“When I went to my first assembly of participatory budgeting, it was the first time in a while, probably ever in my adult life, that I was like ‘this is democracy. This just feels like democracy, and this is the way decisions should be made in the city,'” Hadden explained.
Amid a more volatile global market, “companies don’t want to be locked into providing income security for their workers,” says Gerald Friedman, professor of economics at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
As of Wednesday, ATX Co-op Taxi is in business. If you see a bright green taxi shuttling around the city this weekend, that's a car from the co-op. Nega Taddesse, a representative from the Taxi Drivers Association of Austin, which spearheaded efforts to get a co-op up and running in the city, said that initial deployment should be 30 cabs, with another 150 going online in October, and potentially 400 by December.
Auto body painters around the city should get busy.
The Mutual Credit Currency System, this most radical form of endogenous money, was evaluated and compared with Marx's Commodity-Money-Commodity requirement. A simple simulation of a small community closed loop economy was used to illustrate the functioning of two types of mutual credit currency systems.
A research paper by Cooperatives Europe and LAMA Development and Cooperation Agency highlights how co-operatives can improve standards and workers’ rights in the collaborative economy.
