THE BEER BEAT: Dollars and cents remain the most rational arguments against AB InBev.

Consider it equal time.

The author makes excellent points about the nadir of debate and dialectic, and the tribalism, and the chest-thumping.

Still, my fundamental stance v.v. AB InBev and other manifestations of Monstrous Chainthink remains unchanged, and for reasons that aren't at all emotional.

Rather, it's factual. Lots and lots of people with no connection whatever to beer or brewing already have done their homework as it pertains to what independent local business means; where the money goes, and where it stays. Two of them are here:

American Independent Business Alliance

Business Alliance for Local Living Economies

My rule of thumb: To know these principles is to be able to walk the walk when making beer choices.

Yes, it's a matter of shift, and no one's playing to be perfect, because when it comes to philosophical concepts, perfection simply doesn't exist.

There'll always be exceptions, but life is about the everyday. In the main, as a consumer, I'd like to know exactly where my money is going. Whenever possible, I'd like to see my money directed to indies.

It's as simple as that. If I couldn't get good beer without my money going to multinationals, then I'd either submit or stop drinking. However, this isn't the case.

Yet.

Dialectic Lost – We Can’t Talk about Beer Rationally Anymore, by Oliver Gray (Literature & Libation)

... There’s no dialectic where people are trying look at big beer’s practices objectively or taking a real critical eye to the BA, to figure out whos and whys and hows. There’s certainly never any talk of collaboration, because obviously, you never work with an enemy. There’s hardly even any exploration in why a thing deemed so bad is actually bad; I only need two fingers (one and two) to count the number of well written articles directly about AB-InBevs strategy. The rest of the bad will stems for theoreticals and hard headedism.

Economic localism: "The $80 Billion Shift We Need Now for Economic Democracy."

We talked about these issues throughout the mayoral campaign.

All too often, community tax dollars benefit the few at the great expense of the many. Our economic development decisions are maintaining a system of inequality.

In a "new economy" how would economic development create real community prosperity?

The executive director of BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) provides an overview with selected curatives.

Doing Better: The $80 Billion Shift We Need Now for Economic Democracy, by Michelle Long (via Huffington Post)

Local independent business owners simply must cease performing the ritualistic Kool-Aid communion with municipal officials who are unable (read: unwilling) to understand these points.

You're simply not being helped by their glib assurances.

You're being hurt.

Here are five ways to kick start the necessary shift, but please, click through and read the entire article.

---

Shifting up to $80 billion (the money spent annually on economic development incentives) presents a massive, ready-made opportunity. Doing better would mean new eligibility rules for community economic development incentives. A community's dollars should be used to support its own people, with particular focus on the areas with the greatest need. If we want the majority of people to receive the maximum return on their community's investment then small businesses must be strengthened at every turn. Minority and women ownership should be prioritized to level the playing field. Bigger businesses should be supported in their efforts to transition to employee ownership.

Here are five ways to start the shift tomorrow:

1. Use incentive dollars to instead back local business hubs and networks that are focused on place, health and equity. These systems of support for locally owned businesses nurture local supply chains, enable peers to support each other, and foster the kind of collaboration necessary to make local food distribution viable or renewable energy locally affordable.

2. Re-direct corporate subsidies to organizations that provide technical assistance to micro enterprises. Groups like Rising Tide Capital are adept at strengthening these businesses to create jobs, and they generate nearly $4 in economic impact for every $1 invested. The Association for Enterprise Opportunity has shown that if just one in three microenterprises was strengthened to hire a single employee, the US would be at full employment.

3. Invest in shared infrastructure for local "economies of scale." For example, a foundation in Maine invested in a local grain mill, providing needed processing that made the resurgence of regional grain farmers viable.

4. Purchase land for the community. Agricultural and community land trusts preserve affordability for residents, farmers, and local business owners in contrast to speculative gentrification. Use land banks to bring vacant and blighted lots under the control of a public authority to redevelop the land for productive uses.

5. Support the creation of worker owned businesses, and support larger businesses, particularly those going through founder transitions, to become employee owned through ESOPs. Businesses from Dansko to Eileen Fisher to New Belgium Brewery have traveled this path in recent years. Said New Belgium CEO Kim Jordan, "One of the things that we think is a big societal issue is this widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. And we realized that we had an opportunity to support people owning something that was increasing in value. Shared equity has been an incredibly powerful engine for us."

BALLE: Ruminations on themes of "local" and "sustainable."

