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Following a number of CEOs pulling out of President Trump's American Manufacturing Council and Strategic and Policy Forum, President Trump tweeted that the initiatives have been ended:
Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both. Thank you all!
The CEOs of Merck, Intel, 3M, and other companies had already left:
3M Co. Chief Executive Officer Inge Thulin stepped down from the White House's manufacturing council, adding to the corporate exodus as the backlash grows to President Donald Trump's ambivalent response to racially-charged violence in Virginia over the weekend.
Thulin joined the White House panel in January "to advocate for policies that align with our values and encourage even stronger investment and job growth -- in order to make the United States stronger, healthier and more prosperous," the CEO said Wednesday in a statement tweeted by 3M. "After careful consideration, I believe the initiative is no longer an effective vehicle for 3M to advance these goals."
Update: The members of the Strategic and Policy Forum reportedly disbanded the group before President Trump's tweet:
The quick sequence began late Wednesday morning when Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chief executive of the Blackstone Group and one of Mr. Trump's closest confidants in the business community, organized a conference call for members of the president's Strategic and Policy Forum. On the call, the chief executives of some of the largest companies in the country debated how to proceed. After a discussion among a dozen prominent C.E.O.s, the decision was made to abandon the group altogether, said people with knowledge of the details of the call.
Also at Bloomberg:
Trump made the announcement on Twitter, less than an hour after one of the groups was said to be planning to inform the White House that it would break up. [...] Trump appeared to be making an effort to get ahead of the news as the councils began to disintegrate. The strategy forum, which is led by Blackstone Group LP's Stephen Schwarzman, planned to inform the White House Wednesday before making the announcement public, according to another person familiar with the matter, who wasn't authorized to discuss the news publicly.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday August 17 2017, @03:37PM (3 children)
Mondragon is a cooperative. With cooperatives it's not so much a one worker, one vote organisation as rather a one investor, one vote organisation (independent of the number of shares you buy). A typical cooperative has grown out of some kind of social movement or urge.
In the case of the cooperative I belong to, the inability to buy renewable energy from local electricity companies was the driver. We broke that market open, and are to this day one of the largest operators of wind energy installations in Belgium. The interesting part is that the traditional energy companies are copying this cooperative model -- for example, electrabel, the biggest energy producer in Belgium, part of the Engie multinational, has put its renewable energy business into a cooperative too.
About 4.7 million jobs in the EU are organized in cooperatives [coopseurope.coop], with a total annual turnover of a little more than a trillion euro.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @07:43PM (2 children)
Yes, credit unions, food co-ops, housing co-ops, and electricity co-ops are all examples of other types of cooperatives.
Mondragon manufacturers consumer goods and provides services to its customers, competing with Capitalist companies.
It is a worker-owned cooperative.
It is a different way of organizing the ownership of a workplace.
The word "investor" has no place in describing Mondragon; that is a Capitalist term and Mondragon is a Socialist operation.
In continuous operation since 1956 and having never laid off a worker-owner, Mondragon has become the classic example of how to do a worker-owned cooperative.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by quietus on Friday August 18 2017, @03:46PM (1 child)
You react quite emotional with regards to the meaning of the word 'investor'. This might be something cultural -- Mondragon itself is open [mondragon-corporation.com] about it:
This is normal -- apart from the negative dividends principle -- for cooperatives: you pay a certain amount (i.e. you invest) in exchange for shares; you can only exchange these shares for their initial value after a set period of time (6 years e.g.), but as long as you keep those shares, you may receive a dividend on them. Whether or not a dividend is returned to members is decided on a general meeting; all members of the cooperative have an equal vote. The dividend is limited by law (6 percent, in Belgium); another difference with traditional companies.
In my original post I was trying to point out that the "alternative economy" is a bit bigger, and really not that unusual, than your sole example. Finally, socialism -- in the European social-democratic version -- does not consider capital, shares or bonds evil: they're simply a means to an end, subordinate to labour (workers, the human environment). Or at least, that's the theory -- with human fallacy regularly throwing a spanner in the works.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Friday August 18 2017, @03:53PM