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What is the new economy? Just beneath the surface of media reporting a new economy is quietly emerging. It includes cooperatives, public banks, new clean energy strategies, successful campaigns to turn polluting utilities into ecologically sustainable municipal systems, along with an explosion of related developments at different levels of scale. Simultaneously—and even as national politics is in disarray—an expanding intellectual and political movement involving leading writers and activists has begun to suggest the larger systemic directions to which the building momentum points.

The session for this event took place October 5, 2017 in the Chase Center at Vermont Law School.

You can watch the session in its entirety below.

About the speaker

Gar Alperovitz

Gar Alperovitz, former Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, is Co-Chair of The Next System Project (with James Gustav Speth) and Co-Founder of The Democracy Collaborative, an organization devoted to developing community wealth-building approaches to local and national democratic reconstruction.

A former Fellow of King's College, Cambridge University, and a founding Fellow of the Institute of Politics at Harvard, he has served as a Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and as a Special Assistant working on United Nations matters in the Department of State. He was Chief Economic Adviser to a coalition of 135 Members of Congress led by Rep. Richard Ottinger. He has also served as President of the Center for Community Economic Development, and of the Center for the Study of Public Policy.

Resources

Books and Articles

Take Action

  • Send your legislator an effective letter. Handwritten genuinely gets more attention, but emails are counted. (In the “subject” note the bill or issue you are writing about, and early in the communication tell them your voting district and that you voted for them if you did.)
  • Support carbon emissions tax.
  • Churches have a lot of power—encourage them to support solving climate change.
  • Talk to youth—educate them about climate change and social justice, and support schools in developing effective curriculum.
  • Join a get-out-the-vote effort.
  • Visit resistancenearme.org, a hub designed to help find any U.S. public event, rally, town hall, protest and more near you.
  • Visit indivisible.us, a site about reclaiming government for America’s future. It discusses how the U.S. government works well when it is working for the American people—and, when it fails to do so, how we take action to correct it.
  • Resist extremism in America, one phone call at a time.