Local Economy

Things Got A Whole Lot More Local Than I Expected Due To Coronavirus

March 31, 2020 Neal Gorenflo, Shareable.net Create! Coronavirus, COVID-19, Local Economy

On March 12, I shared five #LocalYear commitments to help me go more local. Little did I know how local things would get in just one week. The next day local schools closed due to the coronavirus. Three days later six San Francisco Bay Area counties, including ours, issued a “shelter in place” order affecting seven million people in California’s coronavirus hotspot. Three days after that, Gov. Gavin Newsom did the same for all of California. Ordinary life in California has come to a near standstill. Birdsong has replaced the howl of traffic in my neighborhood. Downtown Mountain View is a near ghost town. Many shops and restaurants are closed, some for good. Aside from daily walks, my family is staying at ground zero of local — our house.

Coronavirus, Economic Networks, And Social Fabric

March 15, 2020 Richard Heinberg, Resilience.org. Create! Coronavirus, COVID-19, Local Economy, New Economy, Recession

The COVID-19 pandemic offers intriguing insights into how networked our modern world has become, and how we’ve traded resilience for economic efficiency. Case in point: someone gets sick in China in December of 2019, and by March of 2020 the US shale oil industry is teetering on the brink. What set off this unraveling? It was China’s deliberate—and arguably necessary—pull-back from economic connectivity. This tells us something useful about networked systems: unless there is a lot of redundancy built into them, any one node in the network can affect others. If it’s an important node (China has become the center of world manufacturing), it can disrupt the entire system. What would redundancy actually mean?

Resisting War Through Education And Local Cooperatives

July 1, 2018 Kathy Kelly, Intrepid Report. Create! Afghanistan, Cooperatives, Local Economy, Peace

War profiteers deliver hellish realities and futile prospects, but the Afghan Peace Volunteers have not given up on bettering their country. In recent visits to Kabul, we’ve listened as they consider the longer-term question of how peace can come to an economically devastated country where employment by various warlords, including the U.S. and Afghan militaries, is many families’ only way to put bread on the table. Hakim, who mentors the APVs, assures us that a lasting peace must involve the creation of jobs and incomes with a hope of sustaining community.

From Local Pants To Local Energy: The Case For Localizing Our Economies

February 9, 2017 Erica Etelson, www.truth-out.org Create! Local Economy

By Erica Etelson for Truthout - During a panel discussion this May on Community Choice Energy, a rapidly growing initiative in California and six other states that enables communities to seize control of local electricity services, I argued for the economic benefits of building out local, decentralized renewable energy assets such as rooftop and community solar arrays. I was followed by a panelist who chided my “misguided” belief in the virtue of locally-generated, clean energy. “Who cares whether our electricity is locally generated?” he quipped. “I’ve never heard of anyone demanding local pants, and local electricity doesn’t make any more sense than local pants.”

Become #Ungovernable

January 8, 2017 Staff, www.ungovernable2017.com Organize! Inauguration, Local Economy, Trump, Trumpism

By Ungovernable. We pledge to create a resistance movement that makes Trump unable to govern our oppression; unable to deceive the people, to make the people accept his reign of hatred. We refuse to give hatred a chance to govern, a chance to roll back civil and human rights, a chance to deport millions of people, a chance to create camps and registries for Muslims, a chance to expand the prison industrial complex, a chance to expand its drone wars, or a chance to turn back the gains won by our struggles. We pledge resistance to this renewed attack on our communities. As we resist, we will create new governing institutions, new economic relationships, and new ways of being human. What we will not do is sanction and/or normalize “overt” white supremacy. Let’s start now. Let’s make the so-called inauguration day a day to resist a day to be ungovernable and plan for a new future and new way.

Small Town Refused Walmart When Last Grocery Store Closed

January 8, 2017 Melissa Hellman, www.yesmagazine.org Create! Food and Agriculture, Food desert, Local Economy, Walmart

By Melissa Hellman for Yes! Magazine. For two months in 2012, longtime Iola, Kansas, resident Mary Ross trudged through the sweltering heat, waving gnats from her view as she walked door to door with a petition. It was the hottest summer since moving there with her family about 30 years ago, but Ross was determined to gather signatures requesting a grocery store be established in the small rural town of fewer than 6,000 people. Iola had lost its last independent grocery store four years earlier, shortly after the Wal-mart Supercenter—with its own expansive aisles—came to town and drove out all of the competition. “I live in a small town. That was my choice,” she says. But since Iola’s three smaller grocery stores went out of business, she has to drive 8 to 20 miles to find healthy food choices and the specific ingredients for her home-cooked meals.

