From werenotbrokemovie.com

Despite a number of technological hurdles, I left feeling inspired. I came away bolstered by the great efforts being made across the country to ensure that how we invest our money works for us and not against us.

If you missed us online or are looking for ways to plug into bank accountability efforts and want to move your money, there are tons of great resources available online.

To get started:

Take a look at The New Bottom Line and their fabulous Move Our Money USA site.

Also, Green America has a great site that’s filled with resourced dedicated to breaking up with your mega bank which you can find here.

For those of you looking to change the way your place of worship invests their money, take a look at PICO’s “Our Money, Our Values” campaign.

And for the college campus folks, check out the Responsible Endowments Coalition.

]]> http://www.storyofstuff.org/2012/04/05/move-your-money-resources/feed/ 0 http://www.storyofstuff.org/2011/11/17/monica-wilson-more-jobs-less-pollution/ http://www.storyofstuff.org/2011/11/17/monica-wilson-more-jobs-less-pollution/#comments Thu, 17 Nov 2011 11:00:20 +0000 Allison Cook http://www.storyofstuff.org/?p=3313 Post written by Monica Wilson at GAIA, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. GAIA is a worldwide alliance of more than 650 grassroots groups, non-governmental organizations, and individuals in over 90 countries whose ultimate vision is a just, toxic-free world without incineration.

The U.S. could create 1.5 million jobs through recycling. Right now, public funds for expensive, dirty “waste-to-energy” incinerators hold back job growth – and Congress is about to make it worse.

The U.S. could add nearly 1.5 million jobs if it adopted a 75% national recycling rate. Wow, that’s a lot of jobs! Instead of propping up the dinosaur economy highlighted in The Story of Broke, we can be investing in more jobs and a healthier future by keeping the stuff we use in our economy, instead of dumping or burning it.

These are the findings of the exciting new report More Jobs, Less Pollution, prepared for GAIA, the Teamsters, Blue Green Alliance, NRDC, and SEIU. One and a half million jobs in collections, sorting, reuse, and most of all, manufacturing. Jobs that should be good and safe, with family-supporting wages.  The potential for recycling to create jobs has captured a lot of attention across the country since this report was released on National Recycling Day. Check out these great links here, here,  and here.

Handling waste the wrong way destroys livelihoods and ruins local economies. Cities like Harrisburg, PA are going broke because incinerators are risky investments. Not only are they the most expensive way to make energy, incinerators are also the most expensive way to handle waste. Another new GAIA report Burning Public Money for Dirty Energy exposes the tax breaks and public money provided to the incinerator industry. These subsidies are intended for clean, renewable energy, not technologies that create more climate and mercury pollution than coal-fired power plants. New York State groups are mounting strong opposition to clean energy subsidies for incinerators.

Let’s not forget that “waste-to-energy” incinerators waste valuable resources instead of keeping them in the economy and burn the evidence of overconsumption.

And now Congress is poised to make a bad situation worse by gutting part of the Clean Air Act for some incinerators and cement kilns (HR 2250, HR 2681). Earthjustice estimates the resulting pollution would cause up to 9,000 deaths every year.  Congress is also considering a bill (HR 66) to create new tax exemptions for “waste-to-energy” incinerators. So please, join us in telling our elected officials NO to bills for dirty energy, and YES to Zero Waste. Take action HERE!

Recycling and composting are necessary steps in the path to Zero Waste – and we can do much better than subsidizing polluters and pretending we’re too broke to invest in a healthier future.

Post written by Rosa González from Green For All 

Every year, enough untreated sewage escapes into our waterways to completely cover the state of Pennsylvania in sludge an inch thick. Yuck.

Here are just a couple of the reasons why:

Over the last decade, we’ve seen our country’s democracy and economy crumble before our very eyes. But in the midst of this still unfolding disaster, we’ve also seen a surge in public interest in making change in a way that many of us have never seen before. We want to help harness that energy to build a better future for all of us. And the fact is, we feel best equipped to do that here at home.

We also recognize that our country’s export of toxic waste, toxic products, toxic consumer-focused culture, and climate changing carbon disproportionately impact people in countries other than our own. We feel the best way to express our solidarity with impacted communities, both here and abroad, is to change the way our country operates.

Then there’s the simple fact that there are only six of us! So we partner globally with organizations like the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) and others to support organizing in many other countries.

We’re happy to continue making The Story of Broke and our other movies and materials available to anyone around the world. We’ll do everything we can to keep them free to use, share, and show and, with all our movies, we always have our international community in mind.

