April 3, 2012

Cooperatives Put People - and Democracy - To Work

Shift Change—Putting Democracy to Work, a film by Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin about life outside the corporate framework, is slated for release in July 2012.

Examining cooperatives in both the United States and Spain, it documents the growing number of employee-owned businesses. At a time when many people are out of work, job security is not easily attainable, and big corporations are increasingly unpopular, cooperatives provide a way for people not only to make a living, but to be invested in their work like never before.

4:54pm
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: video coop co-op cooperatives economy organization job jobs work capitalism 
March 28, 2012
The Dream of the 1890s: Why Old Mutualism Is Making a New Comeback - The Atlantic

The values of this generation of independent-minded workers aren’t wild and new. Instead, they represent a return to the values we abandoned at the height of the industrial revolution.

9:00pm
Filed under: coop co-op solidarity economy economy capitalism solidarity 
February 23, 2012
What If Corporations Couldn't Use Our Commons For Free?

There’s been much discussion of late about how to save America’s declining middle class. The answer politicians of both parties give is always the same: jobs, jobs, jobs. The parties differ on how the jobs will be created — Republicans say the market will do it if we cut taxes and regulation, Democrats say government can help by investing in infrastructure and education. Either way, it still comes down to jobs with decent wages and benefits.

It’s understandable that politicians say this: it was America’s experience in the past. In the years following World War II, we built a solid middle class on the foundation of high-paying, mostly unionized jobs in the manufacturing sector. But those days are history. Today, automation and computers have eliminated millions of jobs, and private-sector unions have been crushed. On top of that, in a globalized economy where capital can hire the cheapest labor anywhere, it’s no longer credible to believe that America’s middle class can prosper from labor income alone.

So why don’t we pay everyone some non-labor income — you know, the kind of money that flows disproportionally to the rich? I’m not talking about redistribution here, I’m talking about paying dividends to equity owners in good old capitalist fashion. Except that the equity owners in question aren’t owners of private wealth, they’re owners of common wealth. Which is to say, all of us.

5:30pm
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: economy ideas capitalism resources 
February 17, 2012
Put planet and its people at the core of sustainable development, urges report

Social and environmental costs need to be integrated into measurement of economic activity, a new UN report said on Monday as it urged world leaders to focus on the long-term resilience of the planet and its people.

The report from the high-level panel on global sustainability calls for a set of sustainable development indicators that go beyond the traditional approach of gross domestic product. It recommends that governments develop and apply a set of sustainable development goals that can mobilise global action.

At the report’s launch during the AU summit, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, made it plain that sustainable development is a top priority for his second term of office.

“We need to chart a new, more sustainable course for the future, one that strengthens equality and economic growth while protecting our planet,” he said.

Ban established a 22-member panel in August 2010, co-chaired by Finland’s president Tarja Halonen and Jacob Zuma, the president of South Africa. The group was tasked with producing a blueprint for sustainable development and low-carbon prosperity.

The panel’s final report, Resilient People, Resilient Planet: a Future Worth Choosing, contains 56 recommendations to put sustainable development into practice and to mainstream it into economic policy as quickly as possible.

1:44pm
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: economy economics resilience no-growth sustainability development environment ideas 
February 6, 2012
latimes: In a San Francisco neighborhood, another way to pay: Insular Bernal Heights — “this weird little borderline utopia,” as one resident calls it — has updated “complementary currency” in the form of a debit card. This sounds like a fascinating experiment! Designed by two neighborhood loyalists versed in technology and banking, the Bernal Bucks card allows residents to pay for their purchases while earning credits every time they swipe it at any of the two dozen area businesses that have signed on since June. Accrued as frequent-flier miles are, the bucks can be printed as coupons and used toward future purchases. Cardholders also can donate their accrued “wealth” to neighborhood nonprofits. … Branded with a cheerful image of Bernal’s iconic hill, their Visa debit card is issued by the local Community Trust Credit Union and aims to make patronizing neighborhood stores simpler: Residents can earn rewards or make charitable donations without having to keep track of stickers on their bills or carry a passel of buy-nine-and-get-the-10th-free punch cards. Photo: The Bernal Bucks card allows residents to pay for their purchases while earning credits every time they swipe it at any of the two dozen area businesses that have signed on since June. Credit: Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times

latimes:

In a San Francisco neighborhood, another way to pay: Insular Bernal Heights — “this weird little borderline utopia,” as one resident calls it — has updated “complementary currency” in the form of a debit card.

This sounds like a fascinating experiment!

Designed by two neighborhood loyalists versed in technology and banking, the Bernal Bucks card allows residents to pay for their purchases while earning credits every time they swipe it at any of the two dozen area businesses that have signed on since June.

Accrued as frequent-flier miles are, the bucks can be printed as coupons and used toward future purchases. Cardholders also can donate their accrued “wealth” to neighborhood nonprofits.

… Branded with a cheerful image of Bernal’s iconic hill, their Visa debit card is issued by the local Community Trust Credit Union and aims to make patronizing neighborhood stores simpler: Residents can earn rewards or make charitable donations without having to keep track of stickers on their bills or carry a passel of buy-nine-and-get-the-10th-free punch cards.

