THE POST-CORPORATE WORLD

KUBIAK: The "BELITTLE BIG BODIES" Banzai

2011-12-12T15:08:00.003+09:00

A Yearend OWS Salute and Immune Key to 2012

by W. David Kubiak

Yes, Virginia, there really are silver bullets and here’s a sterling one for you.

After a lifetime clashing with monstrous corporate bodies in the US, India and Japan, I hobble into the Occupation arena with a grateful hallelujah and some wild reconnaissance.

The hallelujah is a chorus, by the way. It also arises from countless other US expatriates who have long lived abroad and prayed for signs of a Yankee spring, i.e., any American uprising against the rampant corporate coup that’s beggared the nation at home and scarred its honor overseas.

As for the recon, life in Asia teaches you to see the world as an interplay of living systems – ancient healthy ones like tribes, wetlands and mammal bodies, and newly emerging malignant ones like megacorporations. It also suggests we’re not simply facing a random series of fiscal, social or environmental crises, but a human/megacorps endgame battle for the future of the earth.

Like the sorcerer's apprentice, we have conjured up an army of intended servant beings that have grown colossal, escaped our control and now overrun the planet. Indigenous leaders have begun calling big multinationals bodies an "alien invasive species" that menaces their cultures and homelands more than any threat they’ve faced before.

In this view, Big Banks, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Agrobiz, Big “Defense” et gargantuan cetera are all variations of an emergent new life form – sensually/spiritually/morally blind superorganisms that are alive, in charge and out of control. These Big Bodies' sickening effects on our lands and lives are everywhere apparent, but the good news is that they are a monocultured mutation and remedies that incapacitate some may help to cure them all.

Regarding the Occupation itself, living systems theory sees its campsites as the inflamed lymph glands of a stricken body politic where immuno-activists swarm with urgent energy preparing to mount a defense. Though managing occupation sites takes enormous effort, they are important not as settlements, but as emergency rallying points where activists can strategize their remedial response.

The immune cell/activist analogy is not just a clever metaphor. Consider the striking parallels: both immunocytes and activists are always a tiny minority in their respective bodies; both rush toward signs of trouble instead of sanely scuttling away; and both include highly autonomous members with diverse skills cooperating for the greater good. Neither are guided by orders or commands, but by a shared sense of mission and intelligence regarding the threat they face.

Like our own lymph glands or immune cell nurseries, the occupation camps solicit vital knowledge and history. Besides the rising generation, grizzled veterans of earlier wars are welcomed to talk to youth and share their lore. They report on the greatest foes they have faced, what their weapons and weak spots are, and how new recruits might best arrest their harms.

If the recon transmitted is exact and complete, the next generation of activists (or immunocytes) has a decent chance to prevail. If it’s not, they move out half blind, poorly armed and doomed to needless peril. With that fateful distinction in mind, I respectfully offer Occupation World the following recon dump, a brief wrap-up of all I’ve learned from three decades of anti-megacorps war. It portrays big corporate bodies as actual tumors, our greatest evolutionary bane, and the root cause of most earthly ills. It also suggests that 90% of the single issue harms we face could all be alleviated at once by melting Big Bodies back to human scale. And finally it offers a variety of ways to achieve just that and the rise of a post-corporate world.

All this immunological talk may sound unintelligibly odd to many, but I hope some of you share the same intuitions and can appreciate the solutions it prescribes. I sincerely believe it offers us a real silver bullet for all the symptoms noted below and many more you can probably add.

BIG BODY DIAGNOSTICS

Why bigness is baleful (or why the Fortune 2000 quite literally sucks)

Big Bodies are toxic to democracy and political health
Created to function as literal tyrannies, corporations` are anti-democratic by design and the tech and policies they promote focus rather than disperse power, endangering peace, health and human rights.

Big Bodies devastate the biosphere
Grotesquely engorged with plundered resources, public assets and/or Third World sweat, their cancerous growth drives mass extinctions, global toxicity and catastrophic climate change.

Big Bodies stupefy public discourse
Besides flooding our societal nervous systems with propaganda, ads and trivia, they censor or distort any voices that speak out against their power or contest their right to dominance.

Big Bodies kill jobs, sustainable economies and convivial employment
Sociopathically prioritizing their own growth over all other human values, they destroy or export far more jobs than they create, trash communities, demean workers and deny them basic rights.

Big Bodies stifle human progress
They wield corporatist influence to strangle competition, cripple markets, dissolve safeguards, and attack any innovations that decentralize power or threaten their own growth.

Big Bodies juvenalize their own
Using stress and chronic suction on members' attentional energies, megacorps repress their underlings' political/sensual hormones, and suppress their longing for individuation, autonomy and adulthood.

IMMUNO-ACTIVIST PROGNOSTICS

Knowledge of what we’re up against is empowering, but it’s only a start. We also need a clear vision of what winning would mean to guide our strategies. We therefore propose a few mental exercises to clarify our goal lines and illuminate the field of play. See if any speak to you.

Envision human society as a work in progress that has largely rejected the yokes of theocracy, monarchy and imperial tyranny and now is preparing to overthrow corporate rule.
Envision an America where 99% actually constitutes a ruling majority with the sovereign right to protect its kids, communities and the natural surround from noxious corporate life.
Envision a world where corporations are too small, localized and democratized to systemically disrupt our communities, hijack our media, usurp political power or pillage the world.
Envision a ten-year timeframe to shrink all Big Bodies down to eco-friendly human scale (1000 folks/$5 billion revenue max) and democratize their boards with potent stakeholder reps.
Envision corporate bodies chartered to be transparent, subserve the public good and divide in half like bee swarms when they reach too large a size.
Envision how many global activist campaigns would benefit from miniaturized corporate might.
Envision localized workplaces without steep hierarchies or profit-blinded callousness to people and land.
Envision freeing the market's invisible hand from the jaws of Big cartels and corporatist scams.
Envision a global uprush of awakening humans who renounce competitive consumption as a yardstick of stature and cultivate their own inner gifts and communities instead.
Envision any other single occupation demand that would have more enduring impact on our lives, evolution and governance than swiftly and systematically belittling Big Bodies everywhere.

THERAPEUTIC PRESCRIPTIONS

If you accept the premise that giant corporate bodies are now the biggest threat to planetary peace, health and democracy, we face a formidable challenge but a greatly clarified task. To radically downsize them over the next ten years, evict them from power, and melt them back to healthy scale will require concerted action of many kinds as well as many types of talents. This is exactly how our immune systems dissolve many tumors and they have a lot to teach us now.

Like the occupation movement, one of the most attractive features of immune defenses is that they run quite effectively without formal leaders or hierarchies. Once the dendritic cells, the investigative journalists of immune world, identify and publicize a threat, many other types of immune cells rally to subdue it using many different skills. The biological success of this model implies of course that activists don’t need hierarchies either and that our fractious egalitarian diversity (which often bedevils occupation site politics) may be our greatest long-term strength. Consider the range of talents we could marshal against malignant corporate growth.

DIVERSE PATHS TO BIG BODY DELIQUESCENCE

Academic - researching living system pathologies, corporate/human competitive evolution, and the fastest, safest, most creative ways to shrink Big Bodies down.
Artistic – exposing the addictive delusions of the Big Body matrix, illustrating its harms and vulnerabilities, and reconnecting folks to the grounding energies of their bodies and the earth.
Direct Action - resisting Big Bodies' expropriations, depredations and eco-social crimes.
Educational - liberating empty evening schoolrooms across the nation for students and citizens to jointly study and co-create post-corporate remedies for local, regional and global ills.
Electoral - strengthening anti-Big activists with public office and policy-making power.
Familial - supporting local farms, firms and organizations that create sustainable livelihoods, nurture convivial communities, and respect the environment.
Financial - shifting savings and capital away from Big Body accounts to credit unions, small businesses and community-strengthening investments.
Journalistic - focusing public attention on the systemic harms of Big Body hegemony, and the countless ways they collude to extort our wealth, obstruct our growth and rape the earth.
Legal - challenging corporate supremacy at every level of governance and repudiating their right to subvert our democratic rights or dictate any rules.
Legislative - reconfiguring corporate DNA by rewriting their charters to delimit their size, powers and opacity, and only conferring limited liability on those with multi-stakeholder boards.
Pedagogical - helping schools at all levels organize classes around real-world crises and harnessing youth's imagination and intelligence to solve real problems, not just pass tests.
Scientific - developing more open source solutions to critical eco-social problems and new democracy-enhancing technologies that redistribute power and decentralize control.
Spiritual - channeling attention inward and initiating collective experiences of our ancient interdependence, latent powers and sacred unity with the living world.
Tricksteresque - monkey wrenching, Rev. Billy/Yes-Man-impersonating, Wikileaking and otherwise creatively disrupting corporate assaults on the poor, the peace and the planet.

So in summary, we offer a modest but inclusive proposal for all Occupationistas and other immuno-activists: Don’t eat the rich, just belittle their tumorous bulk, doing whatever it takes. It will radically diminish their powers, harms and deadening distance from our world as well as empowering activists everywhere.

A TEA PARTY POSTSCRIPT: ACKNOWLEDGING BIG GOV CONCERNS

Agreed the government is also way too big and exorbitant, but most of its bloated regulatory organs were once devised to protect us from the sins, crimes and toxicity of unchecked corporate power. Now largely captured by their regulatees, these countless “public” bodies now shamelessly abet corporate takings and have also ballooned in scale. Similarly, our obscenely distended “Defense” Department has virtually merged with vast industry bodies whose health and survival depends on endless fear and wars. Since thousands of retiring Pentagon officials parachute into these bodies now, many are logically happy to ensure a steady supply of both.

Some analysts trace our government's swollen state to infection with malignant corporate memes that elevate autocratic control and endless growth over any other human good. As government swells in size, it also grows more opaque and unaccountable. Something's obviously gone terribly wrong when the sovereign people’s activities are all buck naked to their public servants’ surveillance, but the actions of the servants themselves are shrouded in state secrecy.

Big Gov apologists reply that our industrial life support systems are now so complex and vulnerable that we face perils everywhere and must constantly sacrifice freedoms to preserve our way of life. The sane retort is clear. If bigness breeds complexity so fragile it is threatened by personal rights, we must choose between hugeness and liberty and make that choice damn fast

.

It’s not like there aren’t alternatives. Stakeholder directors could internalize regulatory oversight directly into corporate boards and allow us to shrink scores of “supervisory” agencies. The Swiss approach to national defense largely shuns War, Inc. bureaucracies. Instead it arms and trains all citizens as marksman guerrillas to secure the homeland on their own. Similarly decriminalizing victimless crimes would empty half our prisons, courts and oversized law enforcement bodies. Ending lavish taxpayer subsidies to big agrobiz, nuclear and fossil fuel bodies would ease the deficit, decentralize our food and energy systems and create millions of new jobs. Et cetera, et cetera.

So yes, governmental bloat is a huge concern, but we can cure it far more effectively once we’ve dwarfed Big Bodies, expelled them from our capitols and reclaimed our sovereign power. It will take new laws and legislators to seriously shrivel government and we the people just don’t have enough political clout to make that happen soon. Shrinking megacorps, however, is something we can all begin right now with a wide array of tools. It’s us against them, my friends, the bipeds vs. the Big. The global endgame is on and no one will ever be safe again until we melt these monsters down.

W. David Kubiak is a Project Censored Award-winning journalist, anti-megacorps activist, and director of Big Medicine , a tiny trinational non-profit targeting noxious corporate life He serves Occupy Maine on the media workgroup and as a battle-scarred memory T-cell who also holds forth at magic10percent.net

Nicole Foss - How I Prepared My Home for Peak Oil and Economic Uncertainty

2011-11-01T18:08:00.002+09:00

Reviving the Department of Subsistence Homesteads

2011-10-31T17:42:00.001+09:00

Dorothea Lange The Wayfarers May 1937
"Mother and child of Arkansas flood refugee family near Memphis, Texas. These people, with all their earthly belongings, are bound for the lower Rio Grande Valley, where they hope to pick cotton." Photographed for the Resettlement Administration.

Ashvin Pandurangi:

First Diamond in the Rough: Reviving the Department of Subsistence Homesteads

I am pleased to present the first article submission to TAE Community’s "Diamonds in the Rough" project, which you all voted to explore! In this submission, Joanna Bailey delves into the history of FDR’s Department of Subsistence Homesteads, created during the Great Depression as a part of his New Deal economic program, and outlines how it could be revived and put to use for local communities and/or regions in the near future.

We are, of course, living in very unique times, and the path we take will differ in significant ways from that taken in the 1930s. Even if the DSH cannot be revived as envisioned by FDR, though, its elements can still be adopted by communities and help play a critical role in the ways these communities choose to respond to systemic collapse in upcoming years. Joanna does an excellent job of explaining how these developments could take form and sustain themselves in a clear and concise manner.

Before getting to her submission, I would like to take notice of the three unique Diamonds that were also polled, but were not chosen to be explored further. The originators have generously submitted additional links and details on their ideas. So here are the runners-up Diamonds in the order of total votes received:

1. Jim Jackson: Planting fruit trees and shrubs in large numbers on private and public land - Just Fruits and Exotics (provides an exceptional level of information about the plants and how to care for them)

2. Bill Hoyer: Optimal nurturing from conception through birth and childhood - Optimal Nurturing Summary (reference the works of Joseph Chilton Pearce, James Prescott, John Bowlby, Gabor Mate, Suzanne Arms, Robbie Davis-Floyd)

3. Michael James (contact: newpartycanada at gmail dot com): Tectonic Mitigation Stress Strategy - Detailed Description of Idea

Thank you to all of these guys for participating in and contributing to TAE Community's Diamonds Series. Keep voting for the subsequent choices!

Now, without further ado, here is Joanna:

Joanna Bailey:

Reviving the Department of Subsistence Homesteads

The Original Department of Subsistence Homesteads

Between 1933 and 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal created thirty-four communities under the Division of Subsistence Homesteads (DSH). The DSH, funded at $25 million, pledged to organize pilot programs showing how the country could benefit from semirural neighborhoods with part-time farming.

Each project would be initiated at the state level and administered through a nonprofit corporation. Successful applicants would be offered a combination of part-time employment opportunities, fertile soil for part-time farming, and locations connected to the services of established cities. DSH director Milburn L. Wilson stated:

"A subsistence homestead denotes a house and out buildings located upon a plot of land on which can be grown a large portion of foodstuffs required by the homestead family. It signifies production for home consumption and not for commercial sale. In that it provides for subsistence alone, it carries with it the corollary that cash income must be drawn from some outside source. The central motive of the subsistence homestead program, therefore, is to demonstrate the economic value of a livelihood which combines part-time wage work and part-time gardening or farming."

When word of these projects reached people desperate for a lifeline out of the poverty and turmoil brought on by the Great Depression, thousands wrote letters of interest. Most of these heartbreaking pleas were from people who didn't understand that the DSH projects weren't meant to be a relief program for the unemployed and destitute. The new communities were categorized as to what group of workers they would be helping in the following manner:

"Stranded workers" – Intended to help logging communities at risk due to declining timber supplies, or miners facing economic-related shutdowns, etc.

"Farm" projects" - Intended to help farm families that had been struggling to work poor land.

"Industrial" homesteads" - Redistributed families from congested urban areas into the exurban countryside.

The Cumberland Homesteads project in Tennessee was one of the larger developments, at 10,000 acres. Successful applicants helped clear the land, selling the timber to defray building expenses, and milling some for the community structures. Most project plans allowed for shared spaces and buildings, including pastures, barns, and schools, since maintaining a strong sense of community was one of the basic tenets of the DSH homestead program.

Some factors taken into consideration in reviewing applicants were 'neighborliness' and 'deportment of children'. In some areas, employment opportunities were provided by an existing industry, but others were considered in tandem with new factories or a cash crop to be farmed as a cooperative venture.

The DSH existed independently for only two years before being subsumed by the Resettlement Administration (RA), which survived for another two years before transitioning into the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and then into the Federal Public Housing Authority (PHA). As happens with many 'big government' initiatives, turf battles, bureaucratic slowdowns, political & personal conflicts of interest, all combined to make the DSH problematic from an administration perspective.

Once the visionaries initially involved at the beginning of the project grew impatient, frustrated, and finally moved on, the homestead program was shuffled from agency to agency, finally being discontinued by 1936. Most of the DSH communities shared the eventual fate of the one built in my state, near Longview, WA, with the federal government removing itself from the project's operations in the early 40's, leaving the association free to function as it saw fit.

Some people sold their properties to non-homesteaders, but a few remain relatively intact, with historical documentations and celebrations of "Homesteader Days". Given the enthusiastic ground-level response to the DSH program, it seemed an expansion and continuation would have been very welcome to those families taking advantage, but by then the prospect of a coordinated "war effort" leading to economic revitalization through manufacturing trumped the political will for "homey" solutions.

More information about the original DHS can be found in Robert Carriker's detailed and informative book,

Urban Farming in the West

as well as the following online resources:

Subsistence Homesteads article, published Jan. 1934 in Survey Graphic magazine
List of New Deal Homestead and Resettlement Communities
News article about the Longview, WA project
Cumberland Homesteads website
News article c.1934 about the DSH

Reinventing the Department of Subsistence Homesteads

The original DSH was a top-down, built-from-scratch, fully government run and funded initiative. The homestead communities were meant to be model settlements (populated by carefully selected families), using all the resources the federal government could bring to bear, architects, agricultural experts, social planners, and the like. The hope was that these successful endeavors would inspire private corporations to invest in similar communities, leaving the government to ease itself out of the homesteading business altogether.

Some of the most functional elements of these projects were a result of local involvement at every level, from site planning to homesteader selection. A revived DSH would eschew federal involvement in favor of completely local and regional coordination under an umbrella organization. There are already many community and homestead renewal movements underway across the country, and regional entities could easily work together once founding principles were enacted.

A generalized real-life scenario under the new Department of Subsistence Homesteads is presented below, along with some loosely-grouped potential department branches that could utilize organizations or institutions which are currently active in any given community (organizations in my area will be used as examples).

