12 things white people can do now because Ferguson
As we all know by now, Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenage boy, was gunned down by the police while walking to his grandmother’s house in the middle of the afternoon.
Requests from Ferguson Organizers
The loud call coming out of Ferguson, Missouri has become a national rally to action. There is a growing energy around the country to engage and support the fight in Ferguson and to build it out nationally. Below are ways that people can support the local struggle on the ground and help build the nation-wide call to action.
Economic Harassment and the Ferguson Crisis
According to the group's recent report on the municipal court system in St. Louis County, the Ferguson court is a "chronic offender" in legal and economic harassment of its residents.
Co-op Bank reports loss of £75.8m
The troubled Co-operative Bank has reported a pre-tax loss of £75.8m for the first half of 2014, down from £845m a year ago.
It has also cut staff numbers by 13% in the first six months of the year.
The bank was rescued in 2013 after discovering a £1.5bn capital shortfall.
Poverty Is Not Inevitable: What We Can Do Now to Turn Things Around
While we’re working on mobilizing to take back our democracy, we can start from the bottom up to “democratize wealth,” as both Piketty and Alperovitz say we must. Alperovitz puts less faith in top-down institutions than does Smith (the subtitle of What Then Shall We Do? is Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution ).
A Few Weeds in Minnesota Decision to Allow Community Solar Gardens to Grow
Late last week, Minnesota regulators made a decision that may finally allow community solar projects to move forward (for Xcel Energy customers) in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
A Multi-Stakeholder Cooperatives Manual
Multi-stakeholder cooperatives (MSCs) are co-ops that formally allow for governance by representatives of two or more “stakeholder” groups within the same organization, including consumers, producers, workers, volunteers or general community supporters.
People United Interviews Jessica Gordon Nembhard
This episode of KOOP Radio's People United features political economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard talking with Carlos Pérez de Alejo of Cooperation Texas about her book Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. They spoke at 5604 Manor in Austin, Texas, on July 17, 2014.
Co-operators promote the greener side of the movement
An eclectic mix of co-operatives came together at The Green Gathering festival to promote co-operation as a basis for social change.
The Co-ops’ Camp at the festival saw 30 co-operators run workshops on issues including the ecological and economic resilience of co-operatives, permaculture, young people and the politics of common ownership.
Save Our Co-op – Vote for Reform
[Editor's note: Last Friday, GEO shared the Cooperative Business Group's petition to stop proposed changes to the UK Co-operative Group's governance structure. Ian Snaith provides the opposing view.]
Envisioning Where We Want to Go: An Interview With Evolutionary Reconstructionist Gar Alperovitz
Longtime activist, historian and political-economic theorist Gar Alperovitz, whose America Beyond Capitalism was serialized on Truthout, conducted an email interview with us on the occasion of the creation of his new website.
The Problem of Trust in the "Sharing" Economy
As a community grows, it attracts opportunists. In a small community, the benefit to an opportunist of mimicking a sign of trustworthiness is small, but as the community scales, the potential benefits for opportunists are larger, and the incentive to mimic trustworthiness is greater.
Co-op Conversion In Australia
Joe Caygill and Dave Kerin are the most unlikely of collaborators: one is a conservative-voting small businessman; the other, a Marx-quoting trade unionist. Caygill has been in the manufacturing industry for 30 years; he's the owner and CEO of Everlast, a hot water tank manufacturer based in Dandenong. But before long, he won't be the boss anymore – just a worker-owner like everybody else.