other organizations that encourage workers to cooperate with each other and act collectively.

 



 

5. Capitalism requires the largest propaganda system the world has ever known to convince us it is the only system possible. It turns people into consumers through advertising, marketing, entertainment and even so-called news. Millions around the world are employed to use their creativity to twist our feelings of love, desire, human solidarity and fairness into tools of manipulation, so that ever more profits can flow into the hands of a tiny minority.

 



 

4. Capitalism is a system in which the principle of one dollar, one vote, dominates that of one person, one vote. Those who own the most shares (bought with their dollars) control giant corporations, many of which are more powerful than all but a few governments. Rich people also use their money to dominate the elections that are supposed to give us all one, equal vote. Under capitalism those with the most money are entitled to the most goods and services as well as the most say in directing our governments and our economy.

 



 

3. Capitalism proclaims the virtue of naked self-interest, but self-interest without regard for morality, ecology or common sense leads to environmental degradation, destruction of indigenous communities, colonialism, war and other forms of mass destruction. Self-interest leads capitalists to seek profit absolutely everywhere, regardless of the damage done to other people and the health of the planet’s ecosystem. Self-interest leads capitalists to destroy any rival economic system or way of thinking (such as indigenous communal land use and respect for nature) that can be a barrier to their endless quest for profit.

 



 

2. Capitalism is not a friend to democracy but ultimately its enemy. When pushed, capitalists choose capitalism over democracy. If people use democracy to weaken the power of capitalists the rich and powerful turn to various forms of fascism in order to keep their privileges.

 



 

1. Capitalism is a cancer taking over our planet. Capitalists make profits from global warming, from destroying our oceans, from pumping ever more chemicals into the atmosphere and from patenting everything they can, including life itself. Only by getting rid of capitalism can we rescue our environment.

This is a guest post from Gary Engler. Engler is a Canadian journalist, novelist (The Year We Became Us, about the Saskatchewan Doctors Strike) and co-author of the recently released The New Commune-ist Manifesto: Workers of the World It Really is Time to Unite. You can find more of his work at the New Communeist website

political cartoon of the year.

'Send Bankers to Jail'

from Common Dreams

Following Barclays' Scandal, Stiglitz says 'Send Bankers to Jail'
Without threat of prosecution, says Nobel economist, expect little to change

Nobel Prize winner and former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz has called recent revelations that Barclays and other large banks colluded to defraud their costumers by artificially leveraging international interest rates a "textbook illustration" of how banks use privileged information and lax oversight to reap rewards for themselves while savaging the wider societies in which they operate.

In an interview with The Independent on Monday, Stiglitz argued (with Barclay's as just the most recent example) that bankers -- without threat of prosecution or jail time -- would continue to use their elevated status to exploit weak regulations, consolidate power, and avoid accountability.

The scandal at Barclays claimed the resignation on Sunday of Chairman Marcus Agius after traders at the bank admitted manipulating Libor, a baseline interest rate used by banks to set lending costs around the world and which acts as the benchmark, according to an estimate by Reuters, on $350 trillion in derivatives and other financial products.

Stiglitz argues, in paraphrase by interviewer Ben Chu, "that breaking the economic and political power that has been amassed by the financial sector in recent decades, especially in the US and the UK, is essential if we are to build a more just and prosperous society. The first step, he says, is sending some bankers to jail."

The banks, said Stiglitz in the interview, "create the non-transparent market" by dominating the legislative process that is suppose to control it. "For every meeting that the government has with [bankers], it [should] have to have a meeting with the labor groups and the representatives of civil society," he said. "The problem today is that there’s not equality of access."

And it's not just the banks, Stiglitz says. "Everybody knew that there was this scope for Libor manipulation. Many economists couldn’t believe that it wasn’t going on. We’re focusing on the bankers but at the micro economic level this goes on all the time. I was party to a suit in the state of Alaska. Oil companies were supposed to pay the state royalties – 60 per cent of the net price, the price of oil net of their transportation costs. They manipulated the transportation costs. They had to pay the state of Alaska $1bn. Stealing a penny a time. For every gallon, they stole a penny, or a fraction of a penny. This is in the nature Adam Smith’s invisible hand when there is a lack of transparency."

