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Thanks to the story of stuff project for sharing! https://www.facebook.com/storyofstuff?fref=nf

#story of stuff #consumerism #plastic #sustainability

great resource! This Labor Landscape Analysis Profiles of 38 unions, federations, and other labor organizations on sustainability concerns.

http://www.labor4sustainability.org/labor-landscape-analysis/

#labor #new economy #sustainability #environmentalism #economics #workers rights #union

GOOD READ: The men and women in Invisible Hands reveal the human rights abuses occurring behind the scenes of the global economy. These narrators—including phone manufacturers in China, copper miners in Zambia, garment workers in Bangladesh, and farmers around the world—reveal the secret history of the things we buy, including lives and communities devastated by low wages, environmental degradation, and political repression. Sweeping in scope and rich in detail, these stories capture the interconnectivity of all people struggling to support themselves and their families.

#economics #poverty #labor #union #workers rights #occupy #global economy #agriculture #textiles #bangaldesh #rana plaza #electronics #mining #natural resources #reading group #occupy wall street #solidarity #invisible hands #voice of witness

https://movetoamend.org/

http://werenotbrokemovie.com/

http://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/

http://neweconomies.tumblr.com/

#corporate greed #Move to Amend #move your money #occupy #corporations #New Economy #solidarity economy #economic justice #poverty #taxes #wall street #immigration #children

suzannafinleyphotography

UBINIG (Policy Research for Development Alternatives) is a Bangladeshi organization I had the amazing pleasure of traveling with when I visited Bangladesh in 2009. My focus during the trip was on textile production, but through many hours of conversations and visits to several of their projects I began to have a deep appreciation and admiration for their holistic approach to development. In the past five years, as I have done much studying about alternative economies, social justices movements and globalization, UBINIGs approach and their work has come up for me over and over again as a model of true grassroots people centered development. The organization supports the organic farming movement in Bangladesh, they run seed banks throughout the country, as well as a retail shop organic produce in the city, they also have stunning handloom workshops and are working promote handloom weaving as a viable form of income generation at a local and national level, not based on reliance on exports, and the also run the only feminist bookstore and printing press in Bangladesh. An amazing organization to say the least! Learn more and get involved: http://www.ubinig.org/ & https://www.facebook.com/UBINIG and see my photo essay in Yes! Magazine here: http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/development-redefined-a-holistic-vision-in-bangladesh

Learning From Debt: How It Strengthened My Dreams and Brought My Family Closer

The experience of debt can guide us toward different ways of living—like having extended generations share a household—that are both cheaper and more fulfilling. by Shannon Hayes

On June 18, 1999, Bob and I were hiking through Asticou Terraces on Northeast Harbor in Maine. We’d passed through a series of thunder and lightning storms, but that afternoon the clouds finally parted and rays of sunlight dappled golden splashes along the forest floor. We came to a resting point along the trail, where a break in the trees granted us a view over the harbor. We sat down and drank in the sight.

“I really love you,” Bob stammered after a few minutes of silence. “And I feel as though, together, we could build a really nice life.”

I smiled at him.

“Do you feel that way?” he asked me. My eyes began to grow wet as I realized the weight of his words.

“Yes.” My voice was barely a whisper. “I do.”

He got down on one knee and pulled a little box out of his pocket. “Will you marry me?”

I nodded and stammered something like “yes,” tears spilling down my cheeks as I desperately tried to get him back off his knees, hoping no one would come along and see him.

We went home a few days later and announced our engagement. I don’t think my parents ever doubted that this would be the outcome of our three-year courtship, and when we told them our news, they promptly made an offer for us to build a house on the farm, where they knew my heart was.

We turned them down. We didn’t want to carve up the farm, we told them. We didn’t want to cause a rift in family relationships. But most of all, we carried the belief, inculcated through the broader American culture, that in order to be successful members of society, we were supposed to be independent from our family. And in 1999 that meant owning our own house, our own piece of land, our own mortgage. In October of that year, we closed on our house and took on our mortgage.

It was our first big mistake.

While Bob is happy to have a few miles between our household and his in-laws (and they might feel the same way), there are lots of reasons that lead me to conclude this was a grave error (and in some moments, even Bob concurs). It would have been much easier raising a family with my parents within walking distance. As we work on slowly transitioning my parents’ farm into our ownership, the burden of managing two properties is a perpetual struggle. Every morning when Bob swills down a cup of coffee and has to drive down the mountain to move the chickens and repair fence lines, the mistake sloshes around in our gas tank.