Local Resources of the Education Branch: Whatcom Folk School, Whatcom County Extension, WSU-Mount Vernon Research Center, Country Living Expo

A young couple, mortgaged to an urban house with a decent-sized yard, decide to offset rising food costs and cuts in work hours by growing more of their own food. Having heard about the new Department of Subsistence Homesteads, they contact their regional coordinator, who comes to their house for an informational appointment. They sign up for Homesteading 101 through the area Folk School, which provides them information and directs them to further resources to assess their options.

Local Resources of the Community Branch: Sustainable Connections, Transition Whatcom, Bellingham Urban Gardeners, Washington State Grange

Local Resources of the Legal Branch: Maine’s Local Food and Self-Governance Ordinance, Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund

After being contacted by their neighborhood community coordinator, the couple joins the local grange (which is holding their monthly potluck soon, as posted on their online bulletin board). In addition, they are put in contact with representatives from local branches of organizations that specialize in legal information and aid, such as the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund. This organization makes them aware of their rights as emerging farmers as the rights of customers to access their product directly.

Local Resources of Funding Branch: Whatcom Educational Credit Union, Whatcom Community Foundation, Kulshan Community Land Trust

They learn that their household could easily support raised bed gardening, a laying flock, some fruit trees, and, with a little work, a pig for meat or a dairy goat. They apply for a micro-loan from the state bank/community trust foundation that will pay for building supplies and soil amendments. With advice from the county extension, and some labor assistance obtained by bartering with a neighbor, they build the flock and garden infrastructure.

After a few years of successful urban homesteading, they decide to explore new initiatives being promoted through the DSH. It turns out that, with labor from the regional trade school and funding from the state bank (plus community trust and other local capital), DSH has been reclaiming suitable abandoned/foreclosed housing in semi-rural areas outside town, with an emphasis on contiguous properties for community resettlement. Funding is in place for a feed mill that will source ingredients from larger farms in the state, process and package the finished products for distribution in the area.

A coordinating organization under the DSH umbrella has been working to bring the new mill up to speed in tandem with the influx of homesteaders moving to the reclaimed housing, providing cash wages to homesteaders and a local pool of workers to the new mill. The rise of subsistence homesteading means a steady need for quality animal feed, providing a good return on capital invested in the new venture. Job stability means homestead loans will be repaid, and homesteaders will enjoy food security and community life.

Local Resources of the Re-localization Branch:

Scratch and Peck Feed,
Growing Washington CSA,
Northwest Agriculture Business Center,
Grow Northwest

After reviewing the available resources, one of the couples decides to start a micro-dairy with another community member. Reworked food and zoning laws make homestead food production much easier to share with the wider community, so the micro-dairy will provide milk for the fifteen nearest households. The county extension supplies in-depth education and consultation, and meetings with past and present local dairy farmers give a look at the hands on reality of this venture.

A building party is planned, and a combination of bartered labor and materials, bank and donor funding, volunteers from the "Homesteads for Humanity" and apprentice builders program are used to construct a milk processing room adjoining the community barn. Eventually our couple realizes the hard work of homesteading is proving to be a challenge as they grow older. A younger household (perhaps the one living in the couple’s former urban homestead?) has posted a request for internship on community bulletin boards, and are now set to move in to guest quarters on the rural homestead.

A trial period of hands on practice while learning from the older couple leads to ownership transition. The older couple returns to a more urban setting, where they can continue to work part time and grow food while enjoying the convenience of town life. Now that they have more time to share, they work on various DSH committees, help coordinate the expanding rural transit system, teach a few Homesteading 101 classes, etc. In this manner, the Subsistence Homestead program will sustain itself over many years and many generations, as individuals and families reciprocate within their community.

The specific details of how a new Subsistence Homestead Department and Program can be implemented will obviously differ across regions/communities and over time. Some regions will be able to develop the program on a relatively large-scale across many cities and towns in the U.S., and perhaps even states.

Others will have to take a much smaller-scale approach. Either way, there is no doubting that there are plenty of existing resources available for communities to draw upon in their attempts to revive the program, and tailor it to fit the abilities and needs of their local populations in the assuredly unique times of our future.

Artificial Photosynthesis to Power Homes & Villages

2011-10-31T06:48:00.002+09:00

While we wait for Andrea Rossi et al. to perfect the long-awaited "cold fusion" panacea, here is a fine example of energetic biomimicry. - Ed.

MIT's artificial leaf is ten times more efficient than the real thing
By Mark Brown
wired.co.uk
28 March 2011

Speaking at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in California, MIT professor Daniel Nocera claims to have created an artificial leaf, made from stable and inexpensive materials, which mimics nature's photosynthesis process.

The device is an advanced solar cell, no bigger than a typical playing card, which is left floating in a pool of water. Then, much like a natural leaf, it uses sunlight to split the water into its two core components, oxygen and hydrogen, which are stored in a fuel cell to be used when producing electricity.

Nocera's leaf is stable -- operating continuously for at least 45 hours without a drop in activity in preliminary tests -- and made of widely available, inexpensive materials -- like silicon, electronics and chemical catalysts. It's also powerful, as much as ten times more efficient at carrying out photosynthesis than a natural leaf.

With a single gallon of water, Nocera says, the chip could produce enough electricity to power a house in a developing country for an entire day. Provide every house on the planet with an artificial leaf and we could satisfy our 14 terrawatt need with just one gallon of water a day.

Those are impressive claims, but they're also not just pie-in-the-sky, conceptual thoughts. Nocera has already signed a contract with a global megafirm to commercialise his groundbreaking idea. The mammoth Indian conglomerate, Tata Group has forged a deal with the MIT professor to build a small power plant, the size of a refrigerator, in about a year and a half.

This isn't the first ever artificial leaf, of course. The concept of emulating nature's energy-generating process has been around for decades and many scientists have tried to create leaves in that time. The first, built more than ten years ago by John Turner of the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, was efficient at faking photosynthesis but was made of rare and hugely expensive materials. It was also highly unstable, and had a lifespan of barely one day.

For now, Nocera is setting his sights on developing countries. "Our goal is to make each home its own power station," he said. "One can envision villages in India and Africa not long from now purchasing an affordable basic power system based on this technology."

Forest Gardening - Permaculture

2011-10-19T02:29:00.003+09:00

Forest Gardening with Robert Hart
More details and background on forest garden dynamics and design.

Courtesy of AppleseedGarden, which also offers a lot more edifying eco-agro-videos here.

Perpetual Bacterial Hydrogen Generators

2011-09-21T02:37:00.002+09:00

Harvesting 'limitless' hydrogen from self-powered cells

By Mark Kinver
Environment reporter, BBC News
20 September 2011

US researchers say they have demonstrated how cells fueled by bacteria can be "self-powered" and produce a limitless supply of hydrogen.

Until now, they explained, an external source of electricity was required in order to power the process.

However, the team added, the current cost of operating the new technology is too high to be used commercially.

Details of the findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"There are bacteria that occur naturally in the environment that are able to release electrons outside of the cell, so they can actually produce electricity as they are breaking down organic matter," explained co-author Bruce Logan, from Pennsylvania State University, US.

"We use those microbes, particularly inside something called a microbial fuel cell (MFC), to generate electrical power.

"We can also use them in this device, where they need a little extra power to make hydrogen gas.

"What that means is that they produce this electrical current, which are electrons, they release protons in the water and these combine with electrons."

Prof Logan said that the technology to utilise this process to produce hydrogen was called microbial electrolysis cell (MEC).

"The breakthrough here is that we do not need to use an electrical power source anymore to provide a little energy into the system.

"All we need to do is add some fresh water and some salt water and some membranes, and the electrical potential that is there can provide that power."

The MECs use something called "reverse electrodialysis" (RED), which refers to the energy gathered from the difference in salinity, or salt content, between saltwater and freshwater.

In their paper, Prof Logan and colleague Younggy Kim explained how an envisioned RED system would use alternating stacks of membranes that harvest this energy; the movement of charged atoms move from the saltwater to freshwater creates a small voltage that can be put to work.

"This is the crucial element of the latest research," Prof Logan told BBC News, explaining the process of their system, known as a microbial reverse-electrodialysis electrolysis cell (MREC).

"If you think about desalinating water, it takes energy. If you have a freshwater and saltwater interface, that can add energy. We realised that just a little bit of that energy could make this process go on its own."

Early days

He said that the technology was still in its infancy, which was one of the reasons why it was not being exploited commercially.

"Right now, it is such a new technology," he explained.

"In a way it is a little like solar power. We know we can convert solar energy into electricity but it has taken many years to lower the cost.

"This is a similar thing: it is a new technology and it could be used, but right now it is probably a little expensive. So the question is, can we bring down the cost?"

The next step, Prof Logan explained, was to develop larger-scale cells: "Then it will easier to evaluate the costs and investment needed to use the technology.

The authors acknowledged that hydrogen had "significant potential as an efficient energy carrier", but it had been dogged with high production costs and environmental concerns, because it is most often produced using fossil fuels.

Prof Logan observed: "We use hydrogen for many, many things. It is used in making [petrol], it is used in foods etc. Whether we use it in transportation... remains to be seen."

But, the authors wrote that their findings offered hope for the future: "This unique type of integrated system has significant potential to treat wastewater and simultaneously produce [hydrogen] gas without any consumption of electrical grid energy."

Prof Logan added that a working example of a microbial fuel cell was currently on display at London's Science Museum, as part of the Water Wars exhibition.

Applied Sociocracy - Corp Democracy

2011-09-21T02:19:00.002+09:00

Can a Company Be Run as a Democracy?

By JACLYNE BADAL
* The Wall Street Journal
* APRIL 23, 2007

During a recent strategy meeting at Ternary Software Inc., a programmer criticized the chief executive's new incentive plan for employees. An hourlong discussion ensued, in which several participants, including the CEO, critiqued the proposal. Ultimately, all six participants agreed to handle incentives differently.

That part was crucial: Ternary runs itself as a democracy, and every decision must be unanimous. Any of Ternary's 13 other employees could have challenged the incentive decision and forced it to be revisited.

Running a company democratically sounds like a recipe for anarchy, and it can prompt bureaucratic whiplash: Ternary, a company with annual revenues of around $2 million, adjusted salaries for employees up and down several times last year.

But Ternary's leaders, who adopted the system in reaction to experiences of corporate infighting at another small company where they met, insist that it works. CEO Brian Robertson says Ternary makes decisions more quickly because everyone has a voice and knows that mistakes can be undone. The company, which writes software programs on contract for other companies, is growing and profitable, and drawing interest from outsiders. "It takes getting beyond your ego," says Mr. Robertson, who, as one of the founders of the company, has the CEO title but little typical CEO authority.

Ternary's practices are extreme, but other employers use similar tactics to give workers a voice. Beverage company Honest Tea Inc., Bethesda, Md., shares financial data with employees and encourages them to help at annual planning and strategy meetings. Product-design consultancy Continuum Inc. in West Newton, Mass., hosts monthly employee townhall meetings to discuss plans. Google Inc. prides itself on an egalitarian culture that includes weekly updates from executives who field questions from employees.

Advocates say such systems appeal to workers, particularly younger ones, searching for careers with meaning. "Everyone wants to be a somebody," says Traci Fenton, founder of WorldBlu Inc., a Washington organization that promotes workplace democracy.

Ryan Quinn, a management professor at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business, says these companies typically are willing to sacrifice some short-term profit to pursue innovation or other goals. Mr. Quinn says unorthodox practices can succeed at large and small companies, but says he has never seen a company like Ternary, that strives for unanimous agreement.

Harry Katz, dean of Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, doubts a system like Ternary's could work on a large scale. In bigger companies, "there's an inevitable conflict of interest between managers and employees," Mr. Katz says. General Motors Corp.'s Saturn plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., for instance, experimented with giving employees a strong voice in management, but later moved back to a more-traditional structure, he says. A GM spokesman, however, says the auto maker gleaned many insights from the Spring Hill plant and still emphasizes employee input.

Ternary's path to workplace democracy wasn't painless. The company, founded in 2001, first tried to draft a mission statement by consensus in 2004, when it had grown to more than a dozen employees. The meeting lasted two days and ended as participants too exhausted to continue arguing agreed in principle to run the company as a democracy. An attempt the next year to create a salary system by consensus was no better. But Mr. Robertson persevered, guided by two out-of-print books about a Dutch management technique called "sociocracy" or "dynamic governance." He has dubbed Ternary's system "holacracy" and has begun marketing it as a managing style.

The 19-person Exton, Pa., company has a policy-setting team of seven people, including two frontline workers elected by their peers. The team is linked to smaller groups through the company that ultimately give all employees a voice. The team meets to set policy for two hours once or twice a month.

The meetings take into account feelings as well as strategy. In the "check-in" round at a recent session, a programmer recovering from a tetanus shot reported a sore left arm. As new items are introduced, each participant is asked for a gut reaction. Then, they're asked to state objections. The group reworks the proposal until the objections are resolved or the plan is rejected.

The meeting where the incentive scheme was discussed was typically busy. The team rejected Mr. Robertson's proposal to replace the profit-sharing program with an "ad hoc bonus system" based on performance, formulating a new plan that would keep the profit-sharing program and introduce monthly bonus incentives. The group also assigned the CEO new responsibility for spurring growth, gave the sales manager more authority to negotiate contracts, and decided to bill clients by the day, rather than by the hour.

Technology chief Anthony Moquin, one of the founders of the company, said his gut reaction to the billing change was that it was simplistic. But he accepted it, saying, "We can try it and see how it works."

That's a common refrain at Ternary. Managers don't look for an ideal solution, merely a workable plan that looks like progress. Employees who don't like the results can seek a seat at the next strategy meeting or ask a member of the policy group to revisit the issue.

The repeated changes to Ternary's pay scale last year demonstrate employee empowerment in action. The company shares financial data, including everyone's salary, with all employees. In 2005, Bill Schofield proposed cutting the salaries of senior programmers, including his own, by 15%, and boosting compensation for junior programmers. The council agreed.

Then, last summer, Ternary ran into a cash crunch because some customers weren't paying their bills on time. The strategy council slashed salaries by 22%. That rattled Chad Wolfe, a 29-year-old Canadian programmer who told his representative on the strategy team that he would have trouble paying his personal bills. So the team devised no-interest loans for needy employees.

"It's frustrating and hard not to be able to count on your paycheck being consistent," Mr. Wolfe says. But he still likes working at Ternary.

Four months later, in November, Ternary restored the pay cut. Then, in January, several employees asked the strategy group to give everyone a raise, as thanks for staying through the bad time. Salaries rose 20%. Last month, Ternary paid employees the money they lost during the four-month pay cut, plus interest. Mr. Wolfe will start repaying his roughly $2,000 interest-free loan at the end of April.

Mr. Robertson says the pay saga highlights why the practice works. Instead of getting upset and leaving, the employees "used the system to inject feedback and get their needs met," he says.

Ternary's governance system has won fans among middle-age employees, such as 52-year-old Wade Lee, who survived decades of management fads at behemoths such as International Business Machines Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc. He says the pay fluctuations are no worse than when he was a salesman working on commission; plus, he has a voice in the outcome. "You don't have to fight and claw to be heard," says Mr. Lee, director of business development.

Write to Jaclyne Badal at jaclyne.badal@wsj.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page B1

Influential retired officials push drug decriminalization

2011-06-05T02:19:00.000+09:00

Leading world politicians urge 'paradigm shift' on drugs policy

Afghans harvest opium in a poppy field.
Photograph: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Jamie Doward
The Observer

29 May 2011

Kofi Annan, George Shultz and Richard Branson among those urging public health approach.

Former presidents, prime ministers, eminent economists and leading members of the business community will unite behind a call for a shift in global drug policy. The Global Commission on Drug Policy will host a press conference at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York to launch a report that describes the drug war as a failure and calls for a "paradigm shift" in approaching the issue.Those backing the call include Ernesto Zedillo, former president of Mexico; George Papandreou, former prime minister of Greece; César Gaviria, former president of Colombia; Kofi Annan, former UN secretary general; Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil; George Shultz, former US secretary of state; Javier Solana, former EU high representative; Virgin tycoon Richard Branson; and Paul Volcker, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve.The commission will call for drug policy to move from being focused on criminal justice towards a public health approach. The global advocacy organisation Avaaz, which has nine million members, will present a petition in support of the commission's recommendations to UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon.The commission is the most distinguished group to call for such far-reaching changes in the way society deals with illicit drugs. Danny Kushlick, head of external affairs at Transform, the drug policy foundation that has consultative status with the UN, said current events, such as the cartel-related violence in Mexico, President Barack Obama's comments that it was "perfectly legitimate" to question whether the war on drugs was working, and the wider global economic crisis, had given calls for a comprehensive overhaul of the world's drugs policy a fresh impetus.Kushlick described this week's conference as hugely significant. "What we have here is the greatest collection thus far of ex-presidents and prime ministers calling very clearly for decriminalisation and experiments with legal regulation," he said. "It will be a watershed moment."Transform believes the case for overhauling the prohibition approach to drugs is now overwhelming. It quotes Nicholas Green, chairman of the Bar Council, who observed that drug-related crime costs the UK economy around £13bn a year. "Decriminalising personal use can have positive consequences; it can free up huge amounts of police resources, reduce crime and recidivism and improve public health," he said.But while politicians no longer in office are vocal in calling for a change, incumbents appear less likely to back the idea of any radical shift in policy. In its 2002 review of UK drug policy, the parliamentary home affairs select committee, which included the prime minister, David Cameron, called for the government to "initiate a discussion" into the possibility of legalising and regulating drugs.Despite the calls successive ministers have declined to endorse them.

Agroecology Outstrips Industrial Agriculture on Multiple Fronts

2011-06-05T01:33:00.000+09:00

Reimagining Food Systems in the Midst of a Hunger Crisis

A majority of the world's hungry are women and children

By Kanya D'Almeida,
IPS
June 3, 2011

"Analysing the data from the 2006 study by region, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) found that in some parts of Africa the yield increase (from agro-ecological practices) was a stunning 213 percent."

WASHINGTON, Jun 3, 2011 (IPS) - Today one billion people are living in hunger, not because of scarcity of production or a shortage of food on shelves in the global marketplace, but because they "lack the most basic purchasing power needed to acquire it", Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, said Thursday.