In a related analysis, Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith, wonders why the Barclays' Libor scandal caused such justifiable outrage in the UK, but generated barely a murmor in the US. And separately, Reuters tracks developments in the Barclays' case as embattled CEO Bob Diamond fends off criticism after Agius' departure.

# # #

The rot of Citizen's United and the grim future of American democracy

from Richard Metzger at DangerousMinds

I realize that I keep saying this, but it’s true and the best context I can offer: Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce is one of the—I think—top two political writers in America today, the other being Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who is far better known. Everyone with even a passing interest about what happened with the Walker recall in Wisconsin needs to read Pierce’s spot-on post-mortem on the vote, “The Wisconsin Recall Aftermath: Scott Walker Steps Right Up into the Pocket of Those Who Got Him There.” Seriously, it’s a must-read if ever there was one and so is his blog, which I encourage you to bookmark.

I’ve been noticing with satisfaction in the past few days how some of Pierce’s posts at Esquire’s Politics blog have been zooming up the charts at reddit—and I’m trying to encourage more DM readers to discover Pierce’s writing, too—like this on-target statement about how big money/big corruption is destroying America. Apologies to Charles Pierce for snagging his entire post, but it’s too short—and the sentiments therein far too important—not to pass it on in full here:

The Rot of Citizens United Is Universal. Get Used to It.

It is a capital mistake to study the corrosive effect of the utterly corrupt Citizens United decision only in the context of the presidential contest, or in the context of other highly visible individual races, like the one for a U.S. Senate seat or last night’s Wisconsin recall. The rot in the system is poisonous, general, and spreading.

(And have I mentioned really how utterly stupid it is to have an elected judiciary, especially in the current cash-soaked political atmosphere? It is the second-worst idea ever behind the Balanced Budget Amendment, aka The Stupidest Fking Idea Of All Time.)

Very soon, there is not going to be a single political campaign, no matter how small, that directly affects anything having to do with America’s corporate power, which is practically everything, that will not be swamped by anonymous cash laundered through bagmen organized under the banner of some nobly monickered political whorehouse. (While considering the names of the front groups, it is always important to remember the blog’s favorite quote from Sam Spade, of the firm of Spade And Archer: “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.”) As the NYT says:

“...Justice John Paul Stevens predicted that such spending would overwhelm state court races, which would be especially harmful since judges must not only be independent but be seen to be independent as well. North Carolina is proving him right.”

Of course, I’m sure that, sometime later this week, an earnest young scribe from Politico will tell me that everything’s okay because Democrats spend money, too, and, anyway… unions! So, coming soon to your town: the $40 million race for Register of Probate, and won’t that be fun?

You can follow Charles P. Pierce on Twitter. He’ll be an essential voice during this election cycle. If you are on Twitter, you should definately follow him, and bookmark the Esquire Politics blog.

Zuccotti (Liberty) Park is re-opened...

Take a listen, watch an hear the first moments after the barricades were removed due to a lawsuit brought by the New York division of the ACLU.

Tim Pool speaks with our friend Justin Wedes who brings you all up to date on what's going down at #OWS

"Get Up, Stand Up": Do Americans Have What It Takes to Stand Up to Corporate Power and Does Wisconsin Offer Hope?

from AlterNet:

Bruce Levine discusses his upcoming book "Get Up, Stand Up," which analyzes why Americans have been crushed into inaction and how recent events in Wisc. offer hope for change.

In December 2009, Bruce Levine penned a provocative article on AlterNet entitled “Are Americans a Broken People?” The piece touched a nerve among those who identify themselves as progressive, libertarian, or populist and quickly went viral across the Web. Many respondents and media members who later interviewed Levine wondered why so many Americans have remained passive in the face of attacks on their liberties and their economic well-being. In his latest book, Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (Chelsea Green, 2011), Levine has delved deeper into the cultural forces that have created a politically passive U.S. population. He questions whether “learned helplessness” has taken hold, keeping many Americans locked into an abuse syndrome of sorts. And most importantly, he suggests what can be done to turn this demoralization around. We chatted about his book and some recent efforts by Americans to in fact “get up and stand up.”

Susan Warner: If the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are so unpopular, why aren’t people protesting more?

