New Economy

How Rural Electric Cooperatives Can Support A Green New Deal

May 13, 2021 Wan R. Smith and Philip Fracica, Nonprofit Quarterly. Create! Cooperatives, Electricity, Green New Deal, New Economy

Today, as President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure bill is debated in Congress, it’s worth recalling that this isn’t the first time the US has faced an infrastructure deficit. “By the 1930s nearly 90 percent of US urban dwellers had electricity, but 90 percent of rural homes were without power. Investor-owned utilities often denied service to rural areas, citing high development costs and low profit margins,” recalls one account. The policy response: rural electric cooperatives (RECs). In 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 7037, establishing the Rural Electrification Administration—today’s Rural Utility Service (RUS)—which provided low-cost loans to co-ops to wire rural America; by 1953, 90 percent of rural Americans had power.

Platform Co-op Plans Revolution For Online Tutoring And Teaching

May 9, 2021 Anca Voinea, TheNews.coop. Create! Cooperative, Education, New Economy, Teachers

With schools across the world shutting due to Covid-19, e-learning has become an increasingly popular option around the world – but while this has increased platform revenues, teachers’ pay has stayed the same. “Last year, during lockdown, I decided to start something different,” says John Hayes, co-founder of MyCoolClass, an international teacher-owned platform co-op set for launch next month. He hails from California but has been living in Warsaw, Poland, for nearly six years while working as an ESL teacher, in language schools and online. After speaking with other freelance teachers and professionals affected by pay cuts, he decided the best solution would be to launch a co-operatively owned online learning platform.

How We Can Place The Wellbeing Economy At The Heart Of Our Cities

April 29, 2021 Nadine Maarhuis, Sustainable Urban Delta. Create! Food and Agriculture, Municipalization, New Economy, Urban Agriculture

Once upon a time, the growth of a country’s Gross Domestic Product would actually lead to social progress. In the first few decades after the Second World War, growth was invested in collective institutions like health and education systems. Tax rates were progressive and growth was directed to those who needed it most. Unfortunately, this so-called ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’ did not last very long. Within a few decades, we managed to shift to an economic system dictated by market fundamentalism. “We have been undermining our collective institutions, tax rates have been cut down for the very wealthiest and scientists are getting louder with their warnings about environmental breakdown”, author, researcher and advocate for a Wellbeing Economy Katherine Trebeck explains.

For Small Farms Surviving The Pandemic, Co-ops Are A Lifeline

April 28, 2021 Lisa Held, Civil Eats. Create! Cooperatives, Farming, New Economy, Pandemic

Ian Colburn, Zoey Fink, and Casey Holland all operate small, diversified farms in the Albuquerque, New Mexico area. The farmers already had plants in the ground in March when they realized restaurants and farmers’ markets—two of their biggest sales channels—would likely shut down due to the pandemic. Colburn of Solarpunk Farm worried his acreage was too small to support a robust Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and that he hadn’t planned for the kind of crop diversity that model demanded. Fink works part-time at Farm Shark Farm with her husband. They already had a CSA but didn’t think they could increase membership enough on their own to sell the rest of the vegetables. “It was a scary time,” she said. “We thought: if we work together, we can be scaling up and serving 100 families per week.”

Informal Workers Have The Tools To Build Better Cities Post-Crisis

April 6, 2021 Jenna Harvey, Next City. Create! New Economy, New York City (NYC), Recession, Street Vendors

On November 2020, New York City street vendors from the Street Vendor Project marched over the iconic Brooklyn Bridge in force – food carts, multilingual signs and musical instruments in hand – to call city hall to action. Eight months had passed since the COVID-19 pandemic devastated their livelihoods, and they had received no relief. While the city took multiple measures to provide a lifeline to storefront businesses, vendors received no dedicated small business support. Instead, many continued to receive summonses and fines from a punitive enforcement regime. Struggling vendors were left to make ends meet supporting each other through mutual aid. Their patience was gone, and their proposal was simple: the city should decriminalize vending, lift the arbitrary, 38-year-old cap on...

Money Is Made Up

March 21, 2021 Caitlin Johnstone. Create! Capitalism, Money, New Economy

Have you ever noticed how online capitalism cultists who condescendingly tell socialists they "just don't understand economics" are always unable to lucidly defend their own understanding of economics? If you've never pressed such a character to clearly and concisely explain what it is you "don't understand" using their own words, I highly recommend that you try it, because it's one of the funniest things in the world. If you keep interrogating them about each aspect of their belief system, demanding that they explain exactly what it is they know and how they know it, they will invariably end up getting frustrated and telling you to listen to this or that economist if they don't rage quit on you altogether first.

How To Unlearn Capitalism Through Cooperative Ownership

February 27, 2021 Willa Köerner, Pioneer Works. Create! Cooperatives, Internet, New Economy, Platform Coops

In the context of user-generated content platforms, the coop model is just such a natural fit. One of the principle questions that made a cooperative model feel relevant is this idea of, “Who's generating value, and who's capturing it?” Under capitalism, it’s people with ownership who end up capturing most of the value. So at a base level, sharing ownership with a company’s users and creators can align incentives. And that can dramatically affect the decisions that a platform makes, and steer it in a way that is to the benefit of the people who actually use it and rely on it. What's Spotify valued at, a billion or more? And they’re completely dependent on musicians to make their platform’s content. Lately though, there has been more awareness that this model is not serving its creators. So where coops pop up naturally is when people are like, "I'm not being served."