We share what we know through our movies. We’d love our international friends to share what you know and what The Story of Broke looks like in your country. We encourage you to supplement the movie with materials that speak to the specific reality in your country. Maybe invite a guest speaker to a screening or post it on a website with a explanation of what’s happening near you. Please feel free to share your stories, resources, names organizations you support and questions below as comments. You can also take a look atWiserEarth to find out who’s working on these issues in your community.

And one last thing, if you have a friend in the states, please consider forwarding our emails on to them so they can get involved!

Thank you for all you do to help build a better world. Remember, we’re all in this together.

Like implant dentists or utility accountants, subsidy wonks go to trade meetings (yes, meetings on natural resource subsidies do exist) to find people who talk our language.  In that “safe” space, we can be met with a knowing nod as we wax poetic on the difference between revenue loss and outlay equivalents, or what is missing from a price gap estimate.

Go into the normal world though, and not only does this talk make no sense, but it drives people out of the room fast — really fast.  Sure, they care about the effects of massive subsidies to natural resource extraction: dwindling forests and aquifers, mountain top removal to tap into coal deposits, pollution, and degraded land.  But if you can’t make the link between the policy and the impact, it is hard to leverage the political support needed to change the policies.

This is an issue that most of us subsidy wonks have grappled with over the years, unfortunately, I think, with limited success. One person who has done this extremely well is Annie Leonard, who debuted with a very well received animated web documentary The Story of Stuff that explored the links between what we buy and the environmental damage caused by its production.

Today brings her newest release: The Story of Broke, which looks at how governments seem to find the money to give subsidies to powerful and often polluting industries, but then claim empty wallets when it is time to fund social programs.  In full disclosure, I provided a fair bit of input to them on subsidy types and impacts.  That said, I provide information on subsidies to a wide variety of people and organizations, from home-schooled high school debaters (their topic a few years back was on ethanol and ethanol subsidies) to reporters, educators and government staff.  I never know what will come from it.

In this particular case, I am quite impressed with how The Story of Broke, well, tells its story.  Annie and her team have captured some of the core issues I’ve struggled to convey, and they’ve done so in catchy and readily accessible ways:

• That subsidies aren’t just about cash transfers, but often involve extremely valuable shifting of risks from private investors onto taxpayers;

• That power matters a great deal (and more than merit) in who ends up with the biggest subsidy trough;

• That all of these policies involve trade-offs, but beneficiary industries try to define trade-offs quite narrowly in an effort to argue that their subsidies are benefiting all of us, or that the costs of reform are too high;

• And that patterns of support over a period of years or decades accumulate to produce dramatically different outcomes with respect to industrial structure and market options than what would have occurred without government subsidies or with a different pattern of support.

Here’s hoping her ability to capture and convey this information so widely will help alleviate the bottlenecks to sensible policy reform.

Doug Koplow is the Founder of EarthTrack 

Originally posted at Global Exchange, an international human rights organization dedicated to promoting social, economic and environmental justice around the world.

The Occupy demonstrations have raised a central issue that we must confront: how does capital get invested and who is controlling the process?

A new video by The Story of Stuff Project addresses this issue in a powerful and convincing way.

It’s called The Story of Broke: Why There’s Still Plenty of Money to Build a Better Future.

The evidence is mounting that the global economy has been allocating way too much capital to investments that destroy the environment. Every biological system on our planet is collapsing, largely due to the way we have been running the global economy, putting corporate profits ahead of saving natural resources.

Hundreds of species of plants and animals are being wiped out because we are destroying their habitats. Every year, billions of tons of the topsoil that grows our food is disappearing. We are rapidly destroying the forests that absorb carbon dioxide and produce the oxygen we need to breathe. The glaciers and polar ice caps are melting, which will raise ocean levels, threatening the very existence of major cities.

Everywhere you look, severe weather events are Mother Nature’s way of telling us that we cannot continue on our current path.

Now the new online video by the Story of Stuff Project lays out a well-researched case for changing the way our society decides how to invest its wealth. Instead of investing in the military-industrial complex that pollutes the earth and does not produce enough jobs, this entertaining video explains how we could redeploy our money in ways that will lessen environmental destruction and reduce the growing inequality that is prompting protests all around the world.

The Story of Broke points out the contradictions between the response we get from our political leaders when we want better schools and environmental protection—“Sorry, there’s not enough money”—and the way they always seem to find money when it comes to waging war, subsidizing big corporations that move our jobs overseas, and bailing out financial institutions that gamble our money away.

