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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org, OWL-OldWaysLiving@yahoogroups.com
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Rise of the New Economy Movement
  • Date: Wed, 23 May 2012 22:25:17 -0600


much tnx to Ed a nearby mkt grower, one of the very few articles I can
endorse 100%. On a personal note, starting this list discussion & low tech
market growing, several years ago, was my own effort in this so-called New
Economy direction, but with a sustainability twist. There are many ways to
think outside the box, to build the models for the future inside the shell of
the old, in the words of Bucky Fuller.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
----------------------------

The Rise of the New Economy Movement
Activists, theorists, organizations and ordinary citizens are rebuilding the
American political-economic system from the ground up
by Gar Alperovitz
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/22-2

Just beneath the surface of traditional media attention, something vital has
been gathering force and is about to explode into public consciousness. The
“New Economy Movement” is a far-ranging coming together of organizations,
projects, activists, theorists and ordinary citizens committed to rebuilding
the American political-economic system from the ground up.

The broad goal is democratized ownership of the economy for the “99 percent”
in an ecologically sustainable and participatory community-building fashion.
The name of the game is practical work in the here and now—and a hands-on
process that is also informed by big picture theory and in-depth knowledge.

Thousands of real world projects -- from solar-powered businesses to
worker-owned cooperatives and state-owned banks -- are underway across the
country. Many are self-consciously understood as attempts to develop working
prototypes in state and local “laboratories of democracy” that may be applied
at regional and national scale when the right political moment occurs.

The movement includes young and old, “Occupy” people, student activists, and
what one older participant describes as thousands of “people in their 60s
from the '60s” rolling up their sleeves to apply some of the lessons of an
earlier movement.

Explosion of Energy

A powerful trend of hands-on activity includes a range of economic models
that change both ownership and ecological outcomes. Co-ops, for instance, are
very much on target—especially those which emphasize participation and green
concerns. The Evergreen Cooperatives in a desperately poor, predominantly
black neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio are a leading example. They include a
worker-owned solar installation and weatherization co-op; a state-of-the-art,
industrial-scale commercial laundry in a LEED-Gold certified building that
uses—and therefore has to heat—only around a third of the water of other
laundries; and a soon-to-open large scale hydroponic greenhouse capable of
producing three million head of lettuce and 300,000 pounds of herbs a year.
Hospitals and universities in the area have agreed to use the co-ops’
services, and several cities—including Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Washington, DC
and Amarillo, Texas are now exploring similar efforts.

The name of the game is practical work in the here and now—and a hands-on
process that is also informed by big picture theory and in-depth knowledge.

Other models fit into what author Marjorie Kelly calls the “generative
economy”--efforts that inherently nurture the community and respect the
natural environment. Organic Valley is a cooperative dairy producer in based
in Wisconsin with more than $700 million in revenue and nearly 1,700
farmer-owners. Upstream 21 Corporation is a “socially responsible” holding
company that purchases and expands sustainable small businesses. Greyston
Bakery is a Yonkers, New York “B-Corporation” (a new type of corporation
designed to benefit the public) that was initially founded to provide jobs
for neighborhood residents. Today, Greystone generates around $6.5 million in
annual sales.

Recently, the United Steelworkers union broke modern labor movement tradition
and entered into a historic agreement with the Mondragón Cooperative
Corporation and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center to help build worker-owned
cooperatives in the United States along the lines of a new “union-co-op”
model.

The movement is also serious about building on earlier models. More than 130
million Americans, in fact, already belong to one or another form of
cooperative—and especially the most widely known form: the credit union.
Similarly, there are some 2,000 municipally owned utilities, a number of
which are ecological leaders. (Twenty-five percent of American electricity is
provided by co-ops and public utilities.) Upwards of 10 million Americans now
also work at some 11,000 employee-owned firms (ESOP companies).

More than 200 communities also operate or are establishing community land
trusts that take land and housing out of the market and preserve it for the
community. And hundreds of “social enterprises” use profits for social or
community serving goals. Beyond these efforts, roughly 4,500 Community
Development Corporations and 1.5 million non-profit organizations currently
operate in every state in the nation.