Municipal Leaders Share Visions For Cities Building Community Wealth

February 18, 2016 John Duda, www.community-wealth.org Create! Cooperatives, Local Economy

By John Duda for Comunity Wealth - How can cities redeploy their economic development resources to focus on building a more inclusive economy grounded in broad, local ownership? How can policymakers get strategies like worker cooperative development the support and resources needed to reach truly meaningful scale? How can collaborations between communities, local government, and key institutional stakeholders build pathways to economic equity for the people left behind by the traditional trickle-down economic playbook?

Branding Tradition: A Bittersweet Tale Of Capitalism At Work

February 10, 2016 Steven Gorelick, www.localfutures.org Organize! Creative Economy, Local Economy, Vermont

By Steven Gorelick for Local Futures - Expensive labor-saving technologies not only make it difficult for small producers to survive, they also reduce the number of jobs available among those that remain. It’s true that 24 jobs have been created in Island Pond by the Sweet Tree operation; but 100,000 taps divided among numerous small-scale operations would provide livelihoods for 5 to 10 times as many people. The local economic benefits would also be far greater: the profits from Sweet Tree’s operation will be siphoned into investment portfolios in Connecticut, while the profits from those smaller producers would circulate locally.

Newsletter: Looking Back And Ahead

December 27, 2015 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.popularresistance.org Newsletter Black Lives Matter (BLM), Climate Change, Elections, Local Economy, New Economy, Podemos, Racism, TPP, Venezuela

By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese for Popular Resistance. As we look back over 2015, we see progress and, as we look forward to 2016, we see continued challenges ahead. Overall, the strategic path of resisting harmful policies and practices and building alternative systems to replace the current dysfunctional ones, known as 'stop the machine, create a new world,' is being taken by a growing number of people. The movement continues to grow on multiple fronts and is unifying around issues, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that impact us all. We are on our way to the 3.5% of activated people necessary to defeat the plutocracy, but there is still much to do. And we must be prepared to face even more difficult times before we break through the current paradigm and transform our economic, social and political systems.

Join The Buycott For Trade Justice

December 8, 2015 Staff, www.flushthetpp.org Create! Fair Trade, Local Economy, TISA, TPP, Trade, TTIP

By Flush the TPP. If they become law, international treaties like the TransPacific Partnership (TPP), TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade-in-Services Agreement (TISA) will fundamentally alter the global economy and global governance in a way that further empowers transnational corporations while decreasing the power of nation-states and people. These treaties will create a permanent path that makes corporate profit more important than the needs of people and protection of the planet. They will drive a global race to the bottom in wages and worker rights, food safety, internet freedom, access to health care, protection of the environment and more. It is up to us to organize and build power to stop the race to the bottom in its tracks! The Buycott is a tactic that people all over the world can use. It is not only a form of resistance, of non-cooperation, but it is also a way to create the necessary alternative – trade that lifts communities up and protects the planet as a first priority.

Find Banks That Invest In The Local Economy

October 24, 2015 Olivia LaVecchia, www.ilsr.org Create! Banks, Local Economy

By Olivia LaVecchia for ILSR - The reasons to choose a community bank or credit union range from getting the same services at a lower cost to supporting productive investment instead of speculative trading. But while it’s one thing to think about the qualities that are important in our banks, it’s another to find particular local banks that are enacting them. A new tool, called Bank Local, aims to make that process easier. Bank Local maps every banking institution in the U.S., and uses data from three federal agencies, plus its own algorithm, to assign them a Local Impact Rating.

Wine ‘Goliath’ Bullies ‘David’ Egg Seller

August 9, 2015 Shepherd Bliss, www.popularresistance.org Educate! Big Ag, Environment, Food and Agriculture, Local Economy, Sustainability

By Shepherd Bliss. Sonoma County, CA - It’s a classic Goliath vs. David story, with Sonoma County’s powerful wine industry as Goliath. Their high-paid lobbyists and marketers re-branded this region from our cherished, natural “Redwood Empire” to their commercial “Wine Country.” Goliath hoards more than its fair share of water, agricultural land, and road space. These wine barons run a Wine Empire that colonizes food farms and usurps natural resources. Wise Acre is a local David. Most wineries here are owned by large corporate investors from Wall Street and outside the US. “The Myth of the Family Winery: Global Corporations Behind California Wine,” published by the Marin Institute, documents this. A few alcohol companies own most of the wine production here.

Municipal Broadband & The Fight For Local Internet

February 11, 2015 Jeff Milchen, www.commondreams.org Create! FCC, Internet, Local Economy, Net Neutrality

A large and growing portion of small businesses rely on a high-quality Internet connection for essential operations, but lack of competition and choice among broadband providers has forced many businesses -- and most Americans -- to choose between inferior service or exorbitant prices. Federal Communications Chair Tom Wheeler says the vast majority of the country has only a company providing Internet access above 25 Mbps, what he called “table stakes” for today’s economy. Often responding to local business concerns, many local governments have been investing in fiber optic networks or partnering with independent firms to create real choice among Internet providers.

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