Currently, 35-40 percent of harvests are lost due to inadequate transportation and storage facilities, while a further 35-40 percent goes to wealthy Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.

According to experts like De Schutter, the inability of 10 percent of the world's population to feed itself is also a reflection of unsustainable patterns of consumption and deeply flawed models of industrialised agricultural production which, if allowed to continue, will divert 50 percent of global cereal harvests towards feeding cattle by the year 2050.

"From the food crisis in 1974, to the crisis in 2007-2008, and even now during the food crisis of 2010-2011, governments have had the same Pavlovian reaction - to increase production in order to lower prices and alleviate the burden of food price inflation on the population," De Schutter said at a panel discussion in Washington.

He added that while the reaction was understandable, it has been undeniably proven to be incomplete, short-sighted and based on an inadequate diagnosis of the complexity of the problem.

"A food system that is increasingly industrialised and commodified is not the only one available to us," he stressed. "We can and must re- imagine other food systems that take numerous social dimensions into account."

Inter-connected crises

In his recent report "Agroecology and the Right to Food", which was presented to the Human Rights Council in March this year, De Schutter outlines the global hunger catastrophe as an amalgamation of three distinct but inherently inter-related problems.

These are poverty, caused by trade policies that dump heavily- subsidised produce from developed countries on third world markets, thus rendering local farmers jobless; environmental degradation brought on by industrialised farming, which now accounts for nearly one-third of global green house gas emissions; and an epidemic of malnutrition caused by the colonising effects of mono-crops and a flood of processed food from the global north to the global south.

Only by examining these three challenges together can a strategy for ending hunger be successfully designed and implemented, he argues.

A study released Friday by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)'s programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) bolstered this argument by identifying future climate change "hotspots" in countries already crippled by severe food shortages and chronic hunger.

By consolidating detailed maps of scores of different agricultural regions across the world, the seven scientists behind the study tracked the impacts of climate change on food security and identified highly-vulnerable populations - principally in Africa and South Asia, with dark clouds hanging over China and parts of Latin America as well - that would suffer the double blows of hunger and environmental crisis.

"When you put these maps together they reveal places around the world where the arrival of stressful growing conditions could be especially disastrous," Polly Ericksen, lead author of the study and a senior scientist at the CGIAR's International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Nairobi, Kenya, told the press in Copenhagen Friday.

"These are areas highly exposed to climate shifts, where survival is strongly linked to the fate of regional crop and livestock yields, and where chronic food problems indicate that farmers are already struggling and they lack the capacity to adapt to new weather patterns,” she said.

Swathes of South Asia, including virtually all of India's territory and vast areas of sub-Saharan Africa are home to 369 million food- insecure people, all of whom live in climate-vulnerable, agriculture- intensive areas.

Over 56 million hungry and crop-dependent people in West Africa, India and China inhabit areas which, in less than 40 years, will likely experience daily growing season temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius - virtually impossible conditions for essential crops like corn and rice.

Reimagining food systems

In 2006, a team of researchers from the University of Essex carried out a study on "agro-ecological" approaches to farming and development.

Spanning 57 developing countries and 286 different models of sustainable farming techniques in an area covering 37 million hectares - three percent of cultivated land - the study unearthed how low external-input farming that utilized surrounding ecosystems and cyclical practices resulted in a 79 percent yield increase, more than double the average yield under the normalised agricultural system.

Agro-ecology, which includes systems that produce their own fertiliser using materials and waste from the surrounding environment, is being increasingly viewed as the only viable solution to the hunger crisis. Since prices of fertiliser doubled during the 2008 food crisis, continents like Africa that import 95 percent of their chemical fertilisers could see radically different outcomes in production by adopting agro-ecological techniques.

Analysing the data from the 2006 study by region, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) found that in some parts of Africa the yield increase was a stunning 213 percent.

However, De Schutter warned, this agricultural "revolution" will not come about by chance but will require swift and determined government action.

In addition to investing in education, gender-sensitive solutions and public goods and services such as the infrastructure required to nurture farmers' unions and peasant cooperatives, De Schutter's recommendations to governments include an urgent appeal to revolutionize markets to reward best-practices rather than short-term profit.

"The market as it exists today is too focused on global supply chains and does not give enough importance to local farmers, and producers of diversified crops," De Schutter told IPS.

"Governments must move away from export-led supply models and reinvest heavily in regional, sustainable food systems."

He added that governments should set solid agendas, which development agencies and private sector actors would align with, that incorporate a cultural shift away from a broken structure and towards a visionary, resilient food future.

RUSHKOFF: The Evolution Will Be Socialized

2011-02-25T10:54:00.006+09:00

"I (suggest) we “fork” the Internet – that we accept the fact that the net is built on a fundamentally hierarchical architecture, surrender it to the corporations who run it, and consider building something else for ourselves."

The Evolution Will Be Socialized

By Douglas Rushkoff

02.07.11

From the actions of the Egyptian government to the policies of Facebook, the monopolies of central banks to the corporatization of the Internet, we are witnessing the potential of a peer-to-peer networking become overshadowed by the hierarchies of the status quo. It’s time for us to gather and see what is still possible on the net, and what, if anything, can be built to replace it.

I have had a vague misgiving about the direction the net’s been going for, well, maybe 15 years. But until recently, it was more like the feeling when another Starbucks opens on the block, a Wal-Mart moves into town, or a bank forecloses unnecessarily on that cool local bookstore to make room for another bank.

Lately, however, what’s wrong with the net has become quite crystalized for me. It started with the corporate-government banishment of Wikileaks last year, and reached a peak with Egypt shutting off its networks to stave off revolution. The Obama administration seeking the ability to do pretty much the same thing in the US, Facebook’s “sponsored stories,” and the pending loss of net neutrality don’t help, either.

Here on Shareable, and then again in an OpEd for CNN.com, I suggested we “fork” the Internet – that we accept the fact that the net is built on a fundamentally hierarchical architecture, surrender it to the corporations who run it, and consider building something else for ourselves. The Internet as built will always be subject to top-down government control and domination by the biggest corporations. They administrate the indexes and own the conduit. It has choke points – technological, legal, and commercial. They can turn it off and shut us out. A p2p network protected only by laws – that exists but for the grace of those in charge – is not a p2p network. It is a hierarchical network allowing itself to be used in a p2p fashion, when convenient to those currently in charge.

If we have a dream of how social media could restore peer-to-peer commerce, culture, and government, and if the current Internet is too tightly controlled to allow for it, why not build the kind of network and mechanisms to realize it?
I received literally thousands of emails in response. Some people simply wanted to know if it was really true – could a government really just “turn off” the net? Yes. It’s true. Others wrote to let me know there’s no alternative; there’s no such thing as an unstoppable network. Even if we use ham radio or wifi “mesh” networks to connect to each other, they can always be jammed by governments. True, but by that logic the authorities also can prevent us from speaking to one another by shooting us. At least the tyrant would be in the position of attacking the people’s network, instead of simply turning off the network he already controls.

Finally, though, the vast majority of emails came from people who wanted to get started actually building a new net, developing p2p currency, or figuring out how to promote deep democracy through social media. What should they do? Where should they go? And those kinds of questions can’t be answered in an email, an essay or a column. It’s not something you click on. These challenges can only be answered over time by people actively collaborating on solutions.

That’s why – with some encouragement from a few great organizations including Shareable - I’ve decided to convene a summit called Contact. Contact will seek to explore and realize the greater promise of social media to promote new forms of culture, commerce, collective action, and creativity. I'm inviting technologists, artists, activists, businesspeople, funders, and other stakeholders in the networked future, to come together to hatch new ideas, connect with new collaborators, and forge an ongoing community for innovating social media and beyond. Some of them, like Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation, Paul Hartzog and Sam Rose at the Forward Foundation, have been working on these questions for a while. Others come from NGOs and even corporations looking to support and become part of whatever is next, rather than spending money resisting it.

From the development of a new non-hierarchical Internet to the implementation of alternative e-currencies, the prototyping of open source democracy to experiments in collective cultural expression, Contact will seek to initiate mechanisms that realize the true promise of the networking revolution.

The first summit, to be held October 20, 2011 as a MeetupEverywhere and centered at the historic Angel Orensanz Center in New York City, will be a participatory festival for ideas and action, consisting primarily of meetings convened by attendees. Featured participants will deliver brief "provocations" on stage, sharing the greatest challenges they are facing in their particular fields. But their primary contribution to the day will be to join in the meetings convened by other participants, sharing their experience, insight, and even connections to help bring these ideas into reality.

If it’s not the only thing of its kind in the world, so much the better. Let’s connect, conceive, and conspire. Contact isn’t a way of competing with those efforts, but supporting them.

Topics I’m opening for discussion include:
TECHNOLOGY

Can we build an alternative Internet that can't be turned off?
Alternatives to top-down registries and corporate-controlled access

BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

New net-based currencies and transaction networks
Net-enabled Local Activism and Job Creation

CULTURE

Arts networking initiatives
Decentralized social networking platforms

GOVERNMENT

Proxy voting to expert friends
open source democracy
"Filter Bubbles" and how to prevent them

MEANING

What Factors Facilitate Collective Intelligence?
The Reclamation of Public Space

But please feel invited to bring your own. I may be initiating this thing, but I am by no means in charge.

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Using Greywater

2011-02-10T18:04:00.001+09:00

A Geodesic Greenhouse — Year-Round Gardening at 6000 Feet

2011-02-09T11:58:00.001+09:00

Transition Town Videos

2011-02-05T20:22:00.001+09:00

Backyard Agriculture

2011-02-01T13:43:00.001+09:00

A great idea for a 2 or 3 person business, since many people who would like to grow their own food haven't the ability or knowhow to get it started.

Backyard Agriculture

A simple idea led two women into a thriving new farming enterprise. Build backyard mini-farms for homeowners who want to start growing their own fresh herbs and vegetables lasting throughout most of the year.

Stoneleigh on Transition

2011-01-29T19:37:00.001+09:00

Nicole Foss (Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth) on the need to adapt now for a post-collapse future.
"The American lifestyle is not negotiable"
-Dick Cheney-
To which she replies "That is true, because reality is not going to negotiate with you."
‎

Watch the complete talk

‎

Public Banking Institute Launched

2011-01-15T07:27:00.000+09:00

Public Banking Institute Launched
Seeks to Rescue U.S. Public Finances
Mike Kraus
January 13, 2011

There is mounting evidence that the public finances of the United States are verging on collapse.

The national debt has burdened the American people with a debt service – the cost of interest – that threatens to swallow the entire federal budget in years ahead.

States from New Jersey to Illinois, Texas and California are grappling with immense budget deficits. At least fifteen major U.S. cities are reported on the verge of bankruptcy. In a desperate attempt to stave off calamity, state and municipal governments are taking measures that many view as a worse calamity.

Police, firefighters, health care providers and teachers are being laid off. City street lights are turned off at night, responses to 911 calls are provided on a “fee for service” basis, public parks are abandoned and infrastructure vital to commerce is left to decay to third world status. Unemployment is chronic and home foreclosures roll on.

Americans are wondering if there is a way out of what now appears to many as a decades long and accelerating decline of the fortunes of the once fabled American middle class.

A diverse group of American educators, entrepreneurs and businesspeople, local government officials and civic leaders, economists, writers, lawyers and others think they have identified the central problem.

They have banded together to form the Public Banking Institute (PBI), a not-for-profit educational organization that hopes to explain to the American people how a national network of publicly owned banks can revive the American economy.

Ellen Hodgson Brown, founder of the Public Banking Institute is the author of “Web of Debt,” a groundbreaking and frequently cited diagnostic and prescriptive analysis of the American money system. In her view, American banking and finance have been turned upside down.

“We are in an era where the public is being required to lend to private banks, even though banks were originally supposed to lend to the public. What we have now is a system where bank profits are privatized but bank losses are shared by the public.

“We’ve bailed out banks because we know credit is essential to society, like a public utility such as electricity and water – without it, our economic system fails. So, in essence, the supply of credit has more to do with public and governmental services and less to do with private enterprise.”

Brown notes that public banks were introduced by the Quakers in the original colony of Pennsylvania.

“The Quakers were known as the ‘Society of Friends.’ Their public banking concept was a fore-runner of the PSFS – the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society. The word ‘society’ is telling. We want to put the needs and economic aspirations of the whole of the American society back into the banking picture.

“The Public Banking Institute will explore how credit is created using public resources, how to price it competitively, and how to use it as a low-cost alternative that benefits the free market and the public.”

Krauss' article continues here.

From the Public Banking Institute's new website:

Public Banks are...

• Viable solutions to the present economic crises in US states.
• Potentially available to any-sized government or community
able to meet the requirements for setting up a bank.
• Owned by the people of a state or community, rather than
by private investors.
• Economically sustainable, because they operate like private
banks
• Able to offset tax increases with returned credit income to
the community.
• Ready sources of credit for local governments, eliminating
the need for large “rainy day” funds.
• Required to promote the public interest, as defined in their
charters.
• Constitutional, as ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court

...and are not

• Operated by politicians; rather, they are run by professional
bankers.
• Boondoggles for bank executives; rather, their employees are
salaried public servants -- paid by the state, with a transparent pay structure -- who would likely not earn bonuses,
commissions or fees for generating loans.
• Speculative ventures that maximize profits in the short term,
without regard to the long-term interests of the public.

Next World TV

2011-01-14T19:25:00.001+09:00

Steps Toward a Global Uprising

2010-12-11T16:42:00.000+09:00

The Long March from Cancún: Steps Toward a Global Uprising
By Ronnie Cummins
Organic Consumers Association, Dec 9, 2010

After his brief on-the-ground report from the Cancún climate negotiations, Cummins offers a compelling outline of the geo-agro-reforms we need to fight for now. - Ed.

On a beautiful sunny morning, marching down the Avenida Tulúm, our five thousand strong brigade of climate change activists, armed with colorful flags, hats, signs, and banners, supercharged with lively music and drummers, are making our voices heard: "Cambie el sistema, no la clima" (Change the System, not the climate), "El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido" (The people united will never be defeated) and "Obama, Obama respete Cochabamba" (Obama, Obama, respect the Cochabamba Declaration--on the Rights of Mother Earth). One of two simultaneous street demonstrations this morning, we are heading toward the Moon Palace, 15 miles away, where hundreds of heavily armed riot police are lined up behind enormous steel barricades to prevent us from getting within earshot of the Palace, the official headquarters for the United Nation's COP 16 (Congress of the Parties 16) global climate summit.

With black military helicopters (courtesy of the USA) circling overhead, our message to the "business as usual" elite in the Palace is simple: get off your bureaucratic asses and do something. Stop allowing large corporations to use our common atmosphere as an open sewer. Stop cutting down our forests, spraying poisonous pesticides, killing our oceans, and destroying our living soils. Stand aside and let the world's 1.5 billion small farmers, ranchers, and indigenous communities cool off the planet with organic soil management and sustainable grazing and forestry practices. Tax the rich, nationalize the banks, and do whatever is necessary to pay for millions of Green Jobs and public works programs to rebuild our soils and our economic infrastructure. Stop the delaying tactics. Join hands with the global grassroots to retrofit our buildings, our utilities, and our transportation sectors and move away from fossil fuels, or get the hell out of our way.

In our dancing, chanting corps, a veritable rainbow of nationalities and constituencies, I recognize some of the climate warriors I've seen over the last few days at the alternative forums and workshops: Bolivian, Mexican, Ecuadorian, Guatemalan, and Native American indigenous people; Mexican campesinos and campesinas (small farmers); Via Campesina members from Asia, North America, Latin America, and Africa; Korean peace advocates; Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Code Pink, and Global Exchange campaigners; the National Family Farm Coalition; anti-globalization militants, Klimaforum delegates; trade union leaders from Canada, the U.S., and Argentina; Council of Canadian activists; student organizers; and comrades from the Organic Consumers Association and Via Organica.

The bitter consensus in workshops and plenary sessions over the past week is that we can't wait for Obama or the industrialized nations to take decisive action. Along with the growing list of governments ready to move forward to reverse global warming (Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bangladesh, South Africa, several EU nations, and the Island nations of the Pacific) we've got to take matters into our own hands, in our local communities and regions, and build a mass movement larger than any the world has ever seen. As Bill McKibben of 350.org said today on Democracy Now: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/7/bill_mckibben_clima...

"[The COP 16 Climate Summit meeting here in Cancun is] just like a family reunion aboard the Titanic We can't keep doing this. Until we can build some power outside of these arenas to actually push these guys it's not about how well people are communicating or how great the policy papers are. It's on who has the power. And at the moment, that power rests in the hands of the fossil fuel industry and their allies in governments around the world. And until we build some independent outside movement power to push back, then we're going to get scraps from the table, at the very best."

So how do we take down the climate criminals, Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Agribusiness, Monsanto, and the Military-Industrial Complex? How do we build a fierce and formidable climate conservation corps that can radically alter the dynamics of the marketplace and our suicide economy? How can we mobilize grassroots forces, alternative technology, and progressive public officials to fundamentally change the laws and public policies that are driving us to the brink of disaster? How do we scale up our organic, sustainable, equitable, climate-friendly projects and communities past the "tipping point" so that we become the norm, not just the alternative?

A full battle plan to Save Mother Earth and our climate and life-support systems requires more space than we have today. But here are several steps we need to take as we start our Long March.

Step One: Expand Our Analysis and Broaden Our Coalition

We need to educate a critical mass of the public about the real causes and consequences of global warming so as to inspire and mobilize a grassroots army of hundreds of millions of people armed with practical ideas and confidence. We need to connect the dots and supercharge the synergy between all of our burning issues and Movements (urban and rural Green Jobs for all; retrofitting the economy; stopping the wars for oil and strategic resources in Iraq and Afghanistan; healthy, climate-friendly organic food and farms; drastically reducing fossil fuel use; and environmental and economic justice). We need to break down the walls of the "my issue is more important than your issue" silos.

