Where’s That New Economy? It’s already here!

Interested in cooperatives? Credit Unions? Land trusts? Local food systems? Time-Banks? Complementary currencies? Isn’t it time we try some new ways of doing business as usual?

This Saturday hundreds will be gathering to learn from each other on how to build and participate in the new bottom-up economy at the first Festival of Grassroots Economics. Here’s the deets:

Saturday, September 26 from 10am-4pm

Humanist Hall, 390 27th St, Oakland, CA

Free to the public

www.jasecon.org

Since many of you are interested in the localization movement, I wanted to share my pitch for covering it on Spot.us, a community-funded journalism project:

http://spot.us/pitches/273

It’ll run on Oakland Local, which is a new progressive community and news hub launching next week, but I want to develop stories building off of it for other outlets as well, focusing on specific sectors and issues.

I want to get the story of all this great work out to more people, so please consider forwarding this to anybody who might consider donating as little as $20 to get the story funded. It’s only $70 away from being fully funded, just a little bit to go!

Here is an itinerary of the day’s panels:

A Fun-Filled Fall

There’s no doubt about it: this fall is going to be an exciting one for the nation and the Bay Area.  Dare I say, it’ll be one for the history books.  In my magic clairvoyant mirror hanging just inside my imagination, I can just make out the writing in some future account of the Fall of 2009, “As the dog days of indian summer bore down upon a populace, things were astir in a nation conflicted with itself…”

Or something like that.

On the national scene we will be witness to–and participate in!–the heated political and economic battles over health care. Single-payer will be voted on the House floor this month for the first time. It won’t win, the White House says its off the table, and the media doesn’t seem to want to utter the phrase; but that doesn’t mean people aren’t going to keep putting it back on as part of the discussion. Witness the Mad As Hell Doctors, who are taking off from Portland, OR on a super-roadtrip across the country in an RV (joined by a ‘Care-a-van’) next week to take a message of universal health care for all to the White House and Congress. They will be stopping in 26 cities along the way and they will deliver their message and have a protest event on the Capitol steps on October 1. That’s the way to do it! And they even have a theme song!

But let us not be too consumed by the drama to forget some underlying crises that also need as much or more attention and struggle, such as corporate abuse, socialism for the wealthy, unsustainable economics, climate change, and militarism.  In the next couple months we’ll see