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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Another good sign for Occupy Wall Street’s future: a new group called “Occupy the Hood.”

Founded by Malik Rhasaan, 39 of Queens, N.Y., and Ife Johari Uhuru, 35, based in Detroit, @OccupyTheHood has close to 3,500 followers on Twitter, the growing support of notable figures and a cadre of volunteers devoted to getting the word [...]

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The movement to create “livable communities” – communities where you don’t have to own a car to get around – is pretty white. But there’s no reason it has to be. DCStreetsBlog ’s Tanya Snyder sums up a new study by the Centers For Disease Control:
The CDC asked people how “street-scale urban design policies” [...]

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I’ve been reading responses to Paul Krugman’s great piece last Sunday on Building a Green Economy. One of the striking things about these responses is that almost nobody seems to be talking about one glaring omission: environmental justice.
Krugman argues that when free markets do damage, there are basically two ways you [...]

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If you’re feeling blue about our side’s chances of getting its act together, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and several other environmental justice organizations from around the country just released a report you should check out: Environmental Justice and the Green Economy. The report lays out three principles for building a just, sustainable [...]

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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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