The video makes a very strong case for shifting our capital away from the destructive “dinosaur economy” to the newly emerging green economy sectors that are developing renewable energy, green building, resource recovery, grassroots education, and environmental restoration.

As Jim Hightower says: “Capital is like cow manure, if you concentrate it in a big pile it stinks, but if you spread it out evenly it makes things grow.”

Kevin Danaher is the Co-Founder of Global Exchange and Green Festivals.

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With sky-high unemployment and our social safety net in tatters, it’s no wonder many of us feel a collective sense of desperation. But as Annie points out, we aren’t broke: “Spending billions on fighter planes we don’t need or wars with no end, and then saying we’re broke, just isn’t honest.”

We couldn’t agree more. This August, Friends of the Earth launched our new Earth Budget campaign, which seeks to craft a national budget that protects people and the planet while cutting subsidies for polluting industries, making polluters pay and ensuring that Wall Street and the richest 1% chip in their fair share. We kicked off our campaign with our Green Scissors 2011 report, which identified over $380 billion in environmentally harmful spending and subsidies. Making these cuts won’t just save taxpayer money; it will also help us transition off the dinosaur economy and build a new and more sustainable one.

This transformation will take public investment, and it means making the right choices. In the last months, Solyndra has received a lot of attention – mostly from detractors of solar energy – but if you look at the Department of Energy loan guarantee program (the only one that is still around, called section 1703), only about $1.2 billion of it goes to renewable energy and transmission, while almost $8 billion goes to dirty coal deals and $22.5 billion goes to dangerous nuclear power. This massive bias against renewable energy is pretty typical of our public spending overall and keeps us addicted to dirty, dangerous energy.

But cutting the bad stuff is just one half of the equation; we also need to look at new revenue sources. And the most obvious place to turn is big corporations – especially polluters and the Wall Street bankers who got us into this mess.

As it turns out, corporate taxes only contribute 7% of federal budget revenue – a measly seven percent! Citizens for Tax Justice recently looked at 280 of America’s most profitable companies and found that 78 of them paid no federal income tax at all in at least one of the last three years. 30 companies paid less than nothing, with Wells Fargo (which also benefitted from the bank bailout) getting a tax subsidy of a cool $18 billion.

Tax reform shouldn’t be about making those who have shouldered most of the load take on even more – but rather about making sure everyone carries their fair share. A few economically just and environmentally beneficial options include:

• Instituting a tax of 0.005 percent on international currency trades. The vast majority of these trades are purely speculative, and this microtax could raise billions each year for global needs like HIV/AIDS and climate adaptation.

• Putting a tax on carbon dioxide pollution, while refunding the vast majority of it to consumers to keep them whole. Rep. Pete Stark’s carbon tax bill would raise almost half a billion for deficit reduction and could cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25% in ten years.

• Clamping down on tax havens, which are a large part of the reason why corporations aren’t paying their fair share. Tax dodgers bilk the Treasury out of $100 billion every year. (Learn more about Sen. Carl Levin’s tax dodgers bill)

• Allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire and go back to 2000 levels. These tax expenditures are worth $5.3 trillion over the next 10 years and have starved our budget.

We hope The Story of Broke inspires you to take action, and we invite you to join the thousands of Earth Budget activists that have shown support for a carbon tax, pressured the Super Committee to end handouts to Big Oil, and called for a tax on Wall Street.

Indeed, our country isn’t broke, and budget deficits can be solved without harming the public and the environment. As Annie says, “There is money, it’s ours, and it’s time to invest it right.”

Michelle Chan coordinates Friends of the Earth’s Green Investments project, which brings environmental advocacy to Wall Street.

“They got bailed out; we got sold out!”

The chant rang in my ears as I marched with my 12-year-old daughter and thousands of my fellow citizens through the streets of Oakland last week.

But that $700 billion bank bailout is only part of the way the government takes our taxes – money that should be paying teachers, building clinics, ensuring a healthy environment or feeding poor kids – gives it to big corporations that aren’t helping build a better future.

Every year the government gives billions of our tax dollars to resource-consuming, pollution-spewing, dinosaur industries – oil and gas, coal mining, industrial agriculture, waste incinerators – while investing far less in better, cleaner and ultimately cheaper alternatives. Yet whenever I talk about the promise of developing clean energy, safer chemicals or other innovative ways out of the environmental mess we’re in, I hear the same thing: Those things would be nice, but the country’s broke.

That is, to put it delicately, bull.