Create!

Along with direct action and other forms of resistance, a transformational movement must also have a constructive program that builds new institutions based on the values that the movement aspires to achieve. These may eventually replace the old systems. From small, worker-owned cooperatives to national advocacy groups, hundreds of thousands of people around the country are working to create democratic and sustainable systems that meet the basic needs of all people.

Defusing The Derivatives Time Bomb: Some Proposed Solutions

February 15, 2024 Ellen Brown, Scheer Post. Create! Big Banks, Capitalism, Derivatives, Dodd Frank Act

This is a sequel to a Jan. 15 article titled “Casino Capitalism and the Derivatives Market: Time for Another ‘Lehman Moment’?”, discussing the threat of a 2024 “black swan” event that could pop the derivatives bubble. That bubble is now over ten times the GDP of the world and is so interconnected and fragile that an unanticipated crisis could trigger the collapse not just of the bubble but of the economy. To avoid that result, in the event of the bankruptcy of a major financial institution, derivative claimants are put first in line to grab the assets — not just the deposits of customers but their stocks and bonds. This is made possible by the Uniform Commercial Code, under which all assets held by brokers, banks and “central clearing parties” have been “dematerialized” into fungible pools and are held in “street name.”

Solar Nonprofit Shows Patience Brings Results To Lower-Income Residents

February 15, 2024 Frank Jossi, Next City. Create! Energy, Minneapolis, Poor people, Solar, Worker Rights and Jobs

One installation at a time, a solar nonprofit that matches socially conscious investors’ cash with lower-income homeowners is spreading the benefits of solar in North Minneapolis. Solstar was formed three years ago by solar entrepreneur Ralph Jacobson following his retirement from IPS Solar, the pioneering Twin Cities’ solar company he founded three decades ago earlier. In his entire career, “I hardly ever had Black customers or Black subcontractors,” Jacobson recalled. Solstar is a collective effort for clean energy leaders in North Minneapolis to address those racial disparities. Jacobson, 71, works his network to persuade wealthy individuals to invest in residential solar installations.

Public Pharma For Europe, A Game-Changer For Access To Medicines

February 11, 2024 People's Health Dispatch, People's Dispatch. Create! Big Pharma, Europe, Health Care, Patents, Public ownership

“It’s time to step up, promote health justice, and meet the real needs of people,” says Alan Silva from the European chapter of the People’s Health Movement (PHM), addressing the need for revolutionizing pharma policies in Europe. A long-time advocate for access to medicines, Silva understands how important it is for Europe to change the way it thinks about research and development, but also production and distribution of health technologies. If the region were able to de-link itself from the interests of transnational pharmaceutical companies, it would be a true game changer, he says. “We need public pharma in Europe so we can stop relying on health solutions driven by profit,” he says.

Individualism Is Making Public Transit Worse

February 11, 2024 Jarrett Walker, Next City. Create! Diversity, Public Transit, Transportation, Urban Design

When you complain that transit doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end, and doesn’t go all the time, you’re describing inadequate public transit. With adequate funding and in the context of good city planning, public transit can do all of these things for vast numbers of people, though not for everyone and possibly not for Elon Musk. But Musk’s other point is fundamental. Public transit does expose us to a bunch of random strangers, and this is its superpower. In the most effective public transit, different people with different purposes and destinations find the same vehicle useful at the same time. At its most successful, a transit system’s ridership is as diverse as the city or community it serves.

These Urban Food Forests Do Double Duty

February 9, 2024 Max Graham, Next City. Create! Environment, Food and Agriculture, food forests, heat islands, Trees, Urban Farming

Below the red-tile roofs of the Catalina Foothills, an affluent area on the north end of Tucson, Arizona, lies a blanket of desert green: spiky cacti, sword-shaped yucca leaves, and the spindly limbs of palo verde and mesquite trees. Head south into the city, and the vegetation thins. Trees are especially scarce on the south side of town, where shops and schools and housing complexes sprawl across a land encrusted in concrete. On hot summer days, you don’t just see but feel the difference. Tucson’s shadeless neighborhoods, which are predominantly low-income and Latino, soak up the heat.

Report Lauds Effects Of Guaranteed Income For Struggling Families

February 6, 2024 Chris Walker, Truthout. Create! Boston, Guaranteed income, Poverty, Social safety net, Universal Basic Income

A guaranteed income program in Boston, Massachusetts, which began in the summer of 2021, resulted in numerous positive outcomes for recipients, highlights a recently published study by the groups that organized the program. Camp Harbor View and UpTogether, the organizations that dispersed the payments, privately funded the program from a group of 107 donors. Around $750,000 was raised in total, which was given out to 50 families around the Boston area. The families who were chosen to receive funds didn’t already qualify for social safety net benefits, as the program was designed to help those who were “too rich to be poor and too poor to be rich.”

In Chinatown, A Community Envisions Alternatives To Sixers Arena

February 6, 2024 Oscar Perry Abello, Next City. Create! Chinatown, Gentrification, Participatory Democracy, Philadelphia, Urban Design

Joy. While it’s been a contentious 18 months of protests, marching, and debating about a proposed new basketball arena in Philadelphia’s Center City, for at least one Saturday morning, an urban planning and design discussion about the proposed arena location brought some joy to the conversation. At the Center for Architecture in Philly, just a few blocks from the site of the proposed arena, about a hundred people gathered on Jan. 27 to brainstorm alternative uses for the site. The public workshop was organized by the Save Chinatown Coalition, an alliance of 245 organizations from Chinatown and around the city who oppose the new arena because they fear its proximity to Chinatown will disrupt and displace the community.