The Case For The Financial Transaction Tax

February 19, 2021 Lenore Palladino, The Appeal. Create! Financial Transaction Tax, New Economy, Stock Market, Wall Street

For most Americans, what threatens health also threatens wealth. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered the worst economic crisis in nearly a century, with millions suddenly facing hunger, unemployment, or eviction. But Wall Street doesn’t represent most Americans. In the parallel universe of the financial industry, stock indices soared to historic peaks as Americans wished good riddance to the deadliest year in our history. Detached from the daily lives of most Americans, the stock market surge almost exclusively benefited the disproportionately wealthy, and the pandemic once again lived up to its distinction as “the great clarifier.” For years, Wall Street has been increasingly out of touch with the underlying economy of workers, jobs, and wages, and the fortunes reaped by hedge funds and billionaires have not helped the millions of Americans in dire need.

Baltimore Is Democratizing The Economy, One Pint At A Time

February 14, 2021 Oscar Perry Abello, Next City. Create! Baltimore, Cooperative, New Economy, Worker Ownership

On your first day working at Taharka Brothers, a majority-Black-owned ice cream maker in Baltimore, you can join the flavor committee and help create flavors like the limited holiday edition Sweet Potato Crumble. Or you can join the social justice committee and vet local organizations to support through ice cream sales, like the Baltimore Action Legal Team. If none of those are to your liking, there are other committees you can join. If you work there for at least 15 months and earn top marks on your most recent performance review, you can become a part-owner of Taharka Brothers, and have not just a say but also a final vote on major business decisions and policies like those performance reviews.

Report: America’s Monopolized Energy Sector And How We Can Fix It

January 14, 2021 Virgil McDill, Institute for Local Self Reliance. Create! Democratize, Energy, Monopoly, New Economy

A new report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliances shows that America’s monopoly problem is bigger than you might think. While last year’s Big Tech hearings and House antitrust report spotlighted monopoly abuses at Amazon, Google, and other tech giants, the report from ILSR makes clear that America’s monopoly problem has spread into many other sectors of the economy — including the electricity sector. The report is the latest in a series from ILSR focused on fighting monopoly power throughout several sectors of our economy, including Banking, Broadband, Food and Farming, Pharmacy, Waste and Recycling, and Small Business.

The Art Of The Legal Hack

December 31, 2020 David Bollier. Create! Cooperatives, Legal System, New Economy

In our legal system -- designed to protect private property, individual rights, and market exchange – it can actually be very difficult to share things legally. Attorney Janelle Orsi found this out the hard way as she worked with co-housing groups, worker cooperatives, and community gardens. “Our clients kept running up against legal barriers that make no sense: employment laws for co-ops in which people are both employer and employee. Landlord-tenant law for cohousing projects in which people are both landlords and tenants.” Such frustrations led Orsi to co-found (with Jenny Kassan) the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) in Oakland, California, in late 2009.

Canada’s Housing Co-ops Find Success Despite Covid-19 Challenges

November 26, 2020 Anca Voinea, News Coop. Create! Canada, Cooperatives, Housing, New Economy

Housing co-ops in Canada remain positive about the future, despite the challenges posed by Covid-19 this year. A recent survey conducted by the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada (CHF Canada) during a virtual town hall held last month revealed that 96% of co-op managers and staff were ‘doing well’. Most housing co-ops in Canada are rental co-ops developed during the 1970s and 80s under government social housing programmes targeting people with low to moderate incomes. Across Canada, over 2,200 non-profit housing co‑ops are home to about a quarter of a million people in over 90,000 households.

Blockchains: Building Blocks Of A Post-Capitalist Future?

November 9, 2020 Hannes Gerhardt, ROAR Magazine. Create! Alternative Currency, Blockchain, Capitalism, New Economy

On a small boat off the coast of Thailand fishermen take stock of their haul for the day. They whip out a phone, open an app and record essential information regarding the amount of fish caught, the location, the time and under what conditions. This is uploaded to a database with similar information from other fishermen; the fish itself is packaged with a tag linked to all the sourcing information. The fishermen are credited with a cryptocurrency called Fishcoin, which they can redeem for costly data from their local phone service provider.

An Indigenous Māori View Of Doughnut Economics

October 14, 2020 Juhi Shareef, Resilience.org. Create! Indigenous culture, Maori, New Economy, Sustainability

Working in sustainability, one understands that context is key. When we fail to identify or understand the nuanced, complex, systemic and local context of a situation, the best-intentioned solutions simply won’t solve society’s most pressing problems. The first economic model I came across which offered an effective, modern context for our planet was the doughnut, developed by acclaimed economist and author, Kate Raworth. To inform the local context for sustainability, I felt New Zealand needed a doughnut of its own. I have been to too many meetings held to discuss issues affecting minority groups (Māori, Pasifika, women, children) without them at the table.

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