The Middle East is in turmoil, a predictable outcome of the chaos the Bush administration's adventures in the region were going to bring about. With the Israeli government's decision to take advantage of the situation and join in the fray, to say that the headlines are looking rather bleak at the moment is an understatement. Whose interests do these conflicts serve? Certainly not the interests of ordinary people living either in the Middle East (and I include the ordinary people living in Israel here) nor people living in the US (who are financing this chaos, some of them paying with their lives) or the UK or any of the countries of the so-called 'coalition of the willing'. All this death, all this appalling destruction, is serving only one group's interests: the interests of big corporations - either directly (access to oil, profits of large corporations who win 'reconstruction' contracts, etc) or indirectly (for strategic reasons because of the geographical location of the Middle East). Capitalism, greed for ownership of resources and for power, destroys. In the meantime, another route is being followed in Venezuela...
Venezuela’s Cooperative Revolution
Saturday, Jul 29, 2006
By: Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone - Dollars & Sense
Zaida Rosas, a woman in her fifties with 15 grandchildren, works in the newly constructed textile co-op Venezuela Avanza in Caracas. The co-op’s 209 workers are mostly formerly jobless neighborhood women. Their homes on the surrounding steep hillsides in west Caracas were almost all self-built.
Zaida works seven hours a day, five days a week, and is paid $117 a month, the uniform income all employees voted for themselves. This is much less than the minimum salary, officially set at $188 a month. This was “so we can pay back our [government start-up] loan,†she explained. Venezuela Avanza cooperativistas have a monthly general assembly to decide policy. As in most producer co-ops, they are not paid a salary, but an advance on profits....
Almost everyone we met during our visit was involved in a cooperative. The 1999 constitution requires the state to “promote and protect†co-ops. However, it was only after the passage of the Special Law on Cooperative Associations in 2001 that the totals began to skyrocket. When Chávez took office in 1998 there were 762 legally registered cooperatives with about 20,000 members. In 2001 there were almost 1,000 cooperatives. The number grew to 2,000 in 2002 and to 8,000 by 2003. In mid-2006, the National Superintendence of Cooperatives (SUNACOOP) reported that it had registered over 108,000 co-ops representing over 1.5 million members. Since mid-2003, MINEP has provided free business and self-management training, helped workers turn troubled conventional enterprises into cooperatives, and extended credit for start-ups and buy-outs. The resulting movement has increasingly come to define the “Bolivarian Revolution,†the name Chávez has given to his efforts to reshape Venezuela’s economic and political structures....
More:
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1784 It's quite a long article, but interesting and therapeutic: something positive in a world seemingly gone mad. Another way is possible.
