This monthly update features, in addition to our usual review of the last month’s major economic news (especially the election losses on June 5), a Report on the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque regoin of Spain. This unified community of worker cooperatives is now the world’s most successful, large scale (85,000 workers), and long-lasting (over 50 years) experiment in workers owning and directing their enterprises. It competes successfully with capitalist enterprises, innovates technologically in systematic ways, operates its own major bank and university. As a remarkable effort to move beyond capitalism it deserves attention. I spent some time there at the end of May and will offer a brief, initial assessment.

These Tuesday evenings will each begin with an update and analysis of major economic events of the last month and their contexts of longer-term economic trends shaping politics and society here and abroad. We will focus on the evolving global capitalist economic crisis and its consequences. We will examine topics such as the social costs effects of the historic long-term US unemployment, national debt crises and «austerity programs» in Greece, Ireland, Spain, and beyond changes in today’s Chinese economy and their global effects, tax reform and the entire tax issue in the US today, continuing crisis in the US housing and credit markets the economics of immigration. Actual economic developments will shape the agenda for each monthly Tuesday meeting. Rick Wolff, with occasional guests, will present an economic update and an analysis of some particular economic topics and then open the floor to questions, comments and a general discussion of where the US and world economies are going and the political implications. We aim to develop participants’ understanding of and ability to explain to others the key economic developments of our time.

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