This mistake is at the fore of my mind following a letter I received last week from a young radical homemaker, in her mid-twenties, newly married with a partner who shares her dream. Saddled with nearly $100,000 in student loans, their life is not where they want it to be right now. They are renting an apartment in the suburbs; they are both working full time to pay off their debts, canning their tomatoes every August, dreaming of a homestead someday. They feel alone in their dreams, with no community to support them. They are frustrated with their expenses and commutes. They are angry that they were sold a bill of goods about student loans for degrees that not only fail to serve their life path, but that have derailed them from their dreams as they work to pay off their obligations.

I could make a list of money-saving tips for this young couple: ditch the iPhone subscription, ditch the digital TV service, ditch the visits to Starbucks, ditch the dinners out, ditch the Netflix. Use the library instead of Amazon. Take odd jobs that increase weekly income while building community relationships: mowing lawns, driving for the elderly, babysitting, painting decks, weeding gardens, shoveling driveways. Make soap and sell it on Etsy. Find a local farm and help on weekends. Don’t just make the minimum monthly payments—pay down a little extra every single month. If a windfall happens along the way, pay down a lot extra.

But I’m guessing they know this.

What’s more important, I think, is making sure the first big mistake doesn’t poison their lives.

Everyone is angry about student debt right now. Countless grassroots organizations are working to combat the problem, and it deserves public attention. It is worthy of our activism. But it is not worth coming home angry at the end of every day spent in an unwanted cubicle. It is not worth poisoning marriages, tarnishing a tender kiss, spoiling the joy of intimacy during a Saturday morning lie-in, or ruining a few moments on a summer evening spent sipping cool air while perched on the steps to an apartment. It is not worth sullying the daily affirmations of “I love you,” and “I believe in you.” And most importantly, it is not worth abandoning one’s deepest dreams.

Everyone on the radical homemaking path confronts mistakes. But in a movement like this, where we need to unravel an unsustainable culture and rethink our societal assumptions, mistakes hold tremendous value. Bob’s and my mistake to borrow money and buy a separate house led us to challenge the mainstream exaltation of nuclear families and housing debt. As our family grew and our tiny house expanded to accommodate children, every change was made with an eye toward enabling future generations of our family to cohabitate.

Aware of our mistake, we don’t say things to our daughters like, “When you’re 18, you’re on your own,” or “When you own your own house…” We let them fantasize about how they will use our farm, our house, to meet their own dreams. Maybe Saoirse and Ula will someday own a place of their own. But they don’t have to. We assure them that there will always be room for them here, just like many families across the country who are waking up to the power of intergenerational interdependence. We are teaching a new generation to have new expectations that are more in line with the carrying capacity of the planet.

Mistakes involving student debt are important too. Our regrets about it open our eyes to realizations about education: While diplomas can be bought for a price, education cannot. It must be taken. It cannot be given. We are reconceiving what higher education means for future generations.

While many of our current generation’s radical homemakers are working off student loan debt, they are simultaneously helping their own children remain open to apprenticeships, independent study, online coursework, and mentoring relationships. Mistakes are typically the first steps toward bringing about positive change. As long as this young couple shares a common dream, as long as they keep working toward it, the mistakes will only make the journey rich.

At its core, radical homemaking is not about having a homestead. It is not about being free of financial obligations. It is not about living easily while living light.

These are things to which many of us aspire, but ultimately it is about those simple words Bob used when he proposed to me: having a really nice life together; one where we live by our deepest values and where each mistake is forgiven as it helps to make us wiser, and where we find people at the end of every day to whom we can turn and say “I love you,” no matter how much money is in the piggy bank.

#radical homemaker #YES! magazine #new economy #farm #debt #strikedebt #occupy #economics #economic justice #student loans #politics #99%#farming #off the grid

the Putter (together of scissors) is a beautiful meditation on the meaning of crafting something from hand, from the talented Shaun Bloodworth, via Colossal. This video really resonated with me, as we all become so disconnected from how the things in our lives are put together / made, here is a simple story that reconnects, makes an object no longer just an object, makes it a product of someone elses care and hard work.

#scissors #this is colossal #colossal #art #handmade #sewing #cutting #craft #new economy #occupy #solidarity economy

Check out the Center for a New American Dream's 2014 national survey. www.newdream.org/poll2014

#center for the new american dream #Economic Justice #local economy #consumerism #American Dream

Worker-Owned Co-ops Get $1 Million in NYC Spending. New York City's newly approved budget allocates $1.2 million for developing and supporting worker-owned cooperative businesses.

New York City’s budget for the 2015 fiscal year includes a new item that supporters of a fairer economy will want to celebrate: $1.2 million set aside for the development of worker-owned cooperative businesses.