We need to more clearly identify our adversaries and pinpoint their most vulnerable weaknesses: Big Oil; Big Coal; chemical, genetically modified (GM), and energy-intensive agribusiness and factory farms; transnational timber companies; the Military-Industrial Complex; as well as the financial institutions that fund this Earth and climate-raping Behemoth. At the same time we need to clearly and comprehensively identify our allies: workers and apprentices who can retrofit our fossil fuel economy; organic and green-minded consumers and backyard gardeners; green businesses; environmental, justice, and peace activists; educators; students; churches and religious organizations; and a global army of 1.5 billion small farmers, ranchers, pastoralists, forest dwellers, and indigenous people. As a banner on the march says today "Campesinos y Campesinas Enfrian La Planeta." (Small farmers are cooling off the planet).

We need to educate (and shout when necessary) that there is already 435 ppm (parts per million) of three major greenhouse gases polluting the atmosphere, heating up the earth, killing the oceans, melting the glaciers and polar icecaps, and destabilizing the climate. We need to name these gases over and over again-Carbon dioxide (CO2); Methane (CH4); and Nitrous oxide (N2O); explain exactly where they come from; and then point out how we can drastically curtail and organically sequester these emissions utilizing organic farm and land management and rotational grazing.

Carbon Dioxide Pollution: 800 Gigaton Carbon Gorilla in the Atmosphere

CO2 pollution (76% of all greenhouse gas pollution) comes from burning fossil fuels (in buildings, cars, industry, and most of all in our industrial food system) cutting down forests, draining wetlands, and destroying the soil and ocean's natural capacities to sequester billions of tons of excess greenhouse gases. How do we reduce CO2 emissions as rapidly as possible? Stop building coal plants, stop tar sands and gas shale production, stop deepwater oil exploration, increase energy efficiency, retrofit buildings, ban factory farms, and slap a carbon tax on fossil fuel use that makes the polluters pay.

For a more in-depth discussion see: http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_20200.cfm

How can a global alliance of food (and fiber) consumers and food and fiber producers literally suck down a significant proportion (50 ppm) of the excess CO2 that's already up in the atmosphere? Through organic and sustainable farming, grazing, and forest practices. Organic soil management on a significant proportion of the world's 12 billion acres of farm land and pasture/grazing land can sequester up to 7,000 pounds of CO2 per acre per year and lock this excess carbon naturally in the soil, where it belongs. This Great Transition to organic farming and rotational grazing, coupled with the defense and restoration of the world's 10 billion acres of forests and wetlands, can buy us the precious time we need to retrofit our economies and make the Great Transition to alternative solar, wind, and geothermal energy.

Methane: Food Inc. and Waste Management's Climate Killer

Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that makes up approximately 14% of human-induced global warming. Per ton, released into the atmosphere, methane is 72 times more destructive than CO2. The good news about methane is that if we stop releasing it into the atmosphere, the 65 ppm already up there will quickly dissipate, unlike carbon dioxide (which is more long-lasting) or nitrous oxide (which for all practical purposes is permanent). Where does methane pollution come from, and how can we get rid of it? Methane pollution mainly comes from factory farms and the overproduction and over consumption of non-organic, non-grass-fed, non-grass-finished meat and animal products; from throwing hundreds of millions of tons of rotting food, paper, and lawn wastes into our garbage cans and landfills, instead of composting them for use on farms, ranches, and gardens; destruction of wetlands for shrimp and fish farms, industrial agriculture, urban development or sprawl; and industrial, chemical-intensive rice farming.

How do we get rid of excess methane? We must build massive consumer awareness that it is a "climate crime" to buy or consume meat, animal products, or any food whatsoever that comes from a factory farm or feedlot. At the same time we must educate consumers that organically managed small farms and ranches are actually greenhouse gas sequestration centers, arguably our most important allies in cooling off the planet.

In addition to boycotting any and all of the products of Food Inc. we must create "Zero Waste" households, businesses, and municipalities, not just through voluntary action, but more importantly by passing laws requiring mandatory separation and composting of all food and yard wastes. One major city in the U.S. that has already done this is San Francisco. Mandatory separation and composting of food wastes not only drastically reduces methane emissions from garbage dumps or landfills; but also creates an enormous amount of compost which farmers, ranchers, gardeners, and landscapers can then use (along with the organic concentrated liquid form of compost called "compost tea"). This will create the preconditions to replace the 12 billion pounds of deadly nitrate fertilizers that are dumped on the U.S.'s already ravaged and eroded soils every year.

Nitrous Oxide: Taking Down the Global Chemical Fertilizer Corporations Before They Kill Us All

Human-induced releases of nitrous oxide (N2O) make up 10% of all the greenhouse gases that are causing global warming. Excess nitrous oxide per ton in the atmosphere is 300 times more destructive than CO2 and unfortunately, for the present and future generations, will remain there almost permanently. Two-thirds of all N2O emissions arise from the use of nitrate fertilizers on Genetically Modified (GM) and chemical-intensive industrial farms. And of course the main crops of these fossil fuel-guzzling industrial farms are billions of tons of (pesticide and GMO-tainted) animal feed for use on factory farms or feedlots.

Nitrous oxide is extremely hazardous. It depletes the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere (thereby increasing skin cancer for humans). It increases ozone pollution levels at the ground level (fueling the current epidemic of asthma and respiratory diseases.) Poisonous nitrate fertilizers leaching into our rural wells and municipal drinking water supplies (where it combines into a super-toxic brew with pesticides) are a biological time bomb, a major cause of cancer, infertility, hormone disruption, and birth defects. Nitrate fertilizer runoff into our rivers and streams kills fish and marine life and is directly responsible for the hundreds of dead zones in our oceans, the most famous of which is the enormous dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

Perhaps most deadly of all, nitrate fertilizer kills our living soils and microorganisms, decreasing their ability to sequester (through plant photosynthesis) excess CO2 in the soil. Even after six decades of industrial agriculture dumping hundreds of billions of pounds of chemical fertilizers on farmlands, our living soils still contain two to three times as much carbon as the atmosphere, with the practical capacity to clean and safely sequester at least 50 ppm of greenhouse gases over the next 40 years. In other works, our living soils can save us-but only if we can stop the widespread use of nitrate fertilizers, GMO crops, and pesticides and replace these deadly chemicals and mutant organisms with organic compost and compost tea, and cover crops--augmented by the biological power and fertility generated by carefully planned, high-density rotational grazing of animals.

The energy-intensive manufacturing of nitrate fertilizers requires the use of massive amounts of natural gas, a resource in short supply, that will increasingly be needed to take us through the transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy. We can no longer afford to waste natural gas in order to uphold the profits of Cargill, Monsanto, and Food Inc.

So how do we get rid of nitrous oxide pollution? Similar to our phasing- out of methane emissions, we need a global boycott of factory farms, foods, and fibers derived from chemical pesticides, GMOs, and nitrate fertilizers. We need a million new organic, carbon-sequestering farms and ranches that feed the soil with organic compost, organic tea, animal manure, and cover crops instead of nitrate fertilizer. We need ten million more backyard and community gardens to feed ourselves locally and organically. We need mandatory composting laws so that all of our 100 billion plus tons of food and yard waste every year are transformed into organic compost and compost tea. We need to spread the word that corporate agribusiness, factory farms, and the chemical fertilizer industry are climate criminals. We either "sunset" them or they're going to sunset us.

Moving from Gloom and Doom to Green Solutions and Green Jobs

People are desperate and hungry for hope. People are desperate and hungry for jobs and a sense of meaning and mission. We in the Movement must consciously change the tone of our gloom and doom messages to emphasize the practical solutions and socio-economic benefits that we have to offer: green jobs, healthy food, climate stability, sustainability, peace, and a revitalized democracy. For the most part we don't need to invent new technologies. The tools and techniques and labor power we need are already here, although in many cases they exist only in embryonic form, in our local regions. Solar and wind technology, super-efficient and deep-retrofitted homes and commercial buildings. Organic farms, ranches, restored riparian zones and wetlands and urban gardens. Urban mass transportation, ride share and carpool systems, bike and walking paths, farmers markets, urban greenhouses. Rooftop gardens. Organic gardening and cooking classes. Financial mechanisms like Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE), community credit unions, and "Slow Money" cooperatives. We can and must cool off the planet, but luckily we have pilot projects and "best practices" and climate-friendly laws and policies that we show people right now, from Main Street and our local organic farms or ranches to green buildings, composting toilets, and farmers markets in Manhattan.

We need in short, a Green New Deal, comparable in scope to the New Deal of the 1930s that helped lift the U.S. out of economic depression. Since we don't have the political power right now to force Obama and the Congress to implement a massive Green Jobs and Climate Conservation Corps program at the federal level, let's go local instead. Let's build political power and a series of mini-Green New Deals at the city, county and state levels.

And as we move to phase-out fossil fuels and the fossil fuels industry, let's make sure that we take care of the workers and the blue-collar communities where these industries are located. For every job lost in the fossil fuel economy, in industrial agriculture, and the military industrial complex, we must create two jobs in the urban and rural organic and Green Jobs sector. When China, Europe, and the rest of the world eventually slap a carbon taxes on our exports, then maybe we'll see a carbon tax on greenhouse gas emissions here in the U.S. If we do implement a Carbon Tax that gradually but steadily raises the prices of fossil fuel energy, let's make sure that poor people and the middle class get reduced payroll taxes to make up the difference. Let the polluter pay.

So let's roll up our sleeves and get to work in our local communities. Roll out pilot projects and "structural reform" campaigns that are (a) radical but winnable; (b) that have the potential to educate and mobilize large numbers of people; (c) that build new and broader coalitions; and (d) that slowly but steadily begin to build and expand our political power. Let's point out the problems, but also point out the organic and green solutions that are already taking root.

Early in 2011, my organization, the Organic Consumers Association, joined by our labor and climate action allies, plans to launch a 20+ city campaign to take down the methane and nitrous oxide climate criminals, to build a Movement for Zero Waste and organic soil management that will hopefully mark the beginning of the end for industrial agriculture, factory farms, and the so-called Solid Waste Industry. Stay tuned for details, but please send an email information@organicconsumers.org if you're interesting in helping organize such a campaign in your local community. In the meantime I hope to see you in the streets and the suites raising hell about Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Ag, Big Unemployment, and Endless War. Power to the people!

Ronnie Cummins is a lifetime activist and populist hell-raiser. He is the International Director of the Organic Consumers Association and its Mexico affiliate, Via Organica.

Thorium: Energy Cheaper than Coal

2010-11-22T21:29:00.001+09:00

Energy cheaper than from coal

Published Robert Hargraves on July 11th, 2010
When economic well-being measured by the gross domestic product exceeds a threshold, birthrate drops sharply.

Global warming now threatens irreversible climate damage, ending glacial water flows needed to sustain food production for hundreds of millions of people, and shrinking the polar cold water regions of the ocean where algae start the ocean food chain. Atmospheric CO2 dissolving into the ocean acidifies it, killing corals and stressing ocean life. Demand for biofuels increases destruction of CO2 absorbing forests and jungles.

Burning coal for power is the largest source of atmospheric CO2, which drives global warming. Airborne coal soot causes 24,000 annual deaths in the US and 400,000 in China. We seek alternatives such as burying CO2, or substituting wind, solar, and nuclear power.

The world population growing from 6.7 to 9 billion will increase resource competition, exacerbating environment stress. Yet the OECD nations, with adequate energy supplies, have birthrates lower than needed for population replacement.

Nations with GDP per capita over $7,500 have sustainable birthrates. Electricity for water, sanitation, lighting, cooking, refrigeration, communications, health care, and industry contributes to economic development. Those nations with per capita electricity of 2,000 kWh/year (1/6 US use and an average power of 230 W) do achieve GDP of $7,500 per capita, which leads to sustainable birthrates.

Taxing carbon seeks to encourage energy sources that do not emit CO2, yet this has not been effective in Europe. Developing countries will not agree to carbon taxes and forgo an advantage they perceive led to prosperity in OECD nations. Alternatively, a source of energy cheaper than from coal would dissuade all nations from burning coal, without imposing tariffs or taxes that reduce economic productivity. Affordable electric power can also help developing nations reach modest levels of prosperity and lifestyles that include sustainable birthrates.
The objective for energy cheaper than from coal is $0.03/kWh and a capital cost of $2/watt of generating capacity. How can the liquid fluoride thorium reactor produce energy cheaper than from coal?

Fuel costs. Thorium fuel is plentiful and inexpensive; one ton worth $300,000 can power a 1,000 megawatt LFTR for a year – enough power for a city. Just 500 tons would supply all US electric energy for a year. The US government has 3,752 tons stored in the desert. US Geological Survey estimates reserves of 300,000 tons, and Thorium Energy claims 1.8 million tons of ore on 1,400 acres of Lemhi Pass, Idaho. Fuel costs for thorium would be $0.00004/kWh, compared to coal at $0.03/kWh.

Capital costs. The 2009 update of MIT’s Future of Nuclear Power shows new coal plants cost $2.30/watt and PWR nuclear plants cost of $4.00/watt. The median of five cost studies of molten salt reactors from 1962 to 2002 is $1.98/watt, in 2009 dollars. The following are fundamental reasons that LFTR plants will be less costly than coal or PWR plants.

Pressure. The LFTR operates at atmospheric pressure, without a massive reactor vessel pressurized to 160 atmospheres, and without a large containment dome needed to contain any accidentally released radioactive materials propelled by pressurized steam. One concept for the smaller LFTR containment structure is a concrete building below grade, with a concrete cap at grade level to resist aircraft impact.

Safety. PWRs are safe because of defense in depth – multiple, independent, redundant systems engineered to control faults. LFTR’s intrinsic safety keeps such costs low. A molten salt reactor can’t melt down because the core is already molten — its normal operating state. The salts are solid at room temperature, so if a reactor vessel, pump, or pipe ruptured the salts would spill out and solidify. There is no explosion potential because the pressure in the reactor is atmospheric. If the temperature of the salt rises too high, a solid plug of salt in a drain pipe melts and the fuel drains to a dump tank; the Oak Ridge researchers turned the reactor off this way on weekends.

Heat. The LFTR safely operates at high temperatures. Salt remains liquid below 1400°C; internal graphite core structures maintain integrity even above this. Molten salt heat capacity exceeds that of the water in PWRs or liquid sodium in LMFBRs, allowing more compact heat transfer loops. The molten salt heat exchange loop components of high-nickel metals such as Hastelloy-N are qualified up to 750°C.

Helium gas (green) is successively heated by 700°C molten salt (red) from a LFTR heat exchanger as it passes through high, medium, and low pressure turbines (T). The gas cycles back through three successive compressors (C), cooled by fluid (blue) that transfers rejected heat externally. The recuperator (R) transfers some energy from the compression cycle back to the expansion cycle. The generators (G) produce electricity. (Diagram courtesy of Per Peterson of UC Berkeley.)

Brayton Cycle. The triple reheat closed cycle Brayton turbine achieves a 45% efficiency of conversion from thermal to electric power, compared to 33% typical of existing nuclear and coal power plants using traditional Rankine steam cycles. The Brayton rejected heat to power ratio is thus 1.2 (55/45) rather than Rankine’s 2.0 (67/33) so the cooling requirements are nearly halved, reducing cooling tower costs and making air cooled LFTRs practical in arid regions where water is scarce. This compact Brayton turbine machinery is a quarter the mass, suggesting a similar cost reduction.

Boeing, producing one $200 million airplane per day, is a model for LFTR production.

Mass production. Commercialization of technology leads to lower costs as the number of units increase. Experience benefits arise from work specialization, new processes, product standardization, new technologies, and product redesign. Business economists observe that doubling the number of units produced reduces cost by a percentage termed the learning ratio, seen in the early aircraft industry to be 20%. Today Moore’s law in the computer industry illustrates a learning ratio of 50%. In The Economic Future of Nuclear Power University of Chicago economists estimate the learning ratio is 10% for nuclear power reactors.

Boeing, producing one $200 million airplane per day, is a model for LFTR production. Reactors of 100 MW size costing $200 million can be factory produced. Manufacturing more, smaller reactors traverses the learning curve more rapidly. Producing one per day for 3 years creates 1095 production experiences, reducing costs 65%

Research. Cost reductions are presaged by current engineering research. Compact, thin-plate heat exchangers may reduce fluid inventories, size, and cost. Possible new materials include silicon impregnated carbon fiber with chemical vapor infiltrated carbon surfaces and higher temperature nickel alloys. Operating at 950°C can increase thermal/electrical conversion efficiency beyond 50%, and also improve water dissociation to create hydrogen for manufacture of synthetic fuels such as methanol or dimethyl ether that can substitute for gasoline or diesel oil, another use for LFTR technology.

In summary, LFTR capital cost targets of $2/watt are supported by simple fluid fuel handling, high thermal capacity heat exchange fluids, smaller components, low pressure core, high temperature Brayton gas turbine power conversion, simple intrinsic safety, factory production, the learning curve, and new technologies already under development. A levelized $2/watt capital cost contributes $0.02/kWh to the power cost. With plentiful, inexpensive thorium fuel, LFTR can generate electricity at <$0.03/kWh, underselling power generated by burning coal.

Producing one LFTR of 100 MW size per day could phase out all coal burning power plants worldwide in 38 years, ending 10 billion tons of CO2 emissions from coal plants now supplying 1,400 GW of electric power. Low LFTR costs are vital to this coal replacement strategy, achievable if this goal is maintained during every design choice. Inexpensive electric power can also assist developing economies to improve prosperity, encouraging lifestyles with sustainable birthrates.

Let's Get This Party Started

2010-11-22T14:22:00.001+09:00

Financial Transaction Tax Spawns an Advocacy Movement

2010-11-07T15:08:00.000+09:00

Suggestions for a minuscule but highly productive levy on currency trading and/or financial transactions have been around since the Tobin Tax proposal in the Seventies, but have been effectively stifled by the brokerage and banking worlds ever since. Recently, however, the public's energetic animosity toward the speculation-driven economic meltdown and bailout antics have birthed fresh revivals of the concept such as the following UK movement for a "Robin Hood tax"

An overview of the proposal: "An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Adopt a Financial Transactions Tax" (pdf file) by John Dillon, May 2010

The Future of Money

2010-10-26T15:09:00.000+09:00

The Future of Money from KS12 on Vimeo.