Photo: The Bernal Bucks card allows residents to pay for their purchases while earning credits every time they swipe it at any of the two dozen area businesses that have signed on since June. Credit: Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times

(Source: Los Angeles Times)

1:54pm
(Notes: 177)
  
Filed under: column one community san francisco bernal heights economy 
February 2, 2012
Clinging to economic growth suffocates the imagination

Listen to the news today and you would think that economic growth was the only answer to all our problems. But 40 years ago The Limits to Growth, written by a group of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and published by The Club of Rome, broke a modern taboo: it suggested that growth itself might be the problem.

It wasn’t the first time someone had suggested that an economy endlessly expanding in scale was neither possible nor necessarily desirable. As long ago as 1821, David Ricardo wrote of the ultimate equilibrium to which economic development led. And, in his Principles of Political Economy, 1848, John Stuart Mill raised and answered the question like this:

“Towards what ultimate point is society tending by its industrial progress? When the progress ceases, in what condition are we to expect that it will leave mankind? It must always have been seen, more or less distinctly, by political economists, that the increase of wealth is not boundless: that at the end of what they term the progressive state lies the stationary state, that all progress in wealth is but a postponement of this.”

Why, then, did The Limits to Growth shock in 1972, and why does questioning growth today still provoke incredulity and anger? The report itself became something of an albatross for the green movement. The view entered folklore that it contained predictions about resource use that were alarmist and plain wrong. But, as New Scientist magazine reported recently, it was the critics of the book who turned out to be mistaken.

6:00pm
(Notes: 7)
  
Filed under: growth environment ecology ideas production economy capitalism economics 
January 30, 2012
Less Work, More Living

Here’s a perfect article for the back-to-work-week doldrums:

Millions of Americans have lost control over the basic rhythm of their daily lives. They work too much, eat too quickly, socialize too little, drive and sit in traffic for too many hours, don’t get enough sleep, and feel harried too much of the time. It’s a way of life that undermines basic sources of wealth and well-being—such as strong family and community ties, a deep sense of meaning, and physical health.

Earn less, spend less, emit and degrade less. That’s the formula. The more time a person has, the better his or her quality of life, and the easier it is to live sustainably.

Imagining a world in which jobs take up much less of our time may seem utopian, especially now, when a scarcity mentality dominates the economic conversation. People who are employed often find it difficult to scale back their jobs. Costs of medical care, education, and child care are rising. It may be hard to find new sources of income when U.S. companies have been laying people off at a dizzying rate.

But fewer work hours for people with jobs is a key step toward solving the unemployment crisis—while giving Americans healthier lives. Fewer hours means more jobs are available to people who need them. Living on less pay usually means consuming less, making more of the things one needs at home, and living lighter, whether by design or by accident.

4:17pm
(Notes: 30)
  
Filed under: work employment economy ideas health 
January 26, 2012
Local Economies for a Global Future

This article is about a simple, singular idea, yet the significance of the idea to modern society is profound and far-reaching. Here it is: In the near future anything heavy will become intensely local while at the same time the limits to things that are ‘light’, ideas, philosophies, information will travel even further than today—literally and figuratively. This is a new paradigm for humanity and it has huge implications for the complete reordering of society. 

Environmentalists, economists, and sociologists agree: we are in an incredible state of flux, and this is simply the beginning. The planet is undergoing massive change and critical resources are diminishing, conditions to which the human race must respond. Population growth, resource scarcity and climate change will propel us, whether we like it or not, toward a new energy, food and resource paradigm. The world’s economies, based on cheap plentiful energy and the exploitation of people and the environment are starting to crumble. We are beginning an era in which the cozy assumptions of the last half-century are turned upside down, a time when the institutions and technologies that run our civilization are re-engineered. To understand how radical this new paradigm will be, let’s explore similar re-orderings in the past.

4:18pm
Filed under: relocalization transition economy ideas 
January 16, 2012
To Build Community, an Economy of Gifts

Wherever I go and ask people what is missing from their lives, the most common answer (if they are not impoverished or seriously ill) is “community.” What happened to community, and why don’t we have it any more? There are many reasons—the layout of suburbia, the disappearance of public space, the automobile and the television, the high mobility of people and jobs—and, if you trace the “whys” a few levels down, they all implicate the money system.

More directly posed: community is nearly impossible in a highly monetized society like our own. That is because community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people. If you are financially independent, then you really don’t depend on your neighbors—or indeed on any specific person—for anything. You can just pay someone to do it, or pay someone else to do it.

In former times, people depended for all of life’s necessities and pleasures on people they knew personally. If you alienated the local blacksmith, brewer, or doctor, there was no replacement. Your quality of life would be much lower. If you alienated your neighbors then you might not have help if you sprained your ankle during harvest season, or if your barn burnt down. Community was not an add-on to life, it was a way of life. Today, with only slight exaggeration, we could say we don’t need anyone. I don’t need the farmer who grew my food—I can pay someone else to do it. I don’t need the mechanic who fixed my car. I don’t need the trucker who brought my shoes to the store. I don’t need any of the people who produced any of the things I use. I need someone to do their jobs, but not the unique individual people. They are replaceable and, by the same token, so am I.

8:05pm
(Notes: 20)
  
Filed under: community economy ideas gifts 
January 15, 2012

The Economics of Happiness - Trailer

Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment. There are personal costs too. For the majority of people on the planet, life is becoming increasingly stressful. We have less time for friends and family and we face mounting pressures at work.

The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, an unholy alliance of governments and big business continues to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, people all over the world are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization.

4:15pm
(Notes: 25)
  
Filed under: video localization globalization local food economy ideas infrastructure environment sustainability documentaries