Berkeley’s Missing Link Bike Cooperative – A closure in the context of a larger cooperative vision
by Bernard Marszalek
The Berkeleyside story on Missing Link going out of business after 50 years
INTRODUCTION
Missing Link Bike Co-op – founded 50 years ago – was a Berkeley institution much like the Cheese Board Collective.
Those advocating for a Just Transition from fossil fuel jobs to sustainable ones had predecessors in the military-industrial complex
Fifty years ago engineers working in the military-industrial complex used their skills to transition from building machines of war to developing socially useful products They designed solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps, hybrid electric vehicles, and even an improved kidney dialysis machine.
A brief encounter with a Classical Land in early Spring, 2016
Excerpts from a Journal
Athens
Tourists in Greece, for the most part, are isolated from the reality of the “Crisis” – as the Greeks refer to their current desperate economic situation.
One summer during my youth I was hired to work the assembly line at a television manufacturer. This was in the days when America had a manufacturing base and actually produced consumer goods.
Comment (slightly revised) to Uneven Earth (Oct. 23, 2020) posting titled: “Make life, not work: democratizing, decommodifying and remediating existence”
Nov.8, 2020
This document, Work: Democratise, Decommodify, Remediate, let’s call it DD&R) was produced, I believe, by a consort of young women economists and as such it has some value as a welcome discordant note in an otherwise monotonous economic chorus of mainly male sycophants of neo-liberalism.
A new industrial policy when we need a de-industrial policy
The most popular poster for the Green New Deal reveals startling assumptions.
Looking at it as a whole, ignoring the details for now, the poster exhibits a sense of movement. The train is the focal point and duplicates similar depiction of trains, for example, in vintage French posters.
The Surreal Days of the Plague?
Are we living surreal days? Hunkered down within four walls. Suspicious of every package at our door. Cleaning and cleaning some more. Gross monopolies mediating all our communication. And constant worry that the elders in our lives will die of COVID19.
Nineteen Thirties’ Grassroots Economic Development
Introduction to John Curl’s Living in the U.X.A. by Bernard Marszalek
January, 2009
The current scramble to resuscitate the economy offers no assurance that the patient will recover swiftly, or at all. No matter the outcome, the precarious rehabilitation has damaged the appearance of good health.
Living In A World That Can’t Be Fixed is not a guidebook to terminal melancholy. Curtis White, the author of this book, also wrote The Spirit of Disobedience along with other social criticism, hardly advocates that course of inaction. On the contrary, White’s provocative title poses a challenge.