I am interested in the political economy of institutional power relationships in transition. The question is one of "reconstructive" communities as a cultural, as well as a political, fact: how geographic communities are structured to move in the direction of the next vision, along with the question of how a larger system - given the power and cultural relationships - can move toward managing the connections between the developing communities. There are many, many hard questions here - including, obviously, ones related to ecological sustainability and climate change.

Worker ownership is only one form of democratizing ownership.

Finding ways to organize work in which people are not locked into unequal power relationships is very important. Having said that, it's not easily done, and it's complicated.

There are areas using what's called the "checkerboard strategy." They are different cities where you can move around the "checkerboard," doing things you can't do in every square, that you can do in some of them, building a mosaic of these kinds of practices. There are about 400 cable television networks, for example, that are publicly owned. That's a big fight for big private companies. In some areas, this is a political struggle, in some it's conventional common sense.

The top 400 people own more wealth now than the bottom 185 million Americans taken together. That is a medieval structure.

The reality of the world we live in is that people sometimes aren't interested in many circumstances; no matter how much young radicals yell at them, that isn't what they want to do right now.

The federalism term is a good term, but it's just below the surface; it's just about to come up into wider public understanding that these practices are happening and are politically viable.