Please join DFMC on December 3rd, 2015, in welcoming author and political historian Gar Alperovitz for a presentation, “Transforming Bloomington’s Economy: Community Wealth in the Age of Cooperation​”​.

This event will not be at our usual location. We will be in the Bloomington City Council Chambers, 401 N. Morton St., at 6:30 pm. RSVP on Facebook, or just come join us!

There is evidence that we are in the midst of a systemic crisis, not simply an economic and political crisis. The current system is characterized by stagnant wages, endemic poverty, looming ecological crises, and growing inequality. How can these outcomes be changed, starting in our own communities? Ultimately the question is how to develop a “next system”—beyond traditional corporate capitalism and state socialism—and how to develop practical and meaningful stages of development that lay groundwork for a longer term historic transformation. They are questions both of theory and of immediate practice—e.g. politics, institution-building, strategy at all levels from neighborhood and community to state, region and nation.

Gar Alperovitz has had a distinguished career as a historian, political economist, activist, writer, and government official. For fifteen years, he served as the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, and is a former Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge University; Harvard’s Institute of Politics; the Institute for Policy Studies; and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution.

He is the author of critically acclaimed books on the atomic bomb and atomic diplomacy and his articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, The Nation, and the Atlantic among other popular and academic publications.  He has been profiled by the New York Times, the Associated Press, People, UPI and Mother Jones and has been a guest on numerous network TV and cable news programs, including “Meet the Press,” “Larry King Live,” “The Charlie Rose Show,” “Cross Fire,” and “the O’Reilly Factor.”

He will also be giving a public lecture, “The Next American Revolution”, in the Tudor Room of the Indiana Memorial Union, on Friday, 4 December, at 1pm. More information is available here: http://themester.indiana.edu/calendar.shtml#overlay/2/