The stock of human knowledge advances from a willingness to continue thinking about "it", whatever "it" happens to be. This willingness to continue thinking must come with an eye on the terrain existing outside the box, because self-imposed limitations don't constitute thinking. Rather, they constitute reactions, like when your cat bats at the yarn.

Wait -- I didn't intend to write about economic development non-strategies in New Albany. Instead, read this piece and ponder ideas. It may not seem like it, but ideas really do matter.

Featured Fellow Series: An Interview with Amy Robinson (bealocalist.org)

BALLE Fellow Amy Robinson shares new definitions of “local” and “sustainable,” the entrepreneurial spirit that distinguishes Vancouver, BC from the rest of Canada, and the four areas of work that have her most energized.

... I’m pretty done with the word “sustainability.” Sustainability is so often equated with green initiatives, and what inspires me is the people behind a business. The social and economic aspects – and the aspirations of sustainability – get lost in our current understanding of it. Right now it’s all about managing risk and doing less bad rather than creating more of what we want to see in the world ...

... We’ve thought our main challenge was to educate consumers about why to buy local, but we realized we’re also teaching businesses how they are local ...

REWIND: Will work for something real.

For Labor Day weekend consideration, here's a look back at a thoughtful piece about economic development from YES! Magazine's David Korten, reprinted in its entirety under a Creative Commons license. It originally was posted by Bluegill on Sept. 6, 2010, and you may find it useful to turn to the comments section there, where a spirited discussion ensued. 

10 Common Sense Principles for a New Economy
It’s time we the people declare our independence from the money-favoring Wall Street economy.

by David Korten

I find hope in the fact that millions of people the world over are seeing through the moral and practical fallacies underlying the Wall Street economy and-—by contributing to the creation of a New Economy--are taking charge of their economic lives.

Here are ten common sense principles to frame the New Economy that we the people must now bring forth:

1. The proper purpose of an economy is to secure just, sustainable, and joyful livelihoods for all. This may come as something of a shock to Wall Street financiers who profit from financial bubbles, securities fraud, low wages, unemployment, foreign sweatshops, tax evasion, public subsidies, and monopoly pricing.

2. GDP is a measure of the economic cost of producing a given level of human well-being and happiness. In the economy, as in any well-run business, the goal should be to minimize cost, not maximize it.

3. A rational reallocation of real resources can reduce the human burden on the Earth’s biosphere and simultaneously improve the health and happiness of all. The Wall Street economy wastes enormous resources on things that actually reduce the quality of our lives— war, automobile dependence, suburban sprawl, energy-inefficient buildings, financial speculation, advertising, incarceration for minor, victimless crimes. The most important step toward bringing ourselves into balance with the biosphere is to eliminate the things that are bad for our health and happiness.

4. Markets allocate efficiently only within a framework of appropriate rules to maintain competition, cost internalization, balanced trade, domestic investment, and equality. These are essential conditions for efficient market function. Without rules, a market economy quickly morphs into a system of corporate monopolies engaged in suppressing wages, exporting jobs, collecting public subsidies, poisoning air, land, and water, expropriating resources, corrupting democracy, and a host of other activities that represent an egregiously inefficient and unjust distribution of resources.

5. A proper money system roots the power to create and allocate money in people and communities in order to facilitate the creation of livelihoods and ecologically balanced community wealth. Money properly serves life, not the reverse. Wall Street uses money to consolidate its power to expropriate the real wealth of the rest of the society. Main Street uses money to connect underutilized resources with unmet needs. Public policy properly favors Main Street.

6. Money, which is easily created with a simple accounting entry, should never be the deciding constraint in making public resource allocation decisions. This is particularly obvious in the case of economic recessions or depressions, which occur when money fails to flow to where it is needed to put people to work producing essential goods and services. If money is the only lack, then make the accounting entry and get on with it.

7. Speculation, the inflation of financial bubbles, risk externalization, the extraction of usury, and the use of creative accounting to create money from nothing, unrelated to the creation of anything of real value, serve no valid social purpose. The Wall Street corporations that engage in these activities are not in the business of contributing to the creation of real community wealth. They are in the business of expropriating it, a polite term for theft. They should be regulated or taxed out of existence.

8. Greed is not a virtue; sharing is not a sin. If your primary business purpose is not to serve the community, you have no business being in business.

9. The only legitimate reason for government to issue a corporate charter extending special privileges favoring a particular enterprise is to serve a clearly defined public purpose. That purpose should be clearly stated in the corporate charter and be subject to periodic review.

