Richard D. Wolff

My reason for writing is to merely pass on a bit of information that I believe might merit a mention in one of Prof. Wolff's videos (if and when D@w produces another one). There is a company that we buy delivered organic food from in the UK, the company in question is called Riverford (www.riverford.co.uk) and with every delivery there is a piece of recycled card with recipies on one side and on the other side the owner of the company writes a short page of news on how the company is getting on, factors affecting harvests, economic considerations and anything thats on his mind generally. I had been following a number of Richard's videos on employee co-op's and to my surprise this topic came up on one of our recent news pages from Riverford. I found the writing particularly thought provoking and very relevant to many of the things that Prof. Wolff talks about. I thought it might make a good topic for discussion. Here is the text from the news update from Riverford: "Riverford is currently moving towards employee ownership (EO), with staff due to take a 74% stake in May 2018. This has led to a lot of navel gazing about what Riverford stands for, and how we will protect them into the future. We have visited other values-driven and EO companies, studied their governance structures and research what works and what doesn't. Through this I have almost managed to grow out of my knee jerk antagonism to the idea of some else auditing my virtue. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely; the idea of being your own judge, jury and executioner becomes progressively more dangerous as an organisation grows. I accept that we have reached a stage where we must agree a more objective measurement of how we behave towards staff, customers and suppliers and need impartial means of checking how we are doing (through the creation of an external EO Trust and our new Customer Roundtable); Sainsbury's passed that stage long ago and should have the wisdom to know it." I hope this proves useful or may at least warrant a mention. One other thing it would be great to see some discussion about on D@W is the long term viability of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general - I would love to know if Richard thinks bitcoin is long overdue for a bubble burst when the recession kicks in? Thanks to everyone involved with D@w for your great videos and special thanks to Richard for championing this cause. With best wishes from the UK