Green Taxes and Ecologically Sustainable Communities

2010-10-05T01:42:00.002+09:00

Ingenious tax and policy algorithms for miniaturizing, localizing and democratizing mega-corporate entities - Ed.

A green tax policy for sustaining Australia, its citizens and communities

A “green” tax policy could be used to increase the reported profits of business while localizing its ownership and control. By this means local communities would obtain the power to protect their environment. Also, the income of local voters would increase while introducing corporate democracy. The whole nation would become richer as profits to foreigners are phased out.

A green tax could be introduced on a voluntary basis. A lower tax rate could be made available to any investor who registered a contract to transfer ownership of their investments at the same rate that they recovered the cost of their investment from depreciation tax deductions. There would no limit on the profits obtained by investors while they got their money back.

More foreign investment could be obtained while eliminating alien ownership and control of national resources. “Boomerang ownership” would eliminate what Professor Penrose described as “unlimited, unknown and uncontrolled foreign liabilities” for the nation. Because profit-maximizing investors discount the future so much only a small preferential tax1 is required for fiduciary investors in listed corporations to approve a change in corporate constitutions to create a new class of “stakeholder” shares to acquire residual ownership of corporate investments2.

Only Australian voters would become owners of the investment being written off by foreign or local investors. Management of the investments transferred need not change. Australian executives and employees who managed the transferred investments would become part owners of them with other citizen stakeholders such as those involved as suppliers and/or customers. An additional incentive for corporations could be an exemption from any increase in their employee superannuation contributions.

All Australians would acquire without any cost stakeholders shares to obtain income without work or welfare according to their patronage as suppliers, workers and customers. Stakeholder shares would be issued in a similar manner as big business grants fly-buy points to customers but extended to workers and suppliers.
Unlike a resource rent or excess profit tax a green tax could provides a way of increasing reported profits of companies without reducing State royalty payments. Government expenditure on welfare could be reduced as income of local citizens increased while also increasing the tax collected by the government as many individuals could be paying tax a higher rate than corporations.

A green tax regime would democratize the national distribution of income and wealth3. It would shrink the size of government as the eligibility for welfare payments and the need for tax collection decreased with every citizen obtaining a guaranteed minimum income from stakeholder dividends. A green tax regime would increase both the equality and level of prosperity in Australia while allowing a zero growth economy to protect the environment.

1 Stakeholder governance: A cybernetic and property rights analysis, available from: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8683.00035/abstract

2 The case for introducing stakeholder corporations, available from: http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract_id=436400.

3 Democratising the wealth of nations, available from: http://ssrn.com/abstract_id=1146062

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The Credit Meltdown and the Shadow Banking System: What Basel III Missed

2010-09-26T13:48:00.001+09:00

"While we're waiting for the Cavalry to swoop down from Washington and save us -- something that could take a while -- we might consider setting up some state-owned banks. The Bank of North Dakota, currently the country's only state-owned bank, is very stable and very profitable, returning a 26% dividend to the state. A bank of that sort could be an attractive investment for all those state and local rainy day funds, pension funds and other local government funds looking for greater returns from the low-risk investments allowed by their legislative mandates. We need to set up some banks that serve the needs of the real economy rather than those of Wall Street bankers, brokers and their super-rich clients for yet more bonuses, bailouts and paper profits. State-owned banks could fill the role the Wall Street banks have declined to fill, providing an effective credit engine for state and local economies."

THE FULL MONTY: http://snipurl.com/16ekqe

How We Can Ignite a Bicycle Revolution in the U.S.

2010-09-23T22:32:00.001+09:00

A Vision of a New American Dream

2010-09-20T10:43:00.001+09:00

A promising site...

For generations of Americans, the American dream stood for opportunity. The dream was rooted in the belief that, in a peaceful and democratic society, citizens were free to pursue their goals, and honest effort would result in a satisfactory degree of material comfort. The idealistic notion that in America one might reasonably aspire to a better life for oneself and one's family was a powerful symbol. It spoke not merely to personal aspirations but to our aim as a society as well.

Unfortunately, in recent decades the traditional American dream has been displaced by a "more is better" focus that promotes not quality of life, but rather the unbridled production and consumption of stuff. While this simplified version of the dream succeeded in boosting the US economy—now the biggest in the world in terms of material production and consumption—it has failed in more important ways. According to studies, all this material wealth isn't making us any happier than we were before the boom. Worse yet, shifting the prize from well-being to acquisition actually endangers some of the very things we cherish. The "more is better" dream is unsustainable personally, as it draws American families into a work-and-spend treadmill that depletes savings and clutters lives. It is unsustainable environmentally, as it fuels a level of resource consumption that the planet cannot keep up with. The "more is better" dream, in fact, is denying our children their fair opportunity for comfort, security and a healthy environment.

The Center for a New American Dream envisions a society that values more of what matters – not just "more." New American Dream is dedicated to helping support and nurture an American dream that revives the spirit of the traditional dream—but with a new emphasis on non-material values like financial security, fairness, community, health, time, nature, and fun. We see both a nation and a world in which a healthy global ecosystem anchors a just society offering all citizens the freedom, the resources and the personal security necessary to pursue their dreams, connect with the natural world, and enjoy a high quality of life. Some key elements of this new American dream are as follows:
A Higher Quality of Life

We envision a society in which citizens are able to meet material needs and pursue their dreams; where there is broad recognition that quality of life includes not just material wealth but also non-material values, relationships, and experiences; where there is more time for families, leisure, community service; where progress is measured not simply by changes in gross domestic product, but rather by indicators that more truly reflect improvements to quality of life, environmental sustainability, and social and economic fairness.
A Healthy Environment

We envision a society whose ecological footprint is in step with Earth's capacity, so that we are living in balance with what the natural world has to offer and we protect the resource base for future generations. Everyone should have access to clean air, clean water, healthy food, and adequate resources.
More Fairness

We envision a world that works for all; a world in which everyone has the opportunity to achieve a high quality of life; a world in which wealthy nations and individuals do not overconsume natural resources while the poor do without; a world in which workers at all parts of the supply chain are provided with safe working conditions and just compensation; a world where no one is denied access to basic needs such as food, clothing, shelter, health care, education, safety; a world where citizen influence over government policies is elevated over moneyed influence.
Strong Communities

We envision strong, tightly woven, participatory communities; more direct relationships between local producers and consumers; livable, walkable neighborhoods connected via accessible and affordable transportation systems with natural areas, parks, and open spaces available to all.
Healthy Economy and Marketplace

We envision a vibrant economy that operates in deference to both citizen needs and ecological limits; where advertising informs rather than manipulates, overwhelms, and preys upon insecurities; where citizens can choose not to receive commercial messages and no advertising is targeted at young children; where energy production and industrial processes do not exacerbate climate change nor degrade important biological communities; where materials are continuously recycled back into the manufacturing process and nothing is wasted; where environmentally and socially preferable products are widely available and competitively priced; where consumers have easy access to information that allows them to make informed choices—information about the economic, environmental, and social impacts associated with the entire life cycle of available products.

http://www.newdream.org/about/vision.php

Proposing a Design Economy

2010-09-18T14:49:00.001+09:00

Home-Grown Businesses & Grassroots Financing

2010-09-10T23:13:00.001+09:00

Local investors for local businesses—how businesses are turning to their neighbors for funding.

by Stacy Mitchell
Yes! Magazine

Aug 26, 2010

Photo by MorBCN

In the summer of 2008, business partners Jessica Stockton Bagnulo and Rebecca Fitting were making plans to open a bookstore in Brooklyn. Their chosen neighborhood, Fort Greene, was over the moon at the prospect. For years, residents had been clamoring for a bookstore, repeatedly citing it as their top need in surveys conducted by the neighborhood association.

Although Fitting and Bagnulo still had a long way to go—they hadn't found a space yet or secured financing for the venture—the Fort Greene Association decided to throw a party to welcome them to the neighborhood. More than 300 people came.
That was in mid-September. A week later, the financial crisis hit. Even before the meltdown, Bagnulo and Fitting knew that securing a bank loan for a start-up bookstore would be tough. Now it looked downright impossible.

Just as CSAs have played a key role in the rebirth of small-scale farms, community-supported enterprises (CSEs) may help seed a new generation of independent grocers, bookstores, and other neighborhood businesses.

The warm welcome from the neighborhood gave them an idea, though. Bagnulo and Fitting reached out to people in the community and, over the next few months, raised $70,000 in more than two dozen small loans from their future customers. Combined with their own savings and a loan from the World Trade Center Small Business Recovery Fund, this gave them the $346,000 in capital they needed. Last October, they opened the Greenlight Bookstore on Fulton Street. The store has been a huge hit, with sales exceeding their projections.
Although no hard data exist, the number of businesses relying on their customers and neighbors for financing appears to be on the rise. Just as CSAs (community-supported agriculture operations) have played a key role in the rebirth of small-scale farms, so too may community-supported enterprises (CSEs) help seed a new generation of independent grocers, bookstores, and other neighborhood businesses.

YES! Magazine's special issue
on building an economy that works for all.

This kind of grassroots financing can be a good deal for both parties, bringing together entrepreneurs who need affordable loans and savers who are dissatisfied with today's ultra low interest rates (and perhaps also fed up with investing in the stocks and bonds of big corporations).
While it's no substitute for having a robust local banking system, community financing can help fill in the gaps. It may be especially critical to bringing retail back to urban business districts and rural town centers. New research indicates that a growing number of people want to live within walking distance of neighborhood stores—a trend that could reduce household driving by 25-30 percent—but banks are often reluctant to finance such enterprises because of what they view as multiple risk factors: independent ownership, small store formats by retail industry standards, limited parking, and market areas with unconventional demographics.
Future customers may be better positioned to see the potential of these enterprises.
That was certainly true for Greenlight. "It's traditional to go to friends and family. In our case, that included the neighborhood," says Bagnulo. She and Fitting set a minimum loan amount of $1,000 and allowed each person making a loan to choose his or her own interest rate of between 2 and 4 percent. This fall, one year after the store opened, Greenlight will begin paying the loans back in quarterly payments over a five-year period.
In a way, says Fitting, the financial collapse worked in their favor. "People were interested in investing in something that they could see and something that had real value," she explains. "What we were offering was as good [an interest rate] as anyone was offering at that time. But it was still a low interest rate for us to pay back compared to bank loans."
Community financing may not work for any type of business. So far, it seems most viable for the kinds of businesses that people have a strong emotional connection to: bookstores, food-related enterprises, and community gathering spots.

"People were interested in investing in something that they could see and something that had real value."

To launch Awaken Café, a coffeehouse and eatery in Oakland, Cortt Dunlap and his fellow owners pre-sold gift cards. Priced at $1,000, the cards could be redeemed for $1,250 once the café opened. It offered customers a great deal, but was still cheaper for the café than a loan, because the cards could be paid back with food and labor, rather than dollars.
One benefit of investing locally, says Dunlap, is that you are not trying to predict how the market at large will respond to a particular product—only how you and your neighbors will. Another benefit of community financing is that it helps a new businesses build buzz. "Those customers [who purchased cards] found themselves committed to our success," Dunlap says. "They had an incentive to tell people and invite their friends to come in."
Community financing has also taken off in rural areas. Claire's Restaurant, which anchors downtown Hardwick, Vermont, and sources over 80 percent of its food from farms within 15 miles, is the product of two distinct community enterprises. One, the Hardwick Restaurant Group, which raised capital from about a dozen local investors, secured a 12-year lease on a downtown space and paid for the equipment and build-out for a restaurant.
The other venture, Claire's Restaurant, was financed by a much larger group of residents. Half of the $100,000 in capital needed to start the business came from about a dozen families who made $5,000 loans at 5 percent interest. The other half came from more than 100 local families who purchased a subscription to the future restaurant. These $1,000 subscriptions (some of which were shared among multiple families) are being redeemed at the rate of $25 per month for 10 months each year for the restaurant's first four years.
The idea of separating the real estate from the restaurant came from the Preservation Trust of Vermont, which has provided assistance to community supported enterprises throughout the state. The structure has two benefits, according to Linda Ramsdell, who owns the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick and has been a leader in the venture. "Hopefully it will be Claire's forever, but if something happened with the restaurant, everything would be in place to bring in another restaurant," she explains. "Also, Claire's starting out does not have a lot of the debt that a restaurant usually has."
Claire's, which opened just over two years ago, has exceeded its founders' projections, though it still has a ways to go before it's profitable. "Part of the mission of the restaurant is to support all of those producers," says Ramsdell. "So we are trying to make the margin work between the higher cost of goods and keeping the prices affordable—so farmers can come in and eat their own food."
Community financing does raise significant legal issues, according to Jenny Kassan, an attorney with the Katovich Law Group and co-founder of Cutting Edge Capital. "The minute that you solicit anything like a loan or an investment vehicle where someone is being promised profits, securities law kicks in," she says. Most of these ventures are happening within the boundaries of a single state so they fall under state law, rather than federal regulations. But state law varies widely. "There are some states where it is quite easy and others where it is quite impossible," Kassan says.
One way to reduce compliance issues is to limit the offer to people you know. "We didn't put the offer out there to everyone in the world," says Greenlight's Bagnulo, who vetted their financing plan with a lawyer and only reached out to people they had met who had expressed strong interest in the bookstore. "This was really a slight extension of the 'friends and family' loans that many small businesses do."
Another approach is to stick with prepaid gift cards. "That way you do not have to worry about securities law, because you are selling something that has an intrinsic value as opposed to an investment," says Kassan.

Put Your Money Where Your Life Is
Americans want to invest locally. What's stopping us?

Gift cards are being used not only to finance start-up businesses, but, increasingly, to pay for expansion. After being turned away by a bank earlier this year, David Edwards emailed the 3,800 customers on his newsletter list and, in just two days, raised the $10,000 he needed to expand New Mexico Tea Co., a four-year-old tea shop in Albuquerque. Most came in the form of gift cards that could be redeemed for slightly more than their cost.
Asking the community for support often yields unexpected dividends. When Dandelion Café in Orlando asked customers to help them get through a low cash-flow period last year, two local businesses stepped forward and volunteered to remodel parts of the café as a show of mutual support and a way to advertise their services to the community.
Greenlight had a similar experience. Neighbors not only offered loans, but many volunteered to stain shelves, unpack boxes, and paint in the days leading up to the store's opening. "It was like a barn-raising," recalls Bagnulo. The end result is a bookstore that, although less than a year old, already has the feel of a beloved institution deeply rooted in its neighborhood.

Stacy Mitchell is a senior researcher with the New Rules Project and author of Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses.
Interested? More by Stacy Mitchell:

Taking Financial Reform into Our Own Hands
Why we can't let this financial reform bill be our only response to the economic crisis.
Making Money Work: How Can We Reconnect Capital with Community?
Our investments tend to fund consolidation and speculation. But new models are emerging that allow us to finance the economy we really want.
Local Economies Close the Distance Between Us
But our city planning policies are rigged against them. How can we support neighborhood businesses that slow the pace of life and encourage people to get to know each other?

How We Can Grow Community Food Solutions

2010-09-05T12:20:00.001+09:00

2010 Green Party Platform Targets a Democratized Economy

2010-09-04T21:05:00.000+09:00

Comprehensive Monetary and Economic Reforms now included in the US Green Party Platform

The US Green party's economic analysis and policy planks have been growing more radical and sophisticated in recent years and now offer a credible and inspiring template for socio-economic transformation and a far more convivial world. Relevant highlights of their 2010 platform are included below. (My favorite is "Democratic Conversion of Big Business: Mandatory break-up and conversion to democratic worker, consumer, and/or public ownership on a human scale of the largest 500 US industrial and commercial corporations!) See full platform here.

Economic Democracy

Eliminate Corporate Personhood: Legislation or constitutional amendment to end the legal fiction of corporate personhood.
End Corporate Limited Liability: Make corporate shareholders bear the same liabilities as other property owners.
Federal Chartering of Interstate Corporations
Periodic Review of Corporate Charters: A public corporate charter review process for each corporation above $20 million in assets every 20 years to see if it is serving the public interest according to social and ecological as well as financial criteria.
Strengthen Anti-Trust Enforcement: Require breakup of any firm with more than 10% market share unless it makes a compelling case every five years in a public regulatory proceeding that it serves the public interest to keep the firm intact.
Democratic Production: Establish the right of citizens to vote on the expansion or phasing out of products and industries, especially in areas of dangerous or toxic production.
Workplace Democracy: Establish the right of workers at every enterprise over 10 employees to elect supervisors and managers and to determine how to organize work.
Worker Control of Worker Assets-Pension Funds and ESOP Shares: Pension funds representing over $5 trillion in deferred wages account for nearly one-third of financial assets in the US. 11 million workers participate in employee stock-option plans (ESOPs). Reform ERISA, labor laws, and ESOP tax provisions to enable workers to democratically control their assets.
Democratic Conversion of Big Business: Mandatory break-up and conversion to democratic worker, consumer, and/or public ownership on a human scale of the largest 500 US industrial and commercial corporations that account for about 10% of employees, 50% of profits, 70% of sales, and 90% of manufacturing assets.
Democratic Conversion of Small and Medium Business: Financial and technical incentives and assistance for voluntary conversion of the 22.5 million small and medium non-farm businesses in the US to worker or consumer cooperatives or democratic public enterprises. Mandate that workers and the community have the first option to buy on preferential terms in cases of plant closures, the sale or merger of significant assets, or the revocation of corporate charters.
Democratic Banking: Mandatory conversion of the 200 largest banks with 80% of all bank assets into democratic publicly-owned community banks. Financial and technical incentives and assistance for voluntary conversion of other privately-owned banks into publicly-owned community banks or consumer-owned credit unions.
Democratize Monetary Policy and the Federal Reserve System: Place a 100% reserve requirement on demand deposits in order to return control of monetary policy from private bankers to elected government. Selection of Federal Reserve officers by our elected representatives, not private bankers. Strengthen the regional development mission of the regional Federal Reserve Banks by directing them to target investments to promote key policy objectives, such as high-wage employment, worker and community ownership, ecological production, and inner city reconstruction.

