Capital and the Debt Trap Learning from cooperatives in the global crisis [Hardcover]

The financial crisis is destroying wealth but is also a remarkable opportunity to uncover the ways by which debt can be used to regulate the economic system. This book uses?four case studies of cooperatives to give an in-depth analysis on how they have braved the crisis and continued to generate wealth.Introduction The Mother Of All Crises? Causes And Mechanisms Shifting Control versus Ownership Cooperatives: Importance, Resilience and Rationality Natividad Island Fishermen's and Divers' Cooperative, Mexico: Managing Natural Resources to Generate Wealth Ceralep Soci?t? Nouvelle, France: David and Goliath in the Glocal Economy The Desjardins Cooperative Group: A Financial Movement For Quebec's Development The Mondragon Cooperative Group: Local Development With A Global Vision The Global Crisis: Mother of all Warnings

'This elegant and deeply-informed inquiry weaves together several themes, each significant in itself, even more so as their relations are developed: the deep and persistent crises of capitalism, in the current phase highly financialized, and the fundamental issue of decision-making in social and economic institutions, with special attention to the elaborate growth of cooperatives of many varieties, the forms they have taken, the problems they face, and their great promise in overcoming economic crises, social malaise, and democratic dysfunction.' - Professor Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

'Capital and the Debt Trap combines a searing critique of the unstable debt- and-profit driven system that came close to final collapse in the Great Crisis with a fine portrait of the modern cooperative alternative that exists today in Mexico, Canada, France and Spain. Are these perhaps the small creatures that will survive and flourish after the great dinosaurs are gone? Let's hope so.' - James K. Galbraith, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and University of Texas at Austin

'This book is silÓË