10. Public policy properly favors local investors and businesses dedicated to creating community wealth over investors and businesses that come only to extract it. The former are most likely to be investors and businesses with strong roots in the communities in which they do business. We properly favor them.

------------------
David Korten is co-founder and board chair of YES! Magazine, co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, president of the People-Centered Development Forum, and a founding board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). His books include Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World.

REWIND: Will work for something real.

For Labor Day, a thoughtful piece about economic development from YES! Magazine's David Korten, reprinted in its entirety under a Creative Commons license.

10 Common Sense Principles for a New Economy
It’s time we the people declare our independence from the money-favoring Wall Street economy.

by David Korten

I find hope in the fact that millions of people the world over are seeing through the moral and practical fallacies underlying the Wall Street economy and-—by contributing to the creation of a New Economy--are taking charge of their economic lives.

Here are ten common sense principles to frame the New Economy that we the people must now bring forth:

1. The proper purpose of an economy is to secure just, sustainable, and joyful livelihoods for all. This may come as something of a shock to Wall Street financiers who profit from financial bubbles, securities fraud, low wages, unemployment, foreign sweatshops, tax evasion, public subsidies, and monopoly pricing.

2. GDP is a measure of the economic cost of producing a given level of human well-being and happiness. In the economy, as in any well-run business, the goal should be to minimize cost, not maximize it.

3. A rational reallocation of real resources can reduce the human burden on the Earth’s biosphere and simultaneously improve the health and happiness of all. The Wall Street economy wastes enormous resources on things that actually reduce the quality of our lives— war, automobile dependence, suburban sprawl, energy-inefficient buildings, financial speculation, advertising, incarceration for minor, victimless crimes. The most important step toward bringing ourselves into balance with the biosphere is to eliminate the things that are bad for our health and happiness.

4. Markets allocate efficiently only within a framework of appropriate rules to maintain competition, cost internalization, balanced trade, domestic investment, and equality. These are essential conditions for efficient market function. Without rules, a market economy quickly morphs into a system of corporate monopolies engaged in suppressing wages, exporting jobs, collecting public subsidies, poisoning air, land, and water, expropriating resources, corrupting democracy, and a host of other activities that represent an egregiously inefficient and unjust distribution of resources.

5. A proper money system roots the power to create and allocate money in people and communities in order to facilitate the creation of livelihoods and ecologically balanced community wealth. Money properly serves life, not the reverse. Wall Street uses money to consolidate its power to expropriate the real wealth of the rest of the society. Main Street uses money to connect underutilized resources with unmet needs. Public policy properly favors Main Street.

6. Money, which is easily created with a simple accounting entry, should never be the deciding constraint in making public resource allocation decisions. This is particularly obvious in the case of economic recessions or depressions, which occur when money fails to flow to where it is needed to put people to work producing essential goods and services. If money is the only lack, then make the accounting entry and get on with it.

7. Speculation, the inflation of financial bubbles, risk externalization, the extraction of usury, and the use of creative accounting to create money from nothing, unrelated to the creation of anything of real value, serve no valid social purpose. The Wall Street corporations that engage in these activities are not in the business of contributing to the creation of real community wealth. They are in the business of expropriating it, a polite term for theft. They should be regulated or taxed out of existence.

8. Greed is not a virtue; sharing is not a sin. If your primary business purpose is not to serve the community, you have no business being in business.

9. The only legitimate reason for government to issue a corporate charter extending special privileges favoring a particular enterprise is to serve a clearly defined public purpose. That purpose should be clearly stated in the corporate charter and be subject to periodic review.

10. Public policy properly favors local investors and businesses dedicated to creating community wealth over investors and businesses that come only to extract it. The former are most likely to be investors and businesses with strong roots in the communities in which they do business. We properly favor them.

------------------
David Korten is co-founder and board chair of YES! Magazine, co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, president of the People-Centered Development Forum, and a founding board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). His books include Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World.

(Originally posted by Bluegill on Sept. 6, 2010)

"7 Steps for Action Toward a New Economy," by David Korten.

Several others have pointed the way to this succinct and valuable article, as it appears at the web site of BALLE - Business Alliance for Local Living Economies.

