Rethinking the Economy

After hearing a talk by civil rights veteran Robert Moses about the possibility of transforming the DC school system using a similar style of community organizing to the one he and other SNCC members used in the Mississippi Delta, I’ve been reading a book he cowrote, Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the [...]

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Over the holiday break, I ended up watching two very interesting videos from the March founding conference of the Southern Grassroots Economy Project. According to their website:
SGEP sees its work centered in working with the communities most affected by the economic crisis—women, African Americans, immigrants, youth and poor whites. We are working on [...]

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How much is the insane obsession with deficits costing us? Krugman explains, using the latest projection from the Congressional Budget Office, which optimistically assumes that the economy will bounce back by 2015:
the projection says that we’ll have a cumulative output gap of $5.1 trillion, with $2.8 trillion of that having already happened.
Surely it [...]

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How hard would it be to cut child poverty rates in half? Not as hard as we think, writes Nancy Folbre, if we take a page from the UK:
Britain has used standard policy tools to reduce its child-poverty rate by more than half since 1994 and has effectively defended this progress against the pressures [...]

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Great piece in Huffington Post by William Alden about what happens when we cut mass transit:
Peggy Schulz was fed up. In March, after being unemployed for nearly two years, she performed an experiment: She went to a job-search website, limited the search to the Milwaukee area and typed in a simple term: “bus [...]

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Some great news from one of my fav groups, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. After years of fighting, a victory:
We have some great news to announce: The coal-burning power plant proposed by the East Kentucky Power Cooperative (EKPC) has been canceled by the utility.
EKPC has entered into an agreement with Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, [...]

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What does Business Insider consider “mind blowing“?
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Cliché, sure, but it’s also more true than at any time since the Gilded Age.
The poor are getting poorer, wages are falling behind inflation, and social mobility is at an all-time low.
If you’re in [...]

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According to Wired’s Spencer Reiss, Copenhagen is too little too late:
The really inconvenient truth: We’re toast. Fried. Steamed. Poached. More so than even many hand-wringing carbonistas admit. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, C02 that’s already in the air or in the pipeline will stoke “irreversible” warming for the next 1,000 years. [...]

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It’s not surprising most cities’ green plans are giving poor communities of color the short end of the stick. Many cities have basically written off these communities. But there are also unique issues that make a truly just green plan hard to pull off.
For starters, it’s hard to help folks in low income communities [...]

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According to Green Cities, a report by Living Cities, a collaborative of large foundations and financial institutions, cities are trying hard to go green.
four out of five cities report that sustainability is among their top five priorities as articulated by the mayor. Over 75 percent of cities have, or will soon have, detailed plans on [...]

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