Time for a New Economy

[ProSense]

TIME FOR A NEW ECONOMY

A single dominant industry no longer carries the economy, and the time to think small has arrived.

Katrina vanden Heuvel

Earlier this month, as Republican House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa held a hearing on “job-killing” government regulations, and President Barack Obama ventured over to the anti-worker U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a different kind of meeting between Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and the American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC) went unreported.

The ASBC – a network representing 65,000 businesses and more than 150,000 entrepreneurs, owners, executives, investors and business professionals – was in town for the 2011 Green Jobs Conference. Solis scheduled a one-hour meeting with the ASBC to explore ideas benefiting workers, unemployed people and the business community – it ran nearly two hours.

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Brian Golden, president of Litecontrol, an employee-owned and unionized manufacturer of high efficiency lighting products, describes how the company has been able to grow at a steady clip and now has 200 employee-owners. And Vince Sicliano, President and CEO of New Resource Bank in San Francisco, describes the commercial bank’s “mission-based” approach of achieving environmental and social as well as financial returns by investing in companies that share these values. He speaks of consumers’ growing interest in “knowing where their money sleeps.”

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Other key ideas explored with Solis included public-private partnerships that support locally-rooted start-ups that offer a higher financial return for communities; procurement and lending policies that promote businesses pursuing a triple bottom line; and cooperative research, development and training programs to create healthier, cleaner and more profitable products.

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[ProSense]

1. No comment? n/t

[Jackpine Radical]

2. I hope we get really serious about this.

It is the way to a sustainable future.