C'est bon, merci. Mais, il y a des autres examples de comment les Americans sont faire des choses proggresif. Par example, SUNY University vais reformer la tuition, quelquechose qui vais faire l'investement en capital humane plus facile. (Il y a un link pour l'article par le New York Times).

The building-up of pivotal financial services for cooperatives, such as banking, is indeed worthy of notice. Banking is only a part of the equation, and the NCB is a modest variable in the equation.

What worker and community-ownership needs is a direct pathway to capital that doesn't involve compromising the principles of worker-ownership.

Ideally the strategy used to open up this pathway should yield financing possibilities that go beyond conventional equity and debt while being attractive propositions for investors.

The open pathway for finance of the social economy requires a dedicated, socially-held complex of investment banking, broker/dealer, and fund management companies that gather funds directly from institutional, high net-worth and retail investors.

The most cost effective thing a group of cooperatives could do straight out the gate is to get together and buy-out a small broker-dealer firm that does absolutely nothing but raise finance for them. That's what the boys in the oil business in Oklahoma and Texas did when they were rockin' and rollin' in the 1970s. They'd place a broker-dealer right smack in the middle of their operations. Worker and Community-owned firms in the social economy can do the same.

Cooperatives could form General Partnerships and obtain limit partners to fund the purchase of assets which a cooperative would rent from a Limited Partnership governed by the cooperatives' general partnership firm on a non-exclusive basis. The cooperatives' captive internal broker-dealer would do nothing but contact investors day-in and day-out to do nothing but these three essential things:(1) get THE MONEY,(2) get MORE MONEY and (3) get ALL THE MONEY.

If all goes well the cooperatives and their broker-dealer will find themselves in close proximity of access to some really yummy deal flow. At first the opporunities that might arise to purchase corporate assets and organize workers into cooperatives may occur on a more-or-less ad hoc basis with the internal broker-dealer throwing its pitch to investors whenever called upon

...but sooner or later the cooperatives will outgrow the ability of their broker-dealer to keep up and that's when the cooperatives should set up their own fund management firm to operate private equity funds and BDCs to gather a mass of funds under professional management to invest directly into the social economy.

Of course Canada has gone the farthest of all the NAFTA high-contracting parties in developing central services focused on the social economy. USAmerica's contribution to economic democracy for the America's could well come in the form of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Taft-Hartley pension funds. At the moment this is slow in coming. We need to kick things up a knotch and give American Labor a grassroots social movement for economic democracy to interact with....and invest in.

Regards
Alan Avans
Temporary Blog site:
http://newccf.blogspot.com

Such cooperative banking is severely limited, unfortunately, by laws which restrict banking co-ops to the same rules as the rest of the banking system.

The ideal would be a mutual bank as described by William Greene and Benjamin Tucker, which could issue interest-free credit against any form of collateral acceptable to the membership--perhaps as an outgrowth of a LETS system.

But the state's banking laws, like licensing and capitalisation requirements, uphold the money monopoly by creating entry barriers and enabling the issuers of credit to charge a monopoly price for it.

Thanks for those lenghty and enligntening comments, both Alan and Kevin. Organizations like the NCB are simply ONE example of what can - and needs - to happen. We'll be researching and posting on other organizations.

Kevin, I had a look at your website and I like it a lot, even if I don't agree with everything. I'll be posting a link to it, with comments, soon.

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