The movement is also represented by the “Move Your Money” and “bank transfer
day” campaigns, widespread efforts to shift millions of dollars from
corporate giants like Bank of America to one or another form of democratic or
community-benefiting institution. Related to this are other “new banking”
strategies. Since 2010, 17 states, for instance, have considered legislation
to set up public banks along the lines of the long-standing Bank of North
Dakota.

Several cities—including Los Angeles and Kansas City— have passed
“responsible banking” ordinances that require banks to reveal their impact on
the community and/or require city officials to only do business with banks
that are responsive to community needs. Other cities, like San Jose and
Portland, are developing efforts to move their money out of Wall Street banks
and into other commercial banks, community banks or credit unions.
Politicians and activists in San Francisco have taken this a step further and
proposed the creation of a publicly owned municipal bank.

There are also a number of innovative non-public, non-co-op banks—including
the New Resource Bank in San Francisco, founded in 2006 “with a vision of
bringing new resources to sustainable businesses and ultimately creating more
sustainable communities.” Similarly, One PacificCoast Bank, an Oakland-based
certified community development financial institution, grew out of the desire
to “create a sustainable, meaningful community development bank and a
supporting nonprofit organization.” And One United Bank—the largest
black-owned bank in the country with offices in Los Angeles, Boston and
Miami—has financed more than $1 billion in loans, most in low-income
neighborhoods.

A broad and fast-growing group seeks to end “corporate personhood,” and still
others urge a reinvigoration of anti-trust efforts to reduce corporate power.

Ex-JP Morgan managing director John Fullerton has added legitimacy and force
to the debate about new directions in finance at the ecologically oriented
Capital Institute. And in several parts of the country, alternative
currencies have long been used to help local community building—notably
“BerkShares” in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and “Ithaca Hours” in
Ithaca, New York.

Active protest efforts are also underway. The Occupy movement, along with
many others, has increasingly used direct action in support of new banking
directions—and in clear opposition to old. On April 24, 2012 over 1,000
people protested bank practices at the Wells Fargo shareholder meeting in San
Francisco. Similar actions, some involving physical “occupations” of bank
branches, have been occurring in many parts of the country since the Occupy
movement started in 2011. Large-scale demonstrations occurred at the Bank of
America’s annual shareholder meeting in May 2012.

What to do about large-scale enterprise in a “new economy” is also on the
agenda. A number of advocates, like Boston College professor Charles Derber,
contemplate putting worker, consumer, environmental, or community
representatives of “stakeholder” groups on corporate boards. Others point to
the Alaska Permanent Fund which invests a significant portion of the state’s
mineral revenues and returns dividends to citizens as a matter of right.
Still others, like David Schweickart and Richard Wolff, propose system-wide
change that emphasizes one or another form of worker ownership and
management. (In the Schweickart version, smaller firms would be essentially
directly managed by workers; large-scale national firms would be nationalized
but also managed by workers.) A broad and fast-growing group seeks to end
“corporate personhood,” and still others urge a reinvigoration of anti-trust
efforts to reduce corporate power. (Breaking up banks deemed too big to fail
is one element of this.)

In March 2012, the Left Forum held in New York also heard many calls for a
return to nationalization. And even among “Small is Beautiful” followers of
the late E. F. Schumacher, a number recall this historic
build-from-the-bottom-up advocate’s argument that “[w]hen we come to
large-scale enterprises, the idea of private ownership becomes an absurdity.”
(Schumacher continuously searched for national models that were as supportive
of community values as local forms.)

Theory and Action

A range of new theorists have also increasingly given intellectual muscle to
the movement. Some, like Richard Heinberg, stress the radical implications of
ending economic growth. Former presidential adviser James Gustav Speth calls
for restructuring the entire system as the only way to deal with ecological
problems in general and growth in particular. David Korten has offered an
agenda for a new economy which stresses small Main Street business and
building from the bottom up. (Korten also co-chairs a “New Economy Working
Group” with John Cavanagh at the Institute of Policy Studies.) Juliet Schor
has proposed a vision of “Plentitude” oriented in significant part around
medium-scale high tech industry. My own work on a Pluralist Commonwealth
emphasizes a community-building system characterized by a mix of democratized
forms of ownership ranging from small co-ops all the way up to
public/worker-owned firms where large scale cannot be avoided.

