Word: alperovitz
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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EPEA's latest project was a feasibility study on the re-opening, under community and worker control, of the shut-down Youngstown, Ohio, steel mill. Alperovitz's analysis of the much-ballyhoed "steel crisis" last year shows that corporate greed was the core of the problem, the catalyst for throwing Youngstown out of work. Youngstown Sheet and Tube, locally-owned and highly-profitable in the '60s, was 1969's Ripe Takeover of the Year. Lykes Steamship Company, based in New Orleans and one-seventh the size of Youngstown, borrowed the buy-out capital from Wall Street and elsewhere, using Youngstown...
...alleged "steel crisis," the Wall St. Journal noted this past July 15 that the industry was operating at full capacity. Alperovitz even predicts the steel equivalent of a "refinery shortage" in the '80s, in which an artificially reduced number of steel plants will make a killing. The Carter Administration is doing its best to bring this about: Attorney-General Griffin Bell approved Lykes' salvage plan of merging with LTV Corporation, despite the ruling by his own Antitrust Division that the merger was illegal because LTV operates Jones and Laughlin Steel...
...Alperovitz's scenario in the feasibility study removes corporate clutches altogether. With federal loan guarantees similar to New York City's and with several million dollars of federal seed money, the Youngstown workers and community could buy, re-open, and gradually modernize the plant. The government's other choice is to pay the estimated $75 million in unemployment and increased welfare benefits over the next three years in Youngstown alone. Alperovitz puts it this way: A corporation would never be satisfied with a 3 per cent return because it could make 8 or 10 per cent elsewhere. But owners from...
...ALPEROVITZ's other major research project also concerns counter-productive profit motives, in regards to inflation. Contrary to Keynesian and neoclassical theory, Alperovitz believes government budget deficits have had little to do with the inflation of the past six years. The four necessities--food, housing, energy, and health care--account for over 80 per cent of inflation, he maintains. In health care, for instance, there is no check on greed--third parties, the insurance companies, pay for most treatment, and doctors and hospitals charge whatever the "market" will bear. The result: spiraling insurance premiums and profits, soaring medical costs...
THESE ANALYSES and proposals by Alperovitz and other Cactus Leftists are eminently reasonable and practical; yet, because they would represent fundamental change in the status quo, the flight to institute them will be Sisyphean...