Korten strikes to the very heart of perhaps the most vital issue faced by New Albany as city council elections approach:

Do we continue to out-source "economic development" to oligarchic entities like the GOP and One Southern Indiana, which persist in touting the "economic policies and institutions responsible for Old Economy failure," or do we bring these responsibilities and commitments back into our own houses, right here, by studying, future planning and building New Economy solutions?

Do we persist in groveling while proffering thousands to provide air conditioning at 1Si's behest for a multi-billion dollar foreign corporation, or do we begin using this money to empower our own people to work for economic solutions at home, in this community?

Do we continue to unthinkingly emulate the language of the oligarchs and ape their pieties, which naturally exist to "secure the privilege and extravagance of the few," or do we define our own terms and pursue principled solutions?

7 Steps for Action Toward a New Economy, by David Korten

Hope for our common human future depends instead on global cooperation to create a world in which every child can look forward to a prosperous, secure, and meaningful life irrespective of nationality, race, or religion. This will require replacing the economic policies and institutions responsible for Old Economy failure with the policies and institutions of a New Economy — one based on positive life-values and a democratic distribution of power.

Will work for something real.

For Labor Day, a thoughtful piece about economic development from YES! Magazine's David Korten, reprinted in its entirety under a Creative Commons license.

10 Common Sense Principles for a New Economy
It’s time we the people declare our independence from the money-favoring Wall Street economy.

by David Korten

I find hope in the fact that millions of people the world over are seeing through the moral and practical fallacies underlying the Wall Street economy and-—by contributing to the creation of a New Economy--are taking charge of their economic lives.

Here are ten common sense principles to frame the New Economy that we the people must now bring forth:

1. The proper purpose of an economy is to secure just, sustainable, and joyful livelihoods for all. This may come as something of a shock to Wall Street financiers who profit from financial bubbles, securities fraud, low wages, unemployment, foreign sweatshops, tax evasion, public subsidies, and monopoly pricing.

2. GDP is a measure of the economic cost of producing a given level of human well-being and happiness. In the economy, as in any well-run business, the goal should be to minimize cost, not maximize it.

3. A rational reallocation of real resources can reduce the human burden on the Earth’s biosphere and simultaneously improve the health and happiness of all. The Wall Street economy wastes enormous resources on things that actually reduce the quality of our lives— war, automobile dependence, suburban sprawl, energy-inefficient buildings, financial speculation, advertising, incarceration for minor, victimless crimes. The most important step toward bringing ourselves into balance with the biosphere is to eliminate the things that are bad for our health and happiness.

4. Markets allocate efficiently only within a framework of appropriate rules to maintain competition, cost internalization, balanced trade, domestic investment, and equality. These are essential conditions for efficient market function. Without rules, a market economy quickly morphs into a system of corporate monopolies engaged in suppressing wages, exporting jobs, collecting public subsidies, poisoning air, land, and water, expropriating resources, corrupting democracy, and a host of other activities that represent an egregiously inefficient and unjust distribution of resources.

5. A proper money system roots the power to create and allocate money in people and communities in order to facilitate the creation of livelihoods and ecologically balanced community wealth. Money properly serves life, not the reverse. Wall Street uses money to consolidate its power to expropriate the real wealth of the rest of the society. Main Street uses money to connect underutilized resources with unmet needs. Public policy properly favors Main Street.

6. Money, which is easily created with a simple accounting entry, should never be the deciding constraint in making public resource allocation decisions. This is particularly obvious in the case of economic recessions or depressions, which occur when money fails to flow to where it is needed to put people to work producing essential goods and services. If money is the only lack, then make the accounting entry and get on with it.

7. Speculation, the inflation of financial bubbles, risk externalization, the extraction of usury, and the use of creative accounting to create money from nothing, unrelated to the creation of anything of real value, serve no valid social purpose. The Wall Street corporations that engage in these activities are not in the business of contributing to the creation of real community wealth. They are in the business of expropriating it, a polite term for theft. They should be regulated or taxed out of existence.

8. Greed is not a virtue; sharing is not a sin. If your primary business purpose is not to serve the community, you have no business being in business.

9. The only legitimate reason for government to issue a corporate charter extending special privileges favoring a particular enterprise is to serve a clearly defined public purpose. That purpose should be clearly stated in the corporate charter and be subject to periodic review.

10. Public policy properly favors local investors and businesses dedicated to creating community wealth over investors and businesses that come only to extract it. The former are most likely to be investors and businesses with strong roots in the communities in which they do business. We properly favor them.

------------------
David Korten is co-founder and board chair of YES! Magazine, co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, president of the People-Centered Development Forum, and a founding board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). His books include Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World.