Around the country, thinkers are clamoring to meet and discuss new ideas.

Writers like Herman Daly and David Bollier have also helped establish
theoretical foundations for fundamental challenges to endless economic
growth, on the one hand, and the need to transcend privatized economics in
favor of a “commons” understanding, on the other. The awarding in 2009 of the
Nobel Prize to Elinor Ostrom for work on commons-based development underlined
recognition at still another level of some of the critical themes of the
movement.

Around the country, thinkers are clamoring to meet and discuss new ideas. The
New Economy Institute, led primarily by ecologists and ecological economists,
hoped to attract a few hundred participants to a gathering to be held at Bard
College in June 2012. The event sold out almost two months in advance! An
apologetic email went out turning away hundreds who could not be accommodated
with the promise of much bigger venue the next year.

And that’s just one example. From April to May 2012, the Social Venture
Network held its annual gathering in Stevenson, Washington. The Public
Banking Institute gathered in Philadelphia. The National Center for Employee
Ownership met in Minneapolis—also to record-breaking attendance. And the
Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) held a major conference
in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Other events planned for 2012 include the Consumer
Cooperative Management Association’s meeting in Philadelphia; the U.S.
Federation of Worker Cooperatives’ gathering in Boston; a Farmer Cooperatives
conference organized by the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives;
and meetings of the National Community Land Trust Network and the Bioneers.
The American Sustainable Business Council, a network of 100,000 businesses
and 300,000 individuals, has been holding ongoing events and activities
throughout 2012.

Daunting Challenges

The New Economy Movement is already energetically involved in an
extraordinary range of activities, but it faces large-scale, daunting
challenges. The first of these derives from the task it has set for
itself—nothing less than changing and democratizing the very essence of the
American economic system’s institutional structure.

Most of those in the New Economy movement understand the challenge as both
immediate and long-term: how to put an end to the most egregious social and
economically destructive practices in the near term; how to lay foundations
for a possible transformation in the longer term.

Even viewed as a long-range goal, the movement obviously confronts the
enormous entrenched power of an American political economic system dominated
by very large banking and corporate interests—and bolstered by a politics
heavily dependent on the financial muscle of elites at the top. (One recent
calculation is that
400 individuals at the top now own more wealth than the bottom 160 million.)

A second fundamental challenge derives from the increasingly widespread new
economy judgment that economic growth must ultimately be reduced, indeed,
even possibly ended if the dangers presented by climate change are to be
avoided—and if resource and other environmental limits are to be responsibly
dealt with.

Complicating all this is the fact that most labor unions—the core institution
of the traditional progressive alliance—are committed to growth as absolutely
essential (as the economy is now organized) to maintaining jobs.

History dramatizes the implacable power of the existing institutions—until,
somehow, that power gives way to the force of social movements. Most of those
in the New Economy movement understand the challenge as both immediate and
long-term: how to put an end to the most egregious social and economically
destructive practices in the near term; how to lay foundations for a possible
transformation in the longer term.

And driving the movement’s steady build up, day by day, year by year, is the
growing economic and social pain millions of Americans now experience in
their own lives—and a sense that something fundamental is wrong. The New
Economy Movement speaks to this reality, and just possibly, despite all the
obstacles—as with the civil rights, feminist, environmental and so many other
earlier historic movements—it, too, will overcome. If so, the integrity of
its goals and the practicality of its developmental work may allow it to help
establish foundations for the next great progressive era of American history.
It is already adding positive vision and practical change to everyday life.

* * *

This essay is the first installment of 'New Economic Visions', a special
five-part AlterNet series edited by Economics Editor Lynn Parramore in
partnership with political economist Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy
Collaborative, where creative thinkers come together to explore the exciting
ideas and projects that are shaping the philosophical and political vision of
the movement that could take our economy back.
© 2012 Alternet
Gar Alperovitz

Gar Alperovitz is the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the
University of Maryland and co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative. Among
his most recent books are America Beyond Capitalism and (with Lew Daly)
Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We
Should Take It Back.





  • [Livingontheland] The Rise of the New Economy Movement, Tradingpost, 05/24/2012

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