Sustainable Community Development

Credit Unions attracted more than 40,000 new members and $80,000,000 in new savings
on Nov. 5, Bank Transfer Day.

Improving Livelihoods, Removing Barriers: Investing for Impact in Mtanga Farms , published by the Global Impact Investing Network details the activities and decisions of four impact investors as they invest in a Tanzanian farm.

In this video, New Dream profiles the People’s Grocery, a nonprofit in West Oakland that believes the best resources for solving community problems are found in the community itself.

Environment

“We don’t know how many people it takes to encircle the White House, but we’re about to find out,” Bill McKibben told a crowd of over 12,000 gathered to protest the Keystone Pipeline.

On November 8, Australia became the first major economy to put a tax on carbon.

Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions from burning fossil fuels have increased by 49% in the last two decades, and reached a record 10 billion tons in 2010.

New research has shown positive economic impact from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative [PDF] adopted by ten Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states.

Industrial agriculture advocates say organic farming cannot produce enough food for 7 billion people. Robin Broad and John Cavanagh describe how a group of rice farmers in the Philippines are proving them wrong.

Democracy and Corporate Accountability

On December 6th, the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to support a resolution calling on Congress to amend the Constitution to clearly establish that only living persons — not corporations — are endowed with constitutional rights and that money is not the same as free speech. The vote makes Los Angeles the first major city in the U.S. to call for an end to all corporate constitutional rights.

Capping a day of student rallies at UC Berkeley against state cuts to education, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich gave the annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture on the steps of Sproul Hall.

Katie Teague shares a video of David Korten talking about system change, power, and grassroots uprisings in Walking Away From the King.

In the new edition of “America Beyond Capitalism” Gar Alperovitz outlines a plan to create jobs, equity, environmental sustainability and an organized progressive base  by shifting ownership to large scale worker coops supported by municipal anchor institutions.,

Charles Eisenstein gives a mixed review to the movie “Thrive”, which portrays our economy as dominated by a few special interests, in his essay, “The Story is Wrong but the Spirit is Right.”

Macroeconomic Policy

Dr. Peter A Victor discusses No Growth Economics for the System Change! Not Climate Change Project.

Randall Munroe from xkcd.com has produced an ambitious info-graphic on money.

MoveOn shares a hilarious video of elders rapping about why we should Scrap the Cap on incomes subject to payroll taxes to save our social security system.

Richard Heinberg, in his Guardian article “Life After Economic Growth,” asks whether policy makers are pursing the wrong goal in their obsessive search for growth.

Allen White discusses the recently published “Principles of A New Economy” in an article for CSR newswire.

Supporters for the implementation of a Financial Transactions Tax (FTT) or Robin Hood Tax are welcoming the announcement that the Vatican has endorsed the proposal.

Social Justice

Watch this video of the many faces of Occupy Oakland from Drew Dellinger and Planetize the Movement.  “Our communities need us. We are all leaders. How could we ask for anything less than the future?”

Today the Congressional Progressive Caucus introduced the RESTORE the American Dream for the 99% Act –which includes many of the policy ideas endorsed by Van Jones and Rebuild the Dream.

From street protests to boycotts, Israelis are demanding a more equitable economy, writes Jeffrey Hollender in CSR wire.

National People’s Action and the New Bottom line explain how fixing the housing crisis can create one million jobs in their new Win/Win report.

On Dec. 6 members of the Miami Workers Center hit the streets of Liberty City as part of a National Day of Action to address the foreclosure crises.  Organizations around Miami joined MWC as we picketed in front of a local branch of Bank of America, one of the worst offenders against low-income and working class communities of color.