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TVA After 40 Years

The New Republic, November 10,1973

WHEN THE TENNESSEE Valley Authority was created by Congress in 1933, it was conceived of not only as an effort to revitalize an impoverished region, but also as an experiment in public enterprise.  Forty years later the returns on TVA are pretty much in.

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Socialist Experiment In Canada

The New Republic, October 13, 1973

THREE of the four provinces in western Canada — Man­itoba, Sas­katchewan and British Columbia — are gov­erned by socialist parties.  With the over­throw of Salvador Allende in Chile, these are now the only democratic socialist governments in the Western Hemisphere.

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Review of “The New Populism” by Fred Harris

The New Republic, September 8, 1973

BOOKS BY POLITICIANS tend to be boring, staff-produced efforts designed to dis­play The Boss as a thoughtful public servant.  What sets Fred Harris’ apart is his unique angle of vision.  He is the only major politician who says publicly and indeed vo­ciferously that American capitalism is a shuck.

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Buying Back the Land: A Proposal for California

Working Papers For A New Society, Summer 1973

IT IS JUST within the realm of possibility that low-income groups, by joining with environmental­ists, labor and other progressive forces, could bring about a favorable distribution of land ownership in California.  The mechanism for doing this could be a state government trust fund which might be called the California Land Conserva­tion Fund.

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Elites and Alternatives

The New Republic, March 31, 1973

Our economy is controlled by an extremely small, largely unaccountable set of elites operating on behalf of a wealth-owning minority.  To alter this pattern of own­er­ship and control is politically unfeasible at the moment, but so are many things until enough people decide they want them.

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Mining The Prairies

The New Republic, March 24, 1973

UNDER the rolling plains of eastern Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas is one of the world’s last great energy reserves — nearly a trillion tons of lignite and sub-bitu­minous coal, about 35 billion of which are readily strippable.  A good many ranchers, young people and others, however, don’t want to mine it.

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The Berkeley Co-op: Democratic, Up to a Point

The New Republic, December 1, 1972

THE FIRST thing that strikes a shopper entering a Co‑op supermarket is a feeling that the store is on his side.  But cooperatives, like small farms and many other forms of independent busi­ness, have fallen vic­tim to the mid-century dictum of expand or die.

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Fair Shares

The New Republic, October 21, 1972

WHILE a small minority of Americans siphons off more money than it knows what to do with, a fifth of our population remains perennially poor, and millions more teeter on the edge of poverty.  Ever-increasing production won’t, by it­self, correct this.  We also need to share better.

 

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How Wealth Is Distributed

The New Republic, September 30, 1972

WHAT IS WEALTH, who gets it, and why?  More to the point, why — despite wars on poverty, pro­gressive taxation, relatively high em­ployment and widespread educational opportunity — does our economy so stubbornly perpetuate inequality?

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Tax Farmers

The New Republic, September 2, 1972

THERE must be a broad commitment by the federal government to assist agricultural workers, rather than tax-evading doctors, to become farm owners.

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