Monetary Reform (Greening the dollar)
(cited by the American Monetary Institute)
"While the banking reforms outlined in the above 12 points are very important to ameliorate the present crisis in our banking system, to affect long term, transformative change, it is imperative that we restructure our poorly conceived monetary system. The present mis-structured system of privatized control has resulted in the misdirection of our resources to speculation, toxic loans, and phony financial instruments that create huge profits for the few but no real wealth or jobs. It is both possible and necessary for our government to take back its special money creation privilege and spend this money into circulation through a carefully controlled policy of directing funds, through community banks and interest-free loans, to local and state government entities to be used for infrastructure, health, education, and the arts This would add millions of good jobs, enrich our communities, and go a long ways toward ending the current deep recession.

"To reverse the privatization of control over the money issuing process of our nation’s monetary system; to reverse its resulting obscene and undeserved concentration of wealth and income; to place it within a more equitable public system of governmental checks and balances; and to end the regular recurrence of severe and disruptive banking crises such as the ongoing financial crisis which threatens the livelihood of millions; the Green Party supports the following interconnected,

Green Solutions:
1. Nationalize the 12 Federal Reserve Banks, reconstituting them and the Federal Reserve Systems Washington Board of Governors under a new Monetary Authority Board within the U.S. Treasury. The private creation of money or credit which substitutes for money, will cease and with it the reckless and fraudulent practices that have led to the present financial and economic crisis.

2. Create a Monetary Authority, which will, with assistance from the FDIC, the SEC, the U.S. Treasury, the Congressional Budget Office, and others, redefine bank lending rules and procedures to end the privilege banks now have to create money when they extend their credit, by ending what is known as the fractional reserve system in an elegant, non disruptive manner. Banks will be encouraged to continue as profit making companies, extending loans of real money at interest; acting as intermediaries between those clients seeking a return on their savings and those clients ready and able to pay for borrowing the money; but banks will no longer be creators of what we are using for money. Many new forms of banks will be encouraged such as community banks, credit unions, etc., see 11 and 12 above)

3. The new money that must be regularly added to an improving system as population and commerce grow will be created and spent into circulation by the U. S. Government for infrastructure, including the human infrastructure of education and health care. This begins with the $2.2 trillion the American Society of Civil Engineers warns us is needed to bring existing infrastructure to safe levels over the next 5 years. Per capita guidelines will assure a fair distribution of such expenditures across the United States, creating good jobs, re-invigorating the local economies and re-funding government at all levels. As this money is paid out to various contractors, they in turn pay their suppliers and laborers who in turn pay for their living expenses and ultimately this money gets deposited into banks, which are then in a position to make loans of this money, according to the new regulations."

Progressive and Ecological Taxes

Ecological Taxes: Tax pollution, resource extraction, harmful products, and the use of our common wealth of natural capital (land sites according to land value, timber and grazing lands, ocean and freshwater resources, oil and minerals, electromagnetic spectrum, satellite orbital zones).
Simple, Progressive Income Taxes: Enact a no-loopholes, graduated personal income tax with equal taxation of all income, regardless of source. Provide an income tax credit for each dependent to replace and fully compensate for the current exemptions and deductions that benefit to the average taxpayer, such as the home mortgage deduction and medical deductions.
Eliminate Regressive Payroll Taxes: Fund Social Security, Health Care, Unemployment Insurance, and Workers Compensation out of progressive income and wealth taxes.
Guaranteed Adequate Income: Build taxable Basic Income Grants into the progressive income tax structure to create a Universal Social Security system that ensures everyone has income for at least a modest standard of living above the poverty line.
Maximum Income: Build into the progressive income tax a 100% tax on all income over ten times the minimum wage.
End Corporate Welfare: Target subsidies for worker- and community-owned enterprises, not absentee-owned corporations. Put subsidies in the public budgets where they can be scrutinized, not hidden as tax breaks in complicated tax codes. Progressively Graduated Corporate Revenue and Asset Taxes
Wealth Tax: Enact a steeply progressive tax on net wealth over $2.5 million (the top 5% of households).
Inheritance Tax: Replace the loophole-ridden estate tax with a no-loopholes, progressive inheritance tax on inheritances over $1 million.
Stock and Bond Transfer Tax: Encourage a shift from speculative to productive investments through a federal stock and bond transfer tax on all securities transactions.
Currency Speculation Tax: An internationally uniform tax on currency conversion to discourage speculation. Revenues from the currency speculation tax should be channeled through international agencies into ecologically sustainable, democratically controlled development in poor countries.
Advertising Tax: A tax on advertising to fund a decentralized, pluralistic media system of real public broadcasting, public service broadcasting on commercial media, and independent nonprofit, noncommercial media.

Kunstler Talks About his Sequel to World Made By Hand

2010-09-01T14:06:00.001+09:00

Journalist/Author Peter Golden interviews James Howard Kunstler about The Witch of Hebron (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2010), the second novel in Kunstler's World Made By Hand series. Without giving away any important plot points, Golden explores the major themes in this autumn story set in a world after the lights have flickered out and the oil has dried up. Topics include: the rule of law, the importance of ritual holidays, and the role of religion in a tight-knit community. In this novel, Kunstler has revealed more about the circumstances that have placed his characters in a world without modernity. Golden ask if Kunstler believes that people are happier in this imagined future than they are in today's high tech world.

Business model where people, planet and profits matter equally

2010-08-30T03:28:00.000+09:00

Sign Up in Your Local Economy

Will Raap understands that the creating of a new economy is a complex endeavor. "Green" products manufactured with care for the environment are an important element of the new economy story -- but only a part. Sharing profits with those who labored to make the products is another part of the rebalancing of our economic system to one that is fair and sustainable. And then with the financial capacity that the new wealth creates, investing in the restoration of ecological capital in the region, planning and acting for future generations.

In 1983 Will Raap founded Gardener's Supply Company (http://www.gardeners.com) in Burlington, Vermont with a vision to create a business where people, planet, and profits are equally important. At the same time he was providing tools so that people could raise their own food and enjoy doing it at the same time.

In December of 2009, Gardener's Supply became 100 percent employee-owned. Raap began selling shares to employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Program in 1987, allowing all employees to earn stock and participate in company profits.Selling Gardener's Supply to the employees kept the business in Vermont, and gave employees the opportunity to become owners of an enterprise they helped build, something Raap felt was critical when he started the company.

Although the company could have sold to outside buyers, Raap's original vision motivated him and that included equal concern for people involved in the business. At a time when many jobs are moving overseas or companies are being sold to large conglomerates, employee-ownership maintains accountability to workers, to product integrity, and to the regional economy.Meeting a parallel concern for the planet and for future generations,

in 1990 Gardener's Supply created a non-profit to undertake the land restoration and agricultural renaissance of the Intervale, an abandoned pig farm and unregulated dumpsite in on a floodplain in the middle of Burlington. Today the Intervale Center (http://www.intervale.org) manages nearly 300 acres in a patchwork of organic gardens, independent farms, nurseries, a community composting facility, community gardens, recreation trails, and wildlife corridors.

But the Intervale has done even more than that -- it has inspired Burlington to imagine greater self sufficiency in food production, spawning new farmers and an informed citizenry who recognize the importance of a locally based food system. And once such an imagination enters into the public mind, the possibilities expand -- locally made furniture and wool products, distributed energy production, and public transportation options.

The Burlington fever has spread to other towns and regions in Vermont. In Vermont's Northeast Kingdom a cluster of seed, compost, cheese, meat, fruit, and vegetable production businesses have kept jobs local and maintained skills, while building a proud economy that feeds itself and exports quality goods to other regions.Vermont is turning into a model of what a new economy might look like.

Will Raap did not do this alone. But his vision in 1983 for Gardener's Supply included all of this. And visions are active and potent when held for the right reasons. It is such visions that start revolutions.

It is time for a revolution in our economic system -- transitioning to one that is local, vibrant, diverse, fair, restorative, and sustainable. A citizen revolution region by region. Sign up today in your local economy!

In his remarks at the June 5th founding meeting of the New Economics Institute, Will Raap discusses the collaboration of businesses, government, and non-profits working to connect local initiatives into a Vermont wide model of a new kind of economy -- strengthening all the parts (http://www.neweconomicsinstitute.org/documents/willraapjune5.pdf). In his 2006 E. F. Schumacher Lecture he describes the journey that led to this vision and its implementation (http://www.neweconomicsinstitute.org/publications/lectures/raap/will/he-...).
Staff of the New Economics Institute

www.neweconomicsinstitute.org

TURBULENCE Magazine

2010-08-19T19:41:00.001+09:00

A Different Kind of Ownership Society

2010-08-19T12:14:00.001+09:00

Growing Fish in Greenhouses

2010-08-16T01:28:00.000+09:00

Aquaculture model that provides low-cost vegetables and protein as well as jobs to urban centers.

Milwaukee's Growing Power, a community-based urban food center, is using plants as natural water filters for raising yellow perch. Fred Binkowski, an aquaculture specialist with the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute, provides technical advice on the experimental effort.
www.growingpower.org
www.seagrant.wisc.edu

A Farm for the Future

2010-08-16T01:02:00.001+09:00

Inspirational example of a bountiful, sustainable agricultural paradigm

BBC documentary on alternatives to present global farming and the incipient food crisis, filmed in the UK. Featuring Martin Crawford (Agroforestry Research Trust), Fordhall Farm, Richard Heinberg and others. Topics covered are the influence of oil on the food production, peak-oil, food security, carbon emissions, sustainability and permaculture.

This is Part I of five 10-min Youtube clips - continue from here.

E2-Transport Documentary

2010-08-11T11:53:00.001+09:00

E2 Energy Documentary

2010-08-11T11:46:00.001+09:00

Saving the World with Livestock (Holistically)

2010-08-06T08:31:00.002+09:00

Introducing the Brown Revolution

2010 Buckminster Fuller Award winner, Allan Savory argues that while livestock may be part of the problem, they can also be an important part of the solution. He has demonstrated time and again in Africa, Australia and North and South America that, properly managed, they are essential to land restoration. With the right techniques, plant growth is lusher, the water table is higher, wildlife thrives, soil carbon increases and, surprisingly, perhaps four times as many cattle can be kept.

Allan Savory - Keeping Cattle: cause or cure for climate crisis?

RSA Animate – Crisis of Capitalism

2010-07-29T02:40:00.002+09:00

In this short RSA Animate, radical sociologist David Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism, towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that could be responsible, just and humane. View his full lecture at the RSA.

United Diversity's Money Bookmarks

2010-07-29T01:52:00.000+09:00

Progressive Taxation Scenarios

2010-07-06T03:18:00.001+09:00

Sane Tax Initiatives

The cancellation of taxes on labor and basic consumption, the creation of a 2% worldwide tax on property ownership (except basic habitation for the poor), and the implementation of a global 0.5% flat tax on all financial transactions with a total prohibition of speculation on food products.

Until the beginning of the 19th century, taxes were largely used as a means of reducing inequalities, and fell mainly on property ownership.

Neoliberal policies of the 20th century slowly shifted the tax burden away from the rich to the poor by taxing labor and consumption—making the poor responsible for financing our economic system while giving the rich most of the benefit. And we all know what became of trickle-down theory.

Taxes must be shifted away from basic necessities and consumption, and back to profit-making operations, and the ownership of natural resources and other industrial properties. A tax must also be levied on financial transactions.
For more information on these issues:

Source article here (The Yes Men's World Economic Forum spoof site).

Common Good Banks: creating democratic economics for a sustainable world

2010-07-05T23:25:00.001+09:00

What Is Common Good Bank™?

Common Good Bank™ is designed to be the basis for a new economic system -- a democratic, community-based system that can spread quickly to give everyone a home, healthy food, and satisfying work. Common Good Bank will be different from ordinary banks in two ways: who benefits (everyone) and who gets a say in how the money is used (everyone). This is not just another bank with a social mission. This is

a social mission with a bank!

All profits go to schools and other nonprofits.
Depositors decide what the bank should invest in.
Free local credit card processing for local businesses.
Micro-loans for new businesses and community projects.
A full range of secure, FDIC-insured banking services.
Committed to sustainability and economic justice.

Once the Common Good Bank opens, any community ANYWHERE can start a community division in just a few days, with no need for a bank building. (How?)
Together Common Good Bank communities can make a better world for everyone.

LOCAL MONEY
Common Good Bank depositors will create and manage money at the community level. This local system will be seamlessly integrated with the official currency (for example the dollar), but nearly independent of the official currency. Insofar as we use local money, the bank business can operate as we would like an ideal bank to operate in an ideal world.

Initially the local money will take the form of credit only. Paper currency will come much later, if at all.

Each Common Good Bank community will decide for itself, within reasonable limits, how much money to create and what to spend it on, for the common good. The Common Good Bank will exchange locally-created money for dollars automatically -- elevating the local money to the same status as any national currency.

Our local money system will require no self-sacrifice, no conscious decisions and no extra work for anyone. In fact, just like for an international credit card purchase, the system will be effectively invisible to participants. Overall, this system can save a community of 5,000 people over a million dollars a year, automatically, effortlessly. Like magic.

How Can It Save Us Money. Using local money for local commerce frees our dollars for other things.
Basis. Our created money will be based on the stable, inflation-free value of some basic local commodities, benchmarked regularly against the dollar.
Name. Call this money "Common Goods" or just "Goods".
Backing. Issued and backed by participating depositors -- individuals, local government, businesses and organizations.
Limits. Each community can create money by spending and lending.
Implementation. Part of each credit transaction will be conducted in dollars and part in local money, with the bank adjusting the proportion automatically, as needed. The bank will also automatically exchange dollars for local money and local money for dollars, as needed.
Paper currency. No paper (or coin) currency will be introduced until the local credit money system is running well, and not for several years in any case.
Presentation. The bank will present all these unconventional features in a way that feels familiar and attractive to customers and acceptable to regulators.
Risks. Financial risks to the bank or to any participant are small and easily handled.
Benefits. Economic security and sustainable prosperity.

See their homepage here: http://commongoodbank.com/

Has the American Dream Become Our Nightmare?

2010-07-03T17:34:00.001+09:00

"We may want to begin thinking about how we can strengthen what's been called the "commons"—an old but strangely foreign concept in modern America—that refers to what we inherit or create together that contributes to the good of us all as members of a human community."

Become A Radical Homemaker

2010-07-01T11:55:00.001+09:00

"...I talked about changing the world by moving toward what we love, not running away from what we fear. I talked about the power of small changes to result in a deep personal shift. I suggested he hang out the laundry..."

<br>http://www.truth-out.org/live-dangerously-10-easy-steps-becoming-a-radical-homemaker60923?print<br><br><div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=bef95ddb-3de8-8c61-9627-087227687184" alt="" class="zemanta-pixie-img"></div>

A New Deal for Local Economies

2010-06-29T13:20:00.000+09:00

Rebuilding Immune Systems

2010-05-25T21:41:00.000+09:00

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Imagine a World Where People Love Their Jobs

2010-05-25T18:55:00.001+09:00

By Rochelle Gurstein, Guernica

To read more stories like this, visit Guernica Magazine.

When the Ford Motor Company opened in 1903, “jack-of-all trades” mechanics were needed to build the first cars. This kind of labor still belonged to the craft tradition—“worthy work” that required skill, knowledge, and experience obtained through years of apprenticeship. The work was varied and interesting and carried with it, as William Morris once put it, “the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill.” In the face of growing demand for the Model T, however, the knowledge and experience of mechanics were found to be expendable. To increase productivity, Ford’s managers broke up the craft of building cars into its constituent parts; highly skilled mechanics found themselves turned into mere assemblers, reduced to performing an ever more limited set of tasks.

By 1910, these once-independent craftsmen refused to accept what they experienced as the mind-numbing and degrading division of their labor and began to walk off the job. During the next few years, Ford took even more extreme measures to step up production, instituting the endless-chain conveyor system; car assemblies now moved past fixed stations where men carried out ever more simple, repetitive operations. Again, these men registered their revulsion at this systematic destruction of their knowledge and skill by walking off the job, this time in droves. “It was apparent,” writes Keith Sward in his The Legend of Henry Ford, “that the Ford Motor Co. had reached the point of owning a great factory without having enough workers to keep it humming.” For the year 1913 alone, the employee turnover rate reached 380 percent. “So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system,” Sward reports, “that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.”

This crisis only intensified when the Industrial Workers of the World began a unionization drive of Ford workers during the summer of that same year. To put down both threats, Ford introduced his much-trumpeted five dollars a day. Harry Braverman, in his groundbreaking Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974), questions whether even this pay rate, which was almost double that of Ford’s competitors, would have kept the men on the job had there been any other viable options for skilled mechanics. But there were not; by this time, competing manufacturers, in an effort to keep pace with Ford’s increased output, had also forced the assembly line on their skilled mechanics, thus wiping out all alternative modes of work in the burgeoning car industry. Ford’s workers had no choice but to stay put and their union representatives began their long fight for concessions from management.

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama announced with some urgency that, “jobs must be our number one focus in 2010.” But as I have been reading about how to create jobs for the fifteen million men and women who are currently without work, I have been struck by how much space is devoted to breast-beating about declining standards of living and fear-mongering predictions that America will be a “second-rate” power by the end of the decade, and how little is given to any serious consideration about what kinds of work people will be doing.

The near collapse of the auto industry and the way it was averted, in large part, by unionized workers accepting deep cuts in their ranks, hours, wages, and benefits, herald the end of the kind of blue-collar occupations that afforded generations of working people secure, comfortable lives.

It is an historical irony that in last two years’ public discussions about bailing out Detroit, what was once perceived as the death of dignified labor was portrayed by Republican lawmakers and reactionary journalists as a kind of overpaid, over-compensated worker’s paradise. This characterization of the reasonable wages, paid vacations and sick days, health insurance, and retirement packages that labor unions gained in exchange for workers relinquishing the skills required to build cars reveals a distressing loss of historical memory. What is more, this talk of pampered workers is an outrageous libel on the uneasy bargain to which middle-class workers—both blue and white-collar alike—eventually submitted, trading meaningful work for the promise of better working conditions, a higher standard of living, and increased leisure time.