Bruce Levine: Most Americans feel they have no power over whether or not the U.S. invades another nation or for how long it will be occupied. Many Americans know that their government is run by “corporate collaborators” who don’t pay attention to their opinions on wars and other big-money issues that large corporations care about. So although polls show the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have become increasingly unpopular—a clear majority of Americans now oppose them—fewer people are protesting against them.

Actually, more protests occurred against these wars when they were more popular. Remember back in February 2003, when many Americans still believed the U.S. government’s “weapons of mass destruction” rationale for the invasion of Iraq? Even though the invasion was a more popular idea back then, there were many large demonstrations against the then-imminent war, including 500,000 protesting in New York City. Even larger protests took place in Europe, with a London protest of more than 2 million, the largest demonstration ever there. But Americans’ voices and the voices of the people of Great Britain, our junior partner in the Iraq invasion, were of little concern to politicians.

Americans got the message. Their opinion may matter on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage or other issues that the corporate-government partnership—or the “corporatocracy”—doesn't care about, but their opinion is ignored when it comes to issues where real money is involved, such as wars and the Wall Street bailout.

SW: What can you say to frustrated anti-war activists?

BL: Anti-war activists—and other activists—routinely become frustrated when truths about lies, victimization, and oppression don’t set people free to take action. But as a psychologist who has worked with abused people for more than 25 years, it does not surprise me to see that when we as individuals or a society eat crap for too long, we gradually lose our self-respect to the point that we become psychologically too weak to take action.

Other observers of subjugated societies have recognized this phenomenon. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, understood this reality, and so did Bob Marley, who is sort of the poet laureate of oppressed people of the world. Many Americans are embarrassed to accept that we, too, after years of domestic corporatocracy subjugation, have developed what Marley calls “mental slavery.” But unless we acknowledge that reality, we won’t begin to heal from what I call “battered people’s syndrome” and “corporatocracy abuse.” In Get Up, Stand Up I explain how this can be done, including how people let go of the fear of resistance.

SW: You note in your book that even within this widespread passivity, there are instances of Americans “getting up and standing up.” What’s your take on recent events in Wisconsin?

As I make clear in the book, especially for critically thinking pessimists who have given up hope, history teaches us that you never know—until the moment it happens—when the right historical variables will come together to encourage people to let go of their fear and gain the energy to resist.

So in Wisconsin occurred, if not a perfect storm, about as good of a storm as I’ve seen in many years. State employees had actually agreed to eat considerable crap, agreeing to accept a major increase in what they pay toward their pensions and healthcare benefits, but even those major concessions were not good enough for Governor Walker, who continued to demand the elimination of collective bargaining in key areas. Telling a union that they have no collective bargaining rights on health insurance, pension, and work safety is a blatant effort to try to completely crush it. By this “union death threat,” Walker put workers and union leaders in a position of having virtually nothing left to lose in terms of having a union—and when people lose their fear, watch out!

Arrogance by oppressive authorities makes them miscalculate the fear and greed variables, important ones in keeping people passive. In the case of Mubarak, his greed and arrogance resulted in him not spreading enough of his loot around with enough thugs, so not enough of them cared about his fall from power. Once Egyptians lost fear and took action, they found even more courage. And, as I discuss in Get Up, Stand Up, the arrogance of oppressive forces makes them a lot more fragile than they appear.

SW: Tell us more about the “corporatocracy,” a term you use in Get Up, Stand Up. What is its role in keeping Americans quiescent?

BL: The corporatocracy is a corporate-government partnership that governs society. In a corporatocracy, while there are elections, the reality is that corporations and the wealthy elite rule in a way to satisfy their own self-interest. Most Americans “get it” that they are not living in a democracy where they have direct power, or in a republic where they have representatives who actually represent them. Most Americans understand that giant corporations and the wealthy rule, and so people feel powerless. And this sense of powerless ultimately results in passivity.

The corporatocracy, through its huge financial resources and control of the corporate media, ensures that only Democratic or Republican candidates have a chance of winning elections. It then buys off those candidates in both parties via campaign contributions, revolving doors of employment, and other bribes in the various industrial complexes. So, people have a sort of "learned helplessness" when it comes to elections—no matter who they vote for they get unnecessary wars, Wall Street bailouts, and so forth. And those few who continue to rebel against the corporatocracy become politically and/or economically marginalized, and that further frightens people into compliance and passivity.

