----- Forwarded Message ----- From: John Fullerton <[email protected]> To: Robert Searle <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, 16 July 2012, 22:30 Subject: Off-Grid Financing To forward this email, click here. Off-Grid Financing The ramifications of the Libor scandal--what Warren Buffett glibly called a can of worms that affects the whole world--grow by the day. Criminal indictments of individuals, even if firms are too big to indict, appear to be in the making as the tsunami’s shock waves are about to spread to many of the usual suspects. One can only imagine the trial lawyers licking their chops. Has there ever been a class action lawsuit on behalf of the whole world? Central bankers and regulators, understandably panicked at the height of the crisis, may have been complicit in some of the distortions in an effort to create the pretense of financial system stability. However, like the so-called “war on terror,” we find the war on financial system collapse is filled with ends-justifying-the-means moral and legal questions. Read more at The Future of Finance. Evergreen Cooperatives Launch New Website and Are Featured in Brancaccio Documentary The Evergreen Cooperatives, the subject of a Capital Institute Field Guide to Investing in a Resilient Economystudy published last year, are profiled, along with other community-wealth-building projects, in the newly revised documentary Fixing the Future by David Brancaccio. To attend one of the screenings that will be held in many American cities on July 18th and 19th visit thissite. Also pay a visit to The Evergreen Cooperatives’s enhanced websitefeaturing videos and the latest Evergreen news. Another Summer Visit to the Capital Institute Archives In June 2010 we posted a profilewith More for Mission’s then director Lisa Hagerman to find out how the organization, launched in 2007 by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Meyer Memorial Trust and the F.B. Heron Foundation, was working to help foundations better align their investments with their underlying mission. Since we posted our profile in June 2010, the organization grew to a total membership of 96 foundations. In May 2012 M4M and Program Related Investment Makers Network (PRI) combined to form the Mission Investors Exchange. The merger of the PRI Makers Network and More for Mission was the end result of a long-standing relationship between the two organizations that were initially focused on different areas of the mission-investment spectrum. Read more at This Week at Capital Institute. John on GritTV Laura Flanders’s interview with John Fullerton on making finance safe for the planet went live online last week. In it, Flanders asks penetrating questions about the Newtonian groundings of neoclassical economics and finance, reaching full employment without economic growth, and the role of dematerialization in a sustainable economy. John’s responses detail the underlying theme of Capital Institute’s work: structuring a financial system that helps us stay within biophysical limits and puts us on a path toward a fairer distribution of wealth. The video has since been distributed on Laura Flanders’s siteas well as numerous other outlets including CurrentTV, The Nation, and Truthout. Watch the video at This Week at Capital Institute. What We're Reading One-third of all counties in the United States are part of a USDA declared natural disaster area, but almost no one in political office is willing to say why: climate change. An article from The Atlantic outlines all the facts. U.S. Declares the Largest Natural Disaster Area Ever Due to Drought Comment of the Week "[A] consequence for any complex system is that entropy increases whenever the folly of our hubris in thinking we are in control becomes evident." -Geoff Chesshire, Economics as if the Laws of Thermodynamics Mattered Quote of the Week “How do we appreciate the good without letting it be the enemy of the perfect? How do we keep a step in the right direction from becoming a stopping point? How do we get beyond shades of insipid light green?” -Donella Meadows To unsubscribe from this email list, click here. 73 Arch Street, 3rd Floor Greenwich, CT 06830 United States