Independently speaking...

As the policy wing of our "local" chamber of commerce busies itself croaking dry mouthed praises of $6 Ohio River crossings to the accompaniment of a traveling Wall Street minstrel show, I'd suggest a different path altogether, pausing only occasionally along the way to piss in their general direction. With lips that chapped, the moisture would do them some good.

Besides, it's...



A statement from the American Independent Business Alliance:

As we honor national heritage and liberty, we also celebrate our nation's local independent businesses who have given so many citizens opportunity and underpinned and underwritten community life and prosperity. It's also a time to consider the independent decision-making ability each of us possesses to choose the future of the place we make our home.

And Frequently Asked Questions About Local First Campaigns from The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE):

(1) Aren't local goods and services more expensive?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The truth is we actually do not know. Careful studies of the comparative prices between local and non-local retailers are rare. But here are some intriguing data points.

*A recent survey of pharmacies in Maine, for example, found that chain drugstores there sold prescriptions at an average price 15 percent greater than local stores.

*According to Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, of the few studies available, a Consumer Reports study of bookstores found that Barnes & Noble and Borders prices are 4-8 percent lower than those at independent bookstores. Yet many of the best independent bookstores in the country now offer "frequent buyer programs" that completely erase these price differences for regular customers.

*Mitchell also notes that discount prices from chain stores are often temporary: An interesting aspect of the Maine survey was there were some dozen or so different Wal-Mart stores around the state included and prices for the list of drugs surveyed varied by 15 percent from the lowest-priced Wal-Mart pharmacy to the highest priced Wal-Mart. What was apparent was that Wal-Mart's prices are lowest in areas where it is fairly new on the scene, and highest in towns where it has largely eliminated the competition. What happens long-term to consumer prices as the number of competitors in the retail industry dwindles? Already two to three firms control a dominant share of every retail sector. Wal-Mart has 10 percent of all retail spending, more than 1/3 of the market nationally for numerous basic-needs products, and has a monopoly for some types of goods in many smaller communities. There's plenty of documentation that Wal-Mart routinely sells entire lines of goods below cost in order to squeeze the competition and gain market share. Then prices go up. It has done this in pharmacy goods, toys, gasoline, and now groceries.

A critical mission of Local First is to make sure consumers, businesses, and government purchasing agents ask the right question before spending dollars in a way that will hurt the economy: Is there a reasonably priced local alternative available?

(2) Isn't Local First protectionist?

Not at all. Local First is entirely about the free choices of consumers, businesses, and government purchasing agents. No one is being forced to buy local, and no tariffs or other burdens are being placed on non-local goods.

Some economists believe - incorrectly - that Local First must mean putting up trade barriers or inducing consumers to buy more expensive goods and services, which, as noted above, it doesn't. They also forget that economic models assume all consumers have perfect information. One way of looking at Local First campaigns is that they aim to give consumers better information - about the availability of attractive local goods and services, and about the significant benefits of buying local.

Paradoxically, Local First turns out to be the best way to develop prosperous links to the global economy. Export-led development usually means supporting a small number of globally competitive niches within a global economy. If one of these industries collapses - like automobiles in Detroit or steel in Youngstown - the entire local economy collapses as well, especially its export sectors. The work of Jane Jacobs and others has shown that import-replacing development, which underlies buy-local initiatives, tends to nurture hundreds of existing locally owned businesses, some of which will then become strong exporters. Development led by import replacement rather than export promotion diversifies, stabilizes, and strengthens the local economy.

(3) Does Local First seek to subsidize inefficient local business?

No. Free-market economists forget that the United States is a crazy quilt of thousands of market imperfections - subsidies, regulations, insurance liability limits, tax wrinkles - nearly all of which favor non-local business. Buy local campaigns are very modest efforts to adjust this tilt in the playing field. The tilt is so extreme - probably 99 percent of subsidies go to non-local firms - that we would have a very long way to go before it was undone.

(4) How sound is the methodology for the studies that show a better local multiplier for locally owned businesses?

Some critics have attempted to downplay the studies that have been done in Austin, Maine, and other places because of their small size and because they don't have complete data from the chain stores. To be sure, the methodology of these studies could always be improved, but the results are driven by a simple fact: Local businesses spend more locally - on local management, on local advertising, on local services, and on local profits. Because most economic multipliers are in the range of two to four times the initial expenditure, these differences in local business spending will always result in substantially greater benefits to the local economy.