For decades now, manufacturers have demonstrated their contempt for this trade-off. Claiming competitive threats from “the global market,” more and more manufacturers and associated industries have moved their factories outside the United States to take advantage of poor people who have no choice but to accept meager wages. As for the few remaining manufacturers that have kept their factories in the U.S., most notably, the automobile industry, last spring we heard their obscenely rich executives explain to Congress that the main reason their companies were failing was the extreme financial burden of their workers’ benefits.

As we know, President Obama has been intent on saving Detroit. Last year, in his address to Congress on February 24, he announced, “We are committed to the goal of a re-tooled, re-imagined auto industry that can compete and win. Millions of jobs depend on it; scores of communities depend on it, and I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.” It is certainly not too much to expect that this “re-tooled, reimagined” auto industry, instead of manufacturing gigantic, polluting, profligate S.U.V.’s and light trucks, might produce fuel-efficient, “green” cars. But by what means? The old assembly line has largely been replaced by fully automated, robotic production, leaving many workers with the repetitious, one-dimensional job of tending machines. Will they continue to tend machines, but now with lower pay, fewer benefits, and less security so that, before long, their work will be indistinguishable from the dead-end, often demeaning jobs of the so-called service economy? And to what end? So that instead of drivers sitting for hours in traffic jams during their daily commutes to and from work in cars that pollute, they will now sit for hours in their plug-in, hybrid eco-cars? This is a matter of some urgency, as 90 percent of Americans drive to work and a staggering 76 percent of them drive alone.

When oil prices surged dramatically in the summer of 2008, there was much talk—especially during the presidential debates—about the need to find alternative energy sources as well as about the compromised political situation in which America found itself economically hostage to oil-producing Arab countries that are actively hostile to American interests. (A nice turn on the old saying that capitalists will buy the rope to hang themselves.) Although it is well known that Americans count for only 5 percent of the world’s population but use up over 25 percent of the world’s energy resources, the moral dimension of our gluttonous appetites rarely enters any mainstream public discussions. Paul Kennedy, in his Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, published back in 1993, gave life to these statistics: “According to one calculation, the average American baby represents twice the environmental damage of a Swedish child, three times that of an Italian, thirteen times that of a Brazilian, thirty-five times that of an Indian, and two hundred and eighty times that of a Chadian or Haitian because its level of consumption throughout its life will be so much greater.”

It is this picture that we need to keep in mind as we imagine how we are going to move out of the world—ugly and shoddy, morally and aesthetically—created by the ideology of growth without end and the unrelenting piggish desire for more things that have become hallmarks of the American way of life. We must also keep sight of the historical fact that not only did monopoly capital and the division of labor emerge together in the last decades of the nineteenth century, but so, too, did those alarming “plague clouds” and a sun that was “blanched” rather than “reddened”—those first unmistakable signs of industrial pollution that John Ruskin decried in a lecture entitled “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” (1884). To address one of these historical developments without the other two is to ensure that we will never move beyond the narrow confines of current thinking about our present moment or about what the future might look like.

In the same speech to Congress last year, President Obama made a more explicit connection between jobs and the environment than he did in his recent State of the Union speech. He rightly believes it is time to repair our disintegrating infrastructure and announced that over the next two years, the government “will save or create 3.5 million jobs. More than 90 percent of these jobs will be in the private sector, jobs rebuilding our roads and bridges, constructing wind turbines and solar panels, laying broadband, and expanding mass transit.” What is more, Obama promised that American universities will turn out “the highest proportion of college graduates in the world” by the year 2020. But what will these students study? What kinds of work will their college educations prepare them for? Here President Obama seems unable to picture a world significantly different from the economically and morally bankrupt one that we now find ourselves in: “In a global economy, where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity. It is a pre-requisite.” I am sorry to have to notice that the President’s formulation of knowledge as “the most valuable skill you can sell” belongs to the technocratic world view of the professional-managerial class—the very “experts” who, from the time of the first factory line, have been repackaging once-complex sets of skills into simple instructions that can be mastered in a few days or even a few hours of “training.”

Instead of putting forward, as so many of our elected officials, policy analysts, pundits, and journalists predictably do, a picture of our world that is essentially the same, except that it is somehow “green” and somehow peopled with college-educated or better “trained” workers, we need to focus our attention on the more pressing and more basic question of what kinds of work people should be expected to devote their lives to doing. The last time this question—the question of meaningful, satisfying, dignified labor—got a public hearing was in the nineteen sixties and seventies, with Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital being the intellectual high-water mark. What Braverman convincingly demonstrated is that there is nothing natural or inevitable about our system of labor; that it came about through conscious decisions made by industrial capitalists in the name of profit for them alone; and, so long as there were living alternatives to it, that assembly line work was forcefully resisted by skilled craftsmen who walked off the job rather than submit to work that they felt demeaned them. William Morris spoke for those men when he declared the new factory work “worthless; it is slaves’ work—mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil.”

In this context, it is worth recalling the profusion of skilled practices that once existed. In the mid-sixteenth century, a book described ninety different crafts, including jewelers, metalsmiths, goldsmiths, coiners, tapestry makers, printers, musical instrument makers, dyers, potters, tanners, weavers, carpenters, bakers, and millers. Two centuries later, Diderot’s Encyclopedia counted two hundred and fifty. By the middle of the nineteenth century, in a medium-sized town in England, over fifty crafts were still being practiced. Over the last century and a half, however, the social division of labor penetrated ever more dimensions of daily life, with the result that very few occupations requiring skill, knowledge, experience, and long apprenticeships have survived.

Thus it has become increasingly difficult to imagine how to revive what has vanished both from practice and from memory, let alone how a world might come into being where the greater number of things we use or, better yet—to suggest the enormous change in consciousness that is required—things we enjoy using in our daily life are made by people who enjoy making them. I have in mind here the kind of pleasure and pride that accomplished craftsmen at the Waterford Crystal factory in Kilbarry, Ireland, lost when their factory shut down earlier this year. Sean Egan, who worked as a crystal engraver for twenty-five years, spoke of his ten-year apprenticeship: “It’s extremely hard to learn, and machines can’t do it. It’s like playing the piano. You can learn three chords and get away with it, but if you want to learn classical piano, you have to practice all the time.”

We might also take a lesson from the movement for sustainable, organic, local farming. For decades, champions of this movement have been all but banished to the fringe of respectable discourse, but lately they have been getting a hearing, as evidenced by Michael Pollan’s lengthy “Open Letter to the Next Farmer-in-Chief” that appeared in The New York Times Magazine, in October 2008. It seems to me that a good starting point for how to bring about a similar revolution in thinking and practice when it comes to work is the principle that just as monoculture is disastrous for our health and security when it comes to food, lack of variety in work is just as disastrous for our well-being and happiness. The ideology of ceaseless economic growth, made possible by the division of labor that has filled our world with ugly things from the Styrofoam cup to smog in our skies, has always been vapid and destructive. Now, with the implosion of the global financial system, the American way of life as model for global expansion stands exposed as unsustainable as well.

Rochelle Gurstein is the author of Repeal Of Reticence. She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Of Time and Beauty and writes a monthly column about how the world looks and feels for The New Republic Online. Her essays on aesthetic and political matters have appeared in The New Republic, Salmagundi, Raritan, and other “little magazines.”

Food Among the Ruins: Should Detroit Be Converted Into a Farming Mecca?

2010-05-25T18:40:00.000+09:00

By Mark Dowie, Guernica

To read more stories like this one, please visit Guernica.

Were I an aspiring farmer in search of fertile land to buy and plow, I would seriously consider moving to Detroit. There is open land, fertile soil, ample water, willing labor, and a desperate demand for decent food. And there is plenty of community will behind the idea of turning the capital of American industry into an agrarian paradise. In fact, of all the cities in the world, Detroit may be best positioned to become the world’s first one hundred percent food self-sufficient city.

Right now, Detroit is as close as any city in America to becoming a food desert, not just another metropolis like Chicago, Philadelphia, or Cleveland with a bunch of small- and medium-sized food deserts scattered about, but nearly a full-scale, citywide food desert. (A food desert is defined by those who study them as a locality from which healthy food is more than twice as far away as unhealthy food, or where the distance to a bag of potato chips is half the distance to a head of lettuce.) About 80 percent of the residents of Detroit buy their food at the one thousand convenience stores, party stores, liquor stores, and gas stations in the city. There is such a dire shortage of protein in the city that Glemie Dean Beasley, a seventy-year-old retired truck driver, is able to augment his Social Security by selling raccoon carcasses (twelve dollars a piece, serves a family of four) from animals he has treed and shot at undisclosed hunting grounds around the city. Pelts are ten dollars each. Pheasants are also abundant in the city and are occasionally harvested for dinner.

Detroiters who live close enough to suburban borders to find nearby groceries carrying fresh fruit, meat, and vegetables are a small minority of the population. The health consequences of food deserts are obvious and dire. Diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, and obesity are chronic in Detroit, and life expectancy is measurably lower than in any American city.

Not so long ago, there were five produce-carrying grocery chains—Kroger, A&P, Farmer Jack, Wrigley, and Meijer—competing vigorously for the Detroit food market. Today there are none. Nor is there a single WalMart or Costco in the city. Specialty grocer Trader Joe’s just turned down an attractive offer to open an outlet in relatively safe and prosperous midtown Detroit; a rapidly declining population of chronically poor consumers is not what any retailer is after. High employee turnover, loss from theft, and cost of security are also cited by chains as reasons to leave or avoid Detroit. So it is unlikely grocers will ever return, despite the tireless flirtations of City Hall, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Michigan Food and Beverage Association. There is a fabulous once-a-week market, the largest of its kind in the country, on the east side that offers a wide array of fresh meat, eggs, fruit, and vegetables. But most people I saw there on an early April Saturday arrived in well polished SUVs from the suburbs. So despite the Eastern Market, in-city Detroiters are still left with the challenge of finding new ways to feed themselves a healthy meal.

One obvious solution is to grow their own, and the urban backyard garden boom that is sweeping the nation has caught hold in Detroit, particularly in neighborhoods recently settled by immigrants from agrarian cultures of Laos and Bangladesh, who are almost certain to become major players in an agrarian Detroit. Add to that the five hundred or so twenty-by-twenty-foot community plots and a handful of three- to ten-acre farms cultured by church and non-profit groups, and during its four-month growing season, Detroit is producing somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of its food supply inside city limits—more than most American cities, but nowhere near enough to allay the food desert problem. About 3 percent of the groceries sold at the Eastern Market are homegrown; the rest are brought into Detroit by a handful of peri-urban farmers and about one hundred and fifty freelance food dealers who buy their produce from Michigan farms between thirty and one hundred miles from the city and truck it into the market.

There are more visionaries in Detroit than in most Rust-Belt cities, and thus more visions of a community rising from the ashes of a moribund industry to become, if not an urban paradise, something close to it. The most intriguing visionaries in Detroit, at least the ones who drew me to the city, were those who imagine growing food among the ruins—chard and tomatoes on vacant lots (there are over 103,000 in the city, sixty thousand owned by the city), orchards on former school grounds, mushrooms in open basements, fish in abandoned factories, hydroponics in bankrupt department stores, livestock grazing on former golf courses, high-rise farms in old hotels, vermiculture, permaculture, hydroponics, aquaponics, waving wheat where cars were once test-driven, and winter greens sprouting inside the frames of single-story bungalows stripped of their skin and re-sided with Plexiglas—a homemade greenhouse. Those are just a few of the agricultural technologies envisioned for the urban prairie Detroit has become.

There are also proposals on the mayor’s desk to rezone vast sections A-something (“A” for agriculture), and a proposed master plan that would move the few people residing in lonely, besotted neighborhoods into Detroit’s nine loosely defined villages and turn the rest of the city into open farmland. An American Institute of Architects panel concludes that all Detroit’s residents could fit comfortably in fifty square miles of land. Much of the remaining ninety square miles could be farmed. Were that to happen, and a substantial investment was made in greenhouses, vertical farms, and aquaponic systems, Detroit could be producing protein and fibre 365 days a year and soon become the first and only city in the world to produce close to 100 percent of its food supply within its city limits. No semis hauling groceries, no out-of-town truck farmers, no food dealers. And no chain stores need move back. Everything eaten in the city could be grown in the city and distributed to locally owned and operated stores and co-ops. I met no one in Detroit who believed that was impossible, but only a few who believed it would happen. It could, but not without a lot of political and community will.

There are a few cities in the world that grow and provide about half their total food supply within their urban and peri-urban regions—Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Havana, Cuba; Hanoi, Vietnam; Dakar, Senegal; Rosario, Argentina; Cagayan de Oro in the Philippines; and, my personal favorite, Cuenca, Equador—all of which have much longer growing seasons than Detroit. However, those cities evolved that way, almost unintentionally. They are, in fact, about where Detroit was agriculturally around one hundred and fifty years ago. Half of them will almost surely drop under 50 percent sufficiency within the next two decades as industry subsumes cultivated land to build factories (à la China). Because of its unique situation, Detroit could come close to being 100 percent self-sufficient.

First, the city lies on one hundred and forty square miles of former farmland. Manhattan, Boston, and San Francisco could be placed inside the borders of Detroit with room to spare, and the population is about the same as the smallest of those cities, San Francisco: eight hundred thousand. And that number is still declining from a high of two million in the mid-nineteen fifties. Demographers expect Detroit’s population to level off somewhere between five hundred thousand and six hundred thousand by 2025. Right now there is about forty square miles of unoccupied open land in the city, the area of San Francisco, and that landmass could be doubled by moving a few thousand people out of hazardous firetraps into affordable housing in the eight villages. As I drove around the city, I saw many full-sized blocks with one, two, or three houses on them, many already burned out and abandoned. The ones that weren’t would make splendid farmhouses.

As Detroit was built on rich agricultural land, the soil beneath the city is fertile and arable. Certainly some of it is contaminated with the wastes of heavy industry, but not so badly that it’s beyond remediation. In fact, phyto-remediation, using certain plants to remove toxic chemicals permanently from the soil, is already practiced in parts of the city. And some of the plants used for remediation can be readily converted to biofuels. Others can be safely fed to livestock.

Leading the way in Detroit’s soil remediation is Malik Yakini, owner of the Black Star Community Book Store and founder of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. Yakini and his colleagues begin the remediation process by removing abandoned house foundations and toxic debris from vacated industrial sites. Often that is all that need be done to begin farming. Throw a little compost on the ground, turn it in, sow some seeds, and water it. Water in Detroit is remarkably clean and plentiful.

Although Detroiters have been growing produce in the city since its days as an eighteenth-century French trading outpost, urban farming was given a major boost in the nineteen eighties by a network of African-American elders calling themselves the “Gardening Angels.” As migrants from the rural South, where many had worked as small farmers and field hands, they brought agrarian skills to vacant lots and abandoned industrial sites of the city, and set out to reconnect their descendants, children of asphalt, to the Earth, and teach them that useful work doesn’t necessarily mean getting a job in a factory.

Thirty years later, Detroit has an eclectic mix of agricultural systems, ranging from three-foot window boxes growing a few heads of lettuce to a large-scale farm run by The Catherine Ferguson Academy, a home and school for pregnant girls that not only produces a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, but also raises chickens, geese, ducks, bees, rabbits, and milk goats.

Across town, Capuchin Brother Rick Samyn manages a garden that not only provides fresh fruits and vegetables to city soup kitchens, but also education to neighborhood children. There are about eighty smaller community gardens scattered about the city, more and more of them raising farm animals alongside the veggies. At the moment, domestic livestock is forbidden in the city, as are beehives. But the ordinance against them is generally ignored and the mayor’s office assures me that repeal of the bans are imminent.

About five hundred small plots have been created by an international organization called Urban Farming, founded by acclaimed songwriter Taja Sevelle. Realizing that Detroit was the most agriculturally promising of the fourteen cities in five countries where Urban Farming now exists, Sevelle moved herself and her organization’s headquarters there last year. Her goal is to triple the amount of land under cultivation in Detroit every year. All food grown by Urban Farming is given free to the poor. According to Urban Farming’s Detroit manager, Michael Travis, that won’t change.

Larger scale, for-profit farming is also on the drawing board. Financial services entrepreneur John Hantz has asked the city to let him farm a seventy-acre parcel he owns close to the Eastern Market. If that is approved and succeeds in producing food for the market, and profit for Hantz Farms, Hantz hopes to create more large-scale commercial farms around the city. Not everyone in Detroit’s agricultural community is happy with the scale or intentions of Hantz’s vision, but it seems certain to become part of the mix. And unemployed people will be put to work.

Any agro-economist will tell you that urban farming creates jobs. Even without local production, the food industry creates three dollars of job growth for every dollar spent on food—a larger multiplier effect than almost any other product or industry. Farm a city, and that figure jumps over five dollars. To a community with persistent two-digit unemployment, that number is manna. But that’s only one economic advantage of farming a city.

The average food product purchased in a U.S. chain store has traveled thirteen hundred miles, and about half of it has spoiled en route, despite the fact that it was bioengineered to withstand transport. The total mileage in a three-course American meal approaches twenty-five thousand. The food seems fresh because it has been refrigerated in transit, adding great expense and a huge carbon footprint to each item, and subtracting most of the minerals and vitamins that would still be there were the food grown close by.

I drove around the city one day with Dwight Vaughter and Gary Wozniak. A soft-spoken African American, Vaughter is CEO of SHAR, a self-help drug rehab program with about two hundred residents recovering from various addictions in an abandoned hospital. Wozniak, a bright, gregarious Polish American, who, unlike most of his fellow Poles, has stayed in Detroit, is the program’s financial director. Vaughter and Wozniak are trying to create a labor-intensive economic base for their program, with the conviction that farming and gardening are therapeutic. They have their eyes on two thousand acres in one of the worst sections of the city, not far from the Eastern Market. They estimate that there are about four thousand people still living in the area, most of them in houses that should have been condemned and razed years ago. There are also six churches in the section, offering some of the best ecclesiastical architecture in the city.