SW: What are other forces that you think are keeping Americans downcast?

BL: As Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out, “The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.” Increasingly, much of our culture and major institutions are only about making money and controlling the population, not about creating critically thinking people who reject authoritarianism. In Get Up, Stand Up, I have a large section called “Understanding How the People Learned Powerlessness,” in which I describe how people are broken by a culture and institutions created by the corporatocracy. Besides a pseudo-democratic election system that creates helplessness, Americans are broken by increasing domination of “fundamentalist consumerism” and “money-centrism” at the expense of all other aspects of their humanity—this breaks our integrity and weakens us. We are also broken by increasing social isolation, bureaucratization, surveillance, the corporate media, and by other public institutions.

SW: What about young people, who are traditionally quick to protest against authority. Why aren’t they out on the streets?

BL: They’re much less apt to protest because the primary socialization forces for young people pacify, zombify, and weaken them. For example, our standard schools teach compliance and following orders far more than how to think critically and resist authoritarianism. And television is such a superb pacifying force that America’s for-profit prisons uses more TVs instead of hiring more prison guards, and nowadays, kids are actually watching more television than ever, with more screens than just a television set. And for many kids I talk to, their only experience of potency is a virtual one, for example, winning a video game.

For those kids who do rebel cognitively or behaviorally, and who don’t mindlessly comply with any and all authorities, there is an increasing presence of my business – the mental health profession – in their lives, with increasing medication for so-called disruptive disorders such as “oppositional defiance disorder.” And it is getting even worse for young people. Nowadays student-loan debt—more than two-thirds of college graduates are carrying student-loan debt, often huge amounts–crushes their ability to even consider resisting unjust authority.

SW: What do you think has led to the rise of the Tea Party movement and its subsequent power?

BL: Certainly, a sense of powerlessness and anger has fueled the Tea Party movement, which is made up of many different kinds of people, and has now been exploited and co-opted by the Republican party. It is a mistake to focus only on the bigots in this movement and to focus only on the fat-cat financers such as the Koch brothers and to focus only on Republican politician opportunists such as Sarah Palin who are exploiting this anger.

The Tea Party movement includes many grassroots members who have a genuine belief in liberty and freedom but, as with any movement, it also includes bigots and opportunists. Following the financial crisis of 2008 and losses—sometimes catastrophic—of homes, savings, or jobs for many, and following the controversial Republican-Democratic bipartisan Wall Street bailout, it would be expected that some kind of angry political movement would form. The corporate elite on Wall Street must have breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing how timid American reaction has been. The corporate elite must be especially delighted that of all the very tame reactions that have occurred, the largest—the Tea Party movement—has not been directed against Wall Street but at its junior partner, the federal government.

SW: How would you compare Tea Party activists and those movements on the Left?

BL: When it comes to cultural issues, there are major differences between those who attend Tea Party demonstrations and those who identify themselves as leftist populists; however, many people in both groups believe that elite forces who rule them do not care about ordinary people. Both left populists and Tea Partiers opposed the Wall Street bailout, and many grassroots Tea Partiers, like left populists, are opposed to the kind of corporate globalization measures—such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) —that have resulted in the outsourcing of U.S. jobs overseas. Like left populists, many grassroots Tea Partiers actually oppose America’s recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and its longtime war against drugs. Many in both groups oppose the civil liberties abuses of the Patriot Act. At the grass roots, many Tea Partiers hold anger for both Democrats and Republicans, with some grassroots Tea Partiers having even more contempt for Republicans, whom they view as more hypocritical.

SW: What are some of the major activist movements you examine in your book?

BL: In Get Up, Stand Up I describe all kinds of modern examples, such as the worker and producer cooperatives, as well as historical examples, such as the successes of the agrarian rebels in the Great Populist revolt, successful labor strikes even in the midst of the Great Depression, such as the General Motors sit-down strike in Flint, the Abolitionist movement, and so forth.

However – and this is a big however – a major point of Get Up, Stand Up is that many people today lack the morale and energy to enact time-honored solutions, strategies, and tactics of defeating the elite. And so we must acknowledge this. That’s why I spend a large section in Get Up, Stand Up describing how we regain the “energy to do battle.” We must first regain self-respect and collective confidence that we can succeed.