The spending is a small fraction of the $75 billion budget, which the City Council approved on June 26. But, according to a statement by U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, it's the largest investment in the sector ever made by a city government in the United States.

Cooperative businesses are both owned and operated by employees. They focus on maximizing value for all their members as well as creating fair and quality jobs.

“This is a great step forward for worker cooperatives,” Melissa Hoover, executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, said in a press release. According to Hoover the co-op funding received widespread support from city council members, which “shows that they understand cooperatives can be a viable tool for economic development that creates real opportunity."

Here’s how the city’s newly adopted budget describes the program:

Funding will support the creation of 234 jobs in worker cooperative businesses by coordinating education and training resources and by providing technical, legal and financial assistance. The initiative will fund a comprehensive citywide effort to reach 920 cooperative entrepreneurs, provide for the start-up of 28 new worker cooperative small businesses and assists another 20 existing cooperatives.

"A healthy local government’s budget is balanced, transparent, responsive, and inclusive," reads the opening statement of the 2015 Budget Summery. A healthy business runs quite the same way, and armed with this funding New York City worker-owned co-ops are set up to prove it.

#worker coops #coop #nyc #coop nyc #new york city #cooperatives #budget #city budget #local economy #yes #YES! magazine

After Piketty, the ownership revolution

Trend-altering change will take time, but potent forces are driving real-world efforts to democratize capital

June 17, 2014 3:15AM ET

by Gar Alperovitz

Now that the first round of intellectual debris left in the wake of French economist Thomas Piketty’s explosive best-seller “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”has begun to settle, it may be time to look more closely at the gaping hole it has left not only in political-economic analysis but also in conventional political strategy. After Piketty documented long-running trends that have turned over ever-increasing shares of national income to the owners of capital at the expense of the vast majority, the best solution he could muster was what he termed a utopian idea: a global tax on capital. Liberal economists, for their part, have largely rolled out the usual list of progressive tax reforms, often conveniently forgetting to confront the extraordinary political obstacles that stand in the way of any one policy remotely powerful enough to tackle the forces Piketty documents.

What forces, you may ask? How about the fact that a mere 400 people at the top now own as much wealth — or capital, in Piketty’s inclusive formulation covering stocks, bonds, businesses, land and any other significant asset — as the bottom 180 million Americans. The best we have been offered in response to this medieval pattern is the vague hope that a cycle of history may one day bring progressive policy back in vogue. Or that demographic shifts may not only allow the election of Democrats but also award them sufficient power to effect trend-altering change rather than modest reforms that utterly fail to divert the steady and ongoing allocation of the nation’s income to those who own capital or work cheek by jowl for them.

The reasons for such a lackluster response are many, but high on the list is the dwindling power of labor: Unions that once added muscle to traditional reform have decayed in membership, from a post–World War II peak of 34.7 percent of the labor force down to a mere 11.3 percent last year (and an even more modest 6.7 percent in the private sector). Close behind on the list, of course, is that money talks in politics — especially powerfully nowadays, given the loudspeaker it is assured by recent Supreme Court decisions rolling back campaign finance regulations.

There may be no solution to the problem. If there is, two things seem obvious: First, it will probably take a long, long ramp-up of experimentation and institution-building similar in form to the kinds of processes that occurred in the state and local laboratories of democracy during the decades prior to the New Deal. Second, whatever develops is unlikely to resemble what we might consider traditional reform. We’ve done that already. We mostly “remember the future,” the historian Lewis Namier once wrote, suggesting that what we learn from the past (and therefore assume about the future) is inevitable. This is a hazardous way to think, especially if what we want is to point our compasses toward something new.

The name of the game — Piketty’s book fairly screams it — is capital: who gets to own it, benefit from it and derive political power from it. Accordingly, it may be of some interest to note that in significant part because of the pain and failure of our current reality, many of those local laboratories of democracy are, in fact, exploring new (and sometimes old) ways to own capital and are seeking to democratize it.

The future is not foregone

Take participatory ownership. Even as union membership has trended steadily downward, for instance, the number of people involved in worker-owned firms has increased, from 250,000 in 1975 to about 11 million working in more than 11,000 firms today. Add to this approximately 130 million Americans who are members of some form of co-op, another type of democratized ownership; this number is increasing daily just beneath the surface of what our hollowed-out local newspapers are able to report on. Credit unions — member-owned one-person, one-vote banks — control more than $1.1 trillion in assets, as much as those of some of Wall Street’s largest financial institutions.