(5) Aren't local businesses less regulated and therefore worse for the environment?

It's hard to generalize. Some communities have tougher environmental laws than the nation as a whole; some don't. Some types of pollution control devices work best at a large scale; others don't. There are four reasons, however, to believe that local businesses are generally better for the environment. First, many local businesses are service related, and these usually are labor intensive and have few environmental impacts. Second, a community is more likely to clean up a local polluter spoiling the local quality of life than to clean up a polluter located 10,000 miles away. Third, local business owners certainly have a higher commitment to clean water when their own children must drink it. Fourth, a community with primarily locally owned businesses - businesses that will not consider moving to Mexico or China - can raise environmental standards with greater confidence that these firms will adapt, which tips the political balance in favor of greater environmental responsibility.

(6) Don't local businesses pay worse wages?

Businesses with more than 500 employees pay about a third more on average than businesses with fewer than 500 employees. But these wage differences have been shrinking in recent years, as many high-paying larger firms move factories overseas and as low-wage retailers like Wal-Mart displace existing small businesses. Moreover, studies suggest that over time, as smaller businesses naturally mature and grow, these wage differentials largely disappear.

(7) Shouldn't we leave the market alone?

A healthy market requires, as Local First insists, that consumers fully gather information about available local alternatives before they make purchasing decisions, in full awareness that every dollar spent locally will have two to four times more benefit than a dollar spent non-locally.

(8) Are Local First campaigns legal?

Unquestionably. In a free-market economy, consumers and businesses may make any purchasing decisions they wish. And in a free-speech society, citizens may persuade one another why local purchases are advantageous. The only real legal questions concern government procurement policies that give preference to local bidders. The U.S. Supreme Court generally has held that the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which normally prevents officials from discriminating against goods on the basis of origin, does not apply when they are acting as market participants, which is the case for procurement officers. The World Trade Organization and other trade agreements, however, may weaken the ability of officials to discriminate against non-U.S. goods and services, though these provisions have yet to be fully defined or tested.

(9) Won't Local First hurt the poor in the Third World from whom we import?

If a large number of U.S. communities successfully move toward self-reliance, then yes, many imports from the global South - whether bananas, aluminum, or oil - would be reduced, to the detriment of the exporting poor countries. But a growing number of development economists are recognizing that the key to improving the plight of these countries is to end their export platform status and to help them become more self-reliant. Communities committed to helping the South might form partnerships like sister cities that facilitate the transfer of state-of-the-art technology and policy. An example is the city-state of Bremen in Germany, which for two decades has been helping its Third World partners become more self-reliant in energy by sharing technology that converts manure, garbage, and sewage into biogas.

(10) Is Local First a front for a radical agenda?

The vision of a world of sustainable communities does differ dramatically from a vision of globalization that tolerates enrichment of a few at the expense of hundreds of millions of workers and families and the destruction of the communities and ecosystems in which they live. But it's hard to imagine more traditional values than those underlying Local First - namely free markets, small business, fair play, and local empowerment.

Learning about economic localization.

A buy local video from the National Main Street Program:



And a suggested reading list from the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE):


THE SMALL-MART REVOLUTION: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition, by Michael H. Shuman

GOING LOCAL: Building Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age, by Michael H. Shuman

DEEP ECONOMY: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, by Bill McKibben

AGENDA FOR A NEW ECONOMY: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, by David C. Korten

THE GREAT TURNING: From Empire to Earth Community, by David C. Korten

FIELDS OF PLENTY: by Michael Abelman

ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver

PLENTY: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, by Alisa Smith, J.B. Mackinnon

THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan

SMALL GIANTS: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big, by Bo Burlingham

THE COMPANY WE KEEP: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community, and Place, by John Abrams

COMPANIES WE KEEP: Employee Ownership and the Business of Community and Place, by John Abrams

GROWING LOCAL VALUE: How to Build Business Partnerships That Strengthen Your Community, by Laury Hammel and Gun Denhart

BIG-BOX SWINDLE: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses, by Stacy Mitchell

AMERICA BEYOND CAPITALISM: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy, by Gar Alperovitz

BUILDING POWERFUL COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS: A Personal Guide to Creating Groups That Can Solve Problems and Change the World, by Michael Jacoby Brown

GREEN ALTERNATIVES TO GLOBALISATION: A Manifesto, by Michael Woodin and Caroline Lucas.