SW: Can you give some details of successful recent activism that you detail in Get Up, Stand Up, and how progressives of all stripes can use these examples to re-energize themselves?

BL: First off, I don’t particularly like the term “progressive.” The corporate media routinely divides Americans as “liberals,” “conservatives,” and “moderates”—a useful division for the corporatocracy because no matter which of these groups is the current electoral winner, the corporatocracy retains power. In order to defeat the corporatocracy, it’s more useful to divide people in terms of “elitism” and “anti-authoritarianism,” or to divide them as “pro-corporatists” and “anti-corporatists.”

There are many kinds of successful activism against corporations. City Life/Vida Urbana, for example, has won victories over some of America’s largest banks, including the Bank of America, and prevented many foreclosures and evictions. I detail this and other successful anti-corporatist efforts in Get Up, Stand Up. But I am realistic enough to know these are a drop in the societal bucket, and I totally understand why people can move into hopelessness and defeatism.

SW: You mentioned worker and producer cooperatives. What exactly are they, and can you give me modern examples of them?

BL: While certainly a strong union gives workers more power than if workers have no union, real worker power only comes when they own and control the business they work in. A worker cooperative is a business entity that is owned and controlled by the people who work in it. A worker coop is the opposite of what occurs in the corporatocracy, since worker coops empower people to have actual control over their economic lives. One current example is Union Cab Cooperative in Madison, Wisconsin, founded in 1979 by a group of drivers, dispatchers, and mechanics. It operates as a truly democratic workplace with one member/one vote. In these worker coops, workers collectively own the business. Worker-owned and controlled businesses—whether the business is a mom-and-pop independent, or Union Cab, or even larger worker coops such as Alvarado Street Bakery (with over a 100 workers and over $20 million in annual revenue)—are the antithesis of the corporatocracy.

There also continues to be producer cooperatives in the spirit of the late nineteenth-century Populist agrarian revolt. By banding together, producer cooperatives are not at the mercy of giant corporations. One modern example is the organic farming cooperative called the Coulee Region Organic Produce Pool, or CROPP. In 1988, with increasing numbers of family farms folding and others being threatened with extinction because of the low prices farmers were receiving for their goods, seven Wisconsin farmers created CROPP. It started with organic vegetables but soon moved into organic dairy products. Eventually, the CROPP cooperative developed its own brand name, Organic Valley, and has become the largest source of organic milk in the United States. CROPP has grown to approximately fourteen hundred farmers.

SW: Earlier you mentioned “battered People’s syndrome” and “corporatocracy abuse” – how do individuals begin healing from these, and how can we find the courage to stand up and fight in their own lives (such as within schools and in the workplace)?

BL: Many battlefields for democracy occur in the normal course of our daily lives, and many paths can lead to regaining morale, energy, and strength. History tells us that we can extricate ourselves from fatalistic vicious cycles in which the less we do, the more we are oppressed, and the more defeatist we become.

To start, we must maintain our sense of humor. Historically, people caught up in these syndromes have learned that humor can turn pain into energy. But we must be honest with ourselves and forgive ourselves—and each other—for succumbing to this corporatocracy abuse syndrome. Beating ourselves up for having succumbed is a waste of our precious energy that would be better spent redefining ourselves as human beings who have beliefs and values that define us more than our fears and greed. And we need to redefine ourselves as worthy of respect and capable of effecting change. And then we can use our energy to provide respect and create confidence in others, which will produce even more energy for ourselves in battling the corporatocracy.

In other subjugated societies, people have learned to develop what’s been called “critical consciousness” to identify both external and self-imposed forms of oppression and then begin to free themselves. By making changes in our self-imposed slavery, we can start to take actions to change our external world, and we replace a vicious cycle with an empowering one. This is part of “liberation psychology,” in which critically thinking people can regain morale, discover the various ways people are energized, learn how to combat social isolation and build community, and understand how we can forge alliances among populists—Get Up, Stand Up talks about how to accomplish this. There’s a lot more to “liberation psychology” and a lot more to the book, but hopefully this gives you a taste of it.

Support AlterNet by purchasing your copy of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite through our partner, Powell's, an independent bookstore.


Susan Warner is Senior Editor at Chelsea Green Publishing.

Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and his latest book is Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/150260/