New ways for capital to be owned broadly by the people — or, again, democratized — are also beginning to show up in city and state politics. Boulder, Colorado, for instance, is in the process of municipalizing its electric utility, what one might call localized nationalization. The city council of Richmond, California, recently voted in favor of the mayor’s plan to utilize eminent domain powers to prevent foreclosures by taking over housing from banks if a major fight over mortgages is not settled in a reasonable way. In recent years, some 20 states have had legislation introduced to establish state banks similar to the one that has been operating successfully in North Dakota for almost 100 years. Land trusts — public or nonprofit ownership of land to benefit the community in diverse ways — have increased from a mere handful three decades ago to more than 250 now operating in 45 states and the District of Columbia.

No one believes these experiments in democratic ownership are at this stage going to alter how capital is owned to deal sufficiently with Piketty’s big trends. On the other hand, powerful forces are driving the new developments — namely, growing social and economic pain and a sense that none of the old ways work. Big trends take big time. It took at least three decades of a different kind of experimentation before the New Deal moved labor law, Social Security and other reforms from their primitive states and local beginnings to major national policies.

By the way, did you notice that the U.S. essentially nationalized General Motors; AIG, one of the largest insurance companies in the world; and in slightly different ways, Chrysler during the last big crisis? What might happen down the line — as Piketty’s capital-concentrating trends cause both more pain and more experimentation — is by no means a foregone conclusion for anyone who spends even a few minutes thinking about the odd ways history often works. If, that is, we try to explore rather than remember the emerging future.

Gar Alperovitz is a professor of political economy at the University of Maryland and a founder of the Democracy Collaborative. He is the author of “What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution.”

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.

#Gar Alperovitz #Capital #Piketty #New Economy #Coop #Economics #Economic Justice #politics #occupy #99%#Solidarity Economy

http://storyofstuff.org/ http://www.yesmagazine.org/ https://occupywallst.org http://neweconomy.net/ http://newint.org/

#mandela #nelson mandela #slavery #poverty #inequality #economics #economic justice #social justice #new economy #community #occupy #solidarity #solidarity economy

LOVE BERNIE SANDERS <3 as he asks FED CHAIR Yellen if the US is a DEMOCRACY OR AN OLIGARCHY

#bernie sanders #bernie #fed #oligarchy #wealth #inequality #poverty #poverty in america #occupy #ows #new economy #economics #social justice #activism #99%

read --- frolic in the park --- picnic --- grab a glass of wine with a friend and catch up --- sew or craft --- build something --- listen to a record --- nap --- pet your animal --- sing --- dance in public or private or wherever --- hug --- http://www.screenfree.org/

#screenfree #screen free #tv #capitalism #occupy #99%#new economy #bored #media #consumer culture #consumerism

Happy May Day / International Worker's Rights Day!

#may day #workers rights #labor #union #8 hours #minimum wage #poverty #work #working #economics #economic justice #occupy #99%#888 #solidarity economy #localism #localist #new economy

So proud of my home city! Looks like the Mayor just unveiled a plan to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Seattle over the next 7 years :) http://www.king5.com/news/local/Seattle-murray-minimum-wage-257505951.html

#seattle #minimum wage #$15 #solidarity economy #economic justice #poverty #poverty in america #new economy #economics #boom!#seattle washington #wage #labor #labor day

http://neweconomies.tumblr.com/ --- http://sacred-economics.com/ http://www.yesmagazine.org/ --- http://storyofstuff.org/

#revolution #occupy #new economy #economics #poverty #social justice #activism #activist #radical #woman #feminism #feminist #economy #economic justice #system change

Princeton Concludes What Kind of Government America Really Has, and It's Not a Democracy

(spoiler alert: its an OLIGARCHY --- guess we all knew but now even the 1% at Princeton are calling it like they see it).

The news: A new scientific study from Princeton researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page has finally put some science behind the recently popular argument that the United States isn't a democracy any more. And they've found that in fact, America is basically an oligarchy.

An oligarchy is a system where power is effectively wielded by a small number of individuals defined by their status called oligarchs. Members of the oligarchy are the rich, the well connected and the politically powerful, as well as particularly well placed individuals in institutions like banking and finance or the military.

For their study, Gilens and Page compiled data from roughly 1,800 different policy initiatives in the years between 1981 and 2002. They then compared those policy changes with the expressed opinion of the United State public. Comparing the preferences of the average American at the 50th percentile of income to what those Americans at the 90th percentile preferred, as well as the opinions of major lobbying or business groups, the researchers found out that the government followed the directives set forth by the latter two much more often.... FULL ARTICLE HERE: http://www.policymic.com/articles/87719/princeton-concludes-what-kind-of-government-america-really-has-and-it-s-not-a-democracy

#princeton #deomcracy #oligarchy #economics #economic justice #voting #politics #new economy #citizens united #money in politics #occupy

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