I tried to imagine what this weedy, decrepit, trash-ridden urban dead zone would look like under cultivation. First, I removed the overhead utilities and opened the sky a little. Then I tore up the useless grid of potholed streets and sidewalks and replaced them with a long winding road that would take vegetables to market and bring parishioners to church. I wrecked and removed most of the houses I saw, leaving a few that somehow held some charm and utility. Of course, I left the churches standing, as I did a solid red brick school, boarded up a decade ago when the student body dropped to a dozen or so bored and unstimulated deadbeats. It could be reopened as an urban ag-school, or SHAR’s residents could live there. I plowed and planted rows of every imaginable vegetable, created orchards and raised beds, set up beehives and built chicken coops, rabbit warrens, barns, and corrals for sheep, goats, and horses. And of course, I built sturdy hoop houses, rows of them, heated by burning methane from composting manure and ag-waste to keep frost from winter crops. The harvest was tended by former drug addicts who like so many before them found salvation in growing things that keep their brethren alive.

That afternoon I visited Grace Lee Boggs, a ninety-three-year-old Chinese-American widow who has been envisioning farms in Detroit for decades. Widow of legendary civil rights activist Jimmy Boggs, Grace preserves his legacy with the energy of ten activists. The main question on my mind as I climbed the steps to her modest east side home, now a center for community organizers, was whether or not Detroit possesses the community and political will to scale its agriculture up to 100 percent food self-sufficiency. Yes, Grace said to the former, and no to the latter. But she really didn’t believe that political will was that essential.

“The food riots erupting around the world challenge us to rethink our whole approach to food,” she said, but as communities, not as bodies politic. “Today’s hunger crisis is rooted in the industrialized food system which destroys local food production and forces nations like Kenya, which only twenty-five years ago was food self-sufficient, to import 80 percent of its food because its productive land is being used by global corporations to grow flowers and luxury foods for export.” The same thing happened to Detroit, she says, which was once before a food self-sufficient community.

I asked her whether the city government would support large-scale urban agriculture. “City government is irrelevant,” she answered. “Positive change, leaps forward in the evolution of humankind do not start with governments. They start right here in our living rooms and kitchens. We are the leaders we are looking for.”

All the decaying Rust-Belt cities in the American heartland have at one time or another imagined themselves transformed into some sort of exciting new post-industrial urban model. And some have begun the process of transformation. Now it’s Detroit’s turn, Boggs believes. It could follow the examples of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo, and become a slightly recovered metropolis, another pathetic industrial has-been still addicted to federal stimulus, marginal jobs, and the corporate food system. Or it could make a complete break and become, if not a paradise, well, at least a pretty good place to live.

Not everyone in Detroit is enthusiastic about farming. Many urbanites believe that structures of some sort or another belong on urban land. And a lot of those people just elected David Bing mayor of the city. Bing’s opponent, acting mayor Ken Cockrel, was committed to expanding urban agriculture in Detroit. Bing has not said he’s opposed to it, but his background as a successful automotive parts manufacturer will likely have him favoring a future that maintains the city’s primary nickname: Motor City.

And there remains a lasting sense of urbanity in Detroit. “This is a city, not a farm,” remarked one skeptic of urban farming. She’s right, of course. A city is more than a farm. But that’s what makes Detroit’s rural future exciting. Where else in the world can one find a one-hundred-and-forty-square-mile agricultural community with four major league sports teams, two good universities, the fifth largest art museum in the country, a world-class hospital, and headquarters of a now-global industry, that while faltering, stands ready to green their products and keep three million people in the rest of the country employed?

Despite big auto’s crash, “Detroit” is still synonymous with the industry. When people ask, “What will become of Detroit?” most of them still mean, “What will become of GM, Ford, and Chrysler?” If Detroit the city is to survive in any form, it should probably get past that question and begin searching for ways to put its most promising assets, land and people, to productive use again by becoming America’s first modern agrarian metropolis.

Contemporary Detroit gave new meaning to the word “wasteland.” It still stands as a monument to a form of land abuse that became endemic to industrial America—once-productive farmland, teeming with wildlife, was paved and poisoned for corporate imperatives. Now the city offers itself as an opportunity to restore some of its agrarian tradition, not fifty miles from downtown in the countryside where most of us believe that tradition was originally established, but a short bicycle ride away. American cities once grew much of their food within walking distance of most of their residents. In fact, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most early American cities, Detroit included, looked more like the English countryside, with a cluster of small villages interspersed with green open space. Eventually, farmers of the open space sold their land to developers and either retired or moved their farms out of cities, which were cut into grids and plastered with factories, shopping malls, and identical row houses.

Detroit now offers America a perfect place to redefine urban economics, moving away from the totally paved, heavy-industrial factory-town model to a resilient, holistic, economically diverse, self-sufficient, intensely green, rural/urban community—and in doing so become the first modern American city where agriculture, while perhaps not the largest, is the most vital industry.

Mark Dowie, a freelance journalist living in Point Reyes Station California, is author of Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (MIT 1995).

Business Alliance for Local Living Economies

2010-04-29T00:10:00.000+09:00

The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) is North America's fastest growing network of socially responsible businesses, comprised of over 80 community networks with over 21,000 independent business members across the U.S. and Canada.

BALLE brings together independent business leaders, economic development professionals, government officials, social innovators, and community leaders to build local living economies. We provide local, state, national, and international resources to this new model of economic development.

We´re showing that independent locally owned businesses can go beyond traditional measures of success. We're proving that these businesses are accountable to stakeholders and the environment. We're helping these businesses flourish in their local economies. And we're leveraging the power of local networks to build a web of economies that are community-based, green, and fair - local living economies.

See their website at http://www.livingeconomies.org/

Most Beautiful Fish Farm in the World

2010-04-28T22:05:00.000+09:00

Dan Barber: "How I fell in love with a fish"

Discovering an outrageously delicious fish raised
using a revolutionary farming method in Spain.

Restoring Rainforests, Village Livelihoods & Biodiversity

2010-04-28T22:00:00.000+09:00

Orangutan conservationist Willie Smits describes a working permaculture paradigm to restore rainforests, biodiversity and local economies in devastated tropical ecosystems.

Kyoto2

2010-04-28T21:43:00.000+09:00

Kyoto2 is a framework for a new climate agreement under the Climate Convention (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change or UNFCCC), intended to replace the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012.

It aims to be:

effective - to deliver the Objective of the Climate Convention: to "to achieve ... stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system ... within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner."

efficient - using auction, open markets, targetted expenditures and appropriate regulation, while minimising accounting and compliance overheads, to provide 'the gain without the pain'.

equitable - addressing the needs of poor people and poor countries, and mitigating the impacts of climate change for the benefit of both present and future generations.

See full website at http://www.kyoto2.org/

A New Way to Govern: Organisations and Society After Enron

2010-04-28T21:40:00.003+09:00

Shann Turnbull
International Institute for Self-Governance
New Economics Foundation Pocketbook 6, 2002

Abstract:
This pocketbook was commissioned to identify ways for avoiding the unexpected failure of large publicly traded enterprises and overcoming the shortcomings in government, and/or privatised organisations. It describes the fundamental problems of organisational hierarchies in either the public or private sectors to perform effectively and reliably with the ever-increasing complexity and dynamism in modern societies. Network organisations with multiple control centres or boards are identified as providing requisite variety of information and control channels to flexibly govern complexity. Provided self-governing network organisations are kept to human scale they reduce information overload and bounded rationality. The division of power into a number of centres introduces checks and balances to facilitate self-governance and allows individuals to act in a contrary way that are inhibited in command and control hierarchies. The ability of individuals to be competitive/cooperative, suspicious/trusting, self-interested/altruistic and so on introduces natures' check and balances to efficiently introduce self-regulation. Competition for excellence arises from contestability for control within organisations rather than between organisations through the market place to harness the self-interest of executives to further the public good. Networks of network organisations achieve economies of scale and scope, provided that no higher level network undertakes activities that are better carried out by a lower level self-governing unit.
This principle of subsidiary function is illustrated by the nested networks that make up the stakeholder control enterprises around the town of Mondragon in Northern Spain that operate more efficiently that investor owned firms. Like a mutual enterprise the Mondragon firms do not require equity investors.

All viable firms by definition become independent of investors but no firm can exist without employees, customers and suppliers who are described as strategic stakeholders. Tax incentives are proposed for shareholders to agree to change corporate constitutions so that all ownership rights are transferred to citizen stakeholders over a twenty-year period. This eliminates any overpayment of investors after 20 years to democratise the wealth of nations. Firms transferring ownership would sponsor new ownership transfer "offspring" firms to raise the new funds required to expand the size and scope of their operations by establishing network relationship with their offspring. This process would convert multi-national corporations into nested networks of firms owned and control by local citizens who supported their operations by being a strategic stakeholder. While investors are eliminated from the new UK proposals for the running railways and some water supply firms, their governance system is identified as being inconsistent with self-regulation.

The booklet was developed from a working paper with the abbreviated name of "A New Way to Govern" that can be downloaded from http://ssrn.com/abstract_id=310263. The working paper contains academic references, tables and figures not included in this edited version published in hard copy to promote a public policy debate.

Source article here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=319867

New ways to govern enterprises with stakeholder networks

2010-04-28T21:30:00.003+09:00

By Shann Turnbull
11 August 2003

A new approach to governing public or private-sector organisations is becoming urgent as society becomes more complex and dynamic. The command and control hierarchies governing both sectors are rapidly reaching their use-by date.

During the past few decades, efforts have been made to overcome the inefficiencies and unresponsiveness of public-sector bureaucracies. Corporatisation, privatisation and public-private partnerships are now producing mixed results and some failures. Both the public and private sectors are increasingly frustrating citizens with unresponsive telephone call centres. Serious problems have emerged in the private sector from the unexpected failure of major publicly traded corporations. These and other failures raise the fundamental question of whether private ownership and/or market forces can reliably sustain a business, let alone increase its efficiency and effectiveness.

The problem has been exacerbated by society getting too complex for a single CEO to manage large and/or complex organisation. In such situations it has also become impractical for company directors to monitor and direct activities with due diligence and vigilance as required by the law. Likewise, Ministers of State can no longer adequately monitor and be held accountable for the actions of government officials. This is exacerbating the alienation of citizens by big business and big government.

A new way to govern is required to enrich democracy while improving efficiency and effectiveness. These objectives can be achieved by following the techniques found in nature to reliably govern and sustain the complexity of living things with unreliable components.

Such "ecological" organisations would be responsive by being kept to human scale. This would also avoid information overload and the loss of feedback as to when mistakes are made or have unintended consequences. Networks of human-scale organisations would then be required to achieve economies of scale and scope. However, to minimise information overload by managers of the networks, each operating unit in the network would need to be as self-governing as possible. This would enrich democracy.

For organisations to become self-governing they require a division of power along the lines found in the US constitution. As a result each operating unit would itself become a network organisation. Besides providing checks and balances this also has the advantage of disaggregating decision-making labour and providing distributed intelligence. Just as importantly, multiple control centres would increase the variety of information channels to cross check accuracy while increasing the variety of control agents to better manage complexity. To be efficient, effective and responsive, no activity that is better managed at a lower level would be carried out at a higher level.

Network organisations introduce internal interdependence to provide a rational basis for developing trust, cooperation and greater operating efficiency. They also introduce internal competition for job satisfaction and other self-interests. Unlike command and control hierarchies, network organisations allow individuals to utilise their contrary nature to be competitive/cooperative, suspicious/trusting, self-interested/altruistic and so on. These are nature's ways of introducing the checks and balances required for efficiently sustaining the self-regulation of social creatures.

Network governance can allow the self-interest of executives to be harnessed to further the public good by introducing contestability for senior positions. Internal competition for control provides a much better informed, sensitive and efficient mechanism to improve the operations of a business than competition for control through the stock market. Network governance provides a compelling basis for replacing corporatisation, privatisation or public-private partnerships as a means for increasing economy, efficiency, and effectiveness of social enterprises.

An outstanding example of network firms organised into networks of groups, are the stakeholder-controlled enterprises located around the town of Mondragon in Northern Spain. A World Bank study found that these firms were more efficient than investor-owned firms. Like mutual enterprises the stakeholder firms do not require equity investors to bring them into existence or to make them efficient. Over 80 per cent of investor-owned firms typically fail in their first five years compared with less than 1 per cent of the Mondragon firms.

Network governance is found in the most complex and dynamic industries like fashion textiles, movie making, electronics and biotechnology. In such industries it is common for firms to both cooperate and compete with each other because of their respective specialisation of talent, knowledge or production techniques.

Network governance is also found in all sustainable non-trivial employee-owned firms. The John Lewis Partnership that operates chain stores in the UK illustrates both network governance and its competitive advantages. The partnership, like Mondragon, is a major business with more than 50,000 employees. It demonstrates how contestability for corporate control through the stock market is not required to produce efficiency and competitive advantages. Another example is VISA International Inc, which has a network of more than 1000 boards of directors within the one legal entity. Each board has absolute autonomy over a particular function or geographical area.

The absence of a public market for shares in these firms eliminates the ability for senior management to ramp up the share price by one means or another, cash-up their stock options and then depart. By not having shares publicly traded network firms grow organically rather than through acquisitions. Many acquisitions are driven by the ambition of a CEO for greater power, influence and remuneration that commonly results in the loss of shareholder value.

All viable firms by definition become independent of investors but no firm can exist without employees, customers and suppliers who are therefore strategic stakeholders. Only a relevantly small tax incentive is required to make it more attractive for shareholders to agree to transfer their ownership over 20 years to stakeholders. In this way any overpayment of investors after 20 years could be eliminated to democratise the wealth of nations.

Firms transferring ownership would sponsor new ownership, transfer "offspring" firms to raise the funds required to expand the size and scope of their operations through establishing network relationship with their offspring. This process would convert multi-national corporations into nested networks of firms owned and controlled by stake-holding citizens. Democracy would be regained with citizens countering the governance of firms by anonymous alien institutional investors while also participating in the governance of public-sector agencies.

Source article: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=608

Notes on a Reverse Entropy Utility System

2010-04-22T16:55:00.005+09:00

Reverse Entropy Utility System

Brennan Jorgensen: Dr. Burns, I have been on a novice quest to design for a solar-powered desalination system coupled to a chloralkali industrial process. I typed up a 40-page rough draft and have not yet completed a final draft. I need to revise the chloro-alkali process per my conversation with Greg Rau. The brine wastewater leftover from desalination is used as a nutrient-rich medium for Arthrospira cyanobacteria (a means for photosynthetic carbon assimilation). After desert brine wastewater lakes evaporate, the goal is to generate convective cloud formations in the low latitude subtopics. The remaining salt fields further deflect incoming solar radiation from the sun much similar to the albedo effect of polar ice caps.

Here is an abstract:

The Reverse Entropy Utility System or REUS is a technologically reliable and economically feasible model for the capture of C02 because it is simply a novel reconfiguration of proven technologies and economic models that have performed successfully for over a quarter of a century. Namely, these technologies are parabolic solar concentrators, multi-effect desalination chambers and chloro-alkali industrial systems in addition to well known agriculture and silvaculture methodologies. The REUS model can arguably be classified as an integrated coastal desert terraforming operation that greatly expands photosynthetic capital with commercially valuable desert agriculture, forestry and algae aquaculture.
The REUS model is also specifically designed to parallel the 50% projected global demand for energy, water and agricultural resources required by an estimated 8 billion people by the year 2030 while greatly lessening market level demands on existing carbon reserves such as tropical forests. On average, a 100-MW REUS model operating at 200,000 MWh/yr will sequester at least 50 million tonnes of C02 primarily through photosynthesis and carbonates after 10 years. This represents an economy of scale average operational efficiency of 40 KWh of solar electricity required to sequester 1 metric ton of C02. Besides C02 being assimilated by sodium hydroxide in order to produce carbonates, most of the photosynthetically assimilated C02 will be turned into commercially valuable products in order to make the system economically viable. The sum total of sequestering 50 million tonnes of C02 into commercially valuable products for a 100-MW REUS model after 10 years of operation would amount to the following biomass figures and 2009 market values; 196,875 tonnes of bamboo (U.s. value $4.9 million), 187,500 tonnes of sugarcane ($1.8 million), 66,823 tonnes of tropical hardwood and fruit tree biomass ($2.0 million) and 18,560,000 tonnes of Arthrospira dry weight algae ($1,856.0 million). Plus the system will generate 27,600,000 tonnes of brine salts after 10 years of operation with a total U.S. market value of $414 million dollars. The solar thermal albedo offset from the REUS models nearly 2-Km2 of parabolic mirrors and total of 50-km2 of intermittent white carbonate and salt flats will also offset the total atmospheric thermal heating effects of 8 million tonnes of C02 in the atmosphere during its ten years of operation. If after 10 years of operation, 27,600,000 tonnes of white brine salts are left in place covering a 50-km2 area at a 30-degree subtropical desert latitude, the yearly thermal albedo effect would be equivalent to removing at least 2.5 million tonnes of C02 from the atmosphere annually. With combined photosynthetic, carbonate and albedo effects, A 100-MW REUS system operating at 200,000 MWh/yr can offset the C02 emissions of twenty 500-MW fossil fuel power plants producing 300,000 tonnes of C02 a year.

On Apr 21, 8:59 am, "Dr. Wil Burns" wrote:

FYI. wil

> TITLE: Climatic changes: what if the global increase of CO(2) emissions cannot be kept under control?
> AUTHORS: L A Barreto de Castro
> AFFILIATION: Ministério de Ciência e Technologia, Brasília, DF, Brasil. lbarr...@mct.gov.br
> REFERENCE: Braz J Med Biol Res 2010 Mar 43(3):230-3
> Climatic changes threaten the planet.

Most articles related to the subject present estimates of the disasters expected to occur, but few have proposed ways to deal with the impending menaces. One such threat is the global warming caused by the continuous increase in CO2 emissions leading to rising ocean levels due to the increasing temperatures of the polar regions. This threat is assumed to eventually cause the death of hundreds of millions of people. We propose to desalinize ocean water as a means to reduce the rise of ocean levels and to use this water for populations that need good quality potable water, precisely in the poorest regions of the planet. Technology is available in many countries to provide desalinated water at a justifiable cost considering the lives threatened both in coastal and desertified areas.

Source: Geongineering Google Group

http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering/msg/907fb60ec1d4f4eb