Here’s How Non-Police Crisis Response Programs Have Been Working

February 5, 2024 Meg O’Connor, Scheer Post. Create! Crisis Response, Emergency services, mental health, Police

Over the past three years, tens of thousands of people in crisis have been met with behavioral health specialists and social workers instead of police officers. Interactions like these are taking place across the country more often today compared to previous years. While unarmed crisis responders have existed for decades, public outrage over the 2020 police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Daniel Prude, and many others prompted cities to create new ways to respond to people in crisis. Police are often called to respond to situations involving people experiencing mental health crises—with disastrous results.

Using Solar Commons To Decentralize And Share Solar Energy

February 4, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Community Wealth, Energy Democracy, Solar Energy, The Commons

Energy from the sun is sure one of the most pervasive forms of common wealth. So why not capture and share that wealth more widely with everyone? That's the basic idea behind the Solar Commons, a prototype project that uses revenue streams from solar energy and partnerships to build community wealth. The primary vehicle is a Solar Commons trust agreement among diverse community groups and the owner of a solar power array. The driving force behind this socio-legal innovation has been Kathryn Milun, a community-engaged scholar, writer and energy democracy advocate.

Guerilla Bus Benches Are Spurring Berkeley To Step Up For Bus Riders

February 4, 2024 Maylin Tu, Next City. Create! Buses, California, Infrastructure, Mutual Aid, Transportation

By day, Mingwei Samuel works as a software developer. Also by day — together with urbanist and writer Darrell Owens — he builds and installs benches at bus stops around Berkeley and Oakland that have no seating. It’s a tale as old as social media: In November, Owens tweeted a photo of his 64-year-old neighbor sitting on the curb at a bus stop to draw attention to the lack of seating for bus riders. “Which stop?” replied Samuel. “I can put a bench there.” A month later, he had placed a wooden bench, built based on a template from the Public Bench Project, at the bus stop in downtown Berkeley.

New Round Of Universal Health Coverage Policies Lies Ahead

January 31, 2024 People's Health Movement, People's Dispatch. Create! Economic insecurity, Health Care, universal healthcare, WHO

During this week’s session of the Executive Board (EB) of the World Health Organization (WHO), Universal Health Coverage (UHC) has been one of the topics in the spotlight. The original purpose of introducing the concept was to increase access to healthcare and financial protection from health expenditure. However, as Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus presented a thematic report to EB members, it became evident — yet again — that UHC-based policies are failing in achieving these goals. Instead of continuing a consistent upward trend, access to care has stagnated since 2019. Financial protection, on the other hand, has worsened.

Fed Up With Inaction, Rail Unions Draft And Push Their Own Safety Plan

January 30, 2024 Mark Gruenberg, People's World. Create! Railroads, Regulations, Worker Rights, Workplace Safety

Washington - Fed up with the big Class I freight railroads’ incessant drive to put profits over people, and safety, and with federal regulators’ piecemeal and often pro-corporate responses, a coalition of rail freight unions issued a comprehensive analysis of the problem, with key recommendations to the government to force the carriers to put people first. The study, including pages of internal railroad documents and e-mails, reveals the horrible impacts of the railroads’ system, Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR). It’s designed to cut costs and workers, including safety workers who inspect freight cars and locomotives.

Inside Igalia: Scaling A Co-op Beyond 100 Members

January 30, 2024 Valerie Young, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Cooperatives, New Economy, Open Source, Worker Rights

Igalia is an open source tech co-op success story. We have been around for 22 years; we have 140 members. We play an essential role in several open web platform projects such as Chromium/Blink, WebKit (WPE & WebKitGTK), Firefox and Servo. We have contributed to GNOME / GTK+ / Maemo, WebKit / WebKitGtk+ / JSC, Blink / V8, Gecko / SpiderMonkey projects, amongst others. The reason we started as a co-op and the reason the focus of our work is Free and Open Source software are one and the same. Both are implementations of our values, in a word: egalitarianism. In this talk you will hear a bit about our history.

Dutch Airport Calls For Air Traffic Polluters To Pay For CO² Emissions

January 29, 2024 The Canary. Create! Airports, Carbon emissions, climate crisis, Transportation

Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport has published new research which shows the need for a strong reduction of air traffic in order to halt the ongoing climate crisis. In a move likely to shock other airport companies, Schiphol proposes the ‘polluter pays’ principle, with measures such as a worldwide kerosene tax and a tax for business class and private flights. Schiphol’s research showed that at least a 30% CO² reduction (when compared to 2019) is needed for Schiphol and European aviation to be on track in 2030. That’s more than the current Dutch goal of a 9% reduction. The Netherlands Aerospace Centre (NLR) and research institute CE Delft were commissioned by Schiphol to investigate what is needed in order to bring Schiphol’s CO² emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.

How ‘Chamas’ And Mutual Credit Are Changing Africa

January 27, 2024 Shaila Agha, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Africa, Local Economy, Mutual Aid, Nonmarket Economy, Unbanked

If I say that the Sarafu Network is a mutual credit network that allows trading without conventional money, that includes 50,000 households across Kenya and did $3 million worth of trade last year – how’s that for a brief description? Yeah, actually we’re up to 52,000, and last month we had 4200 new users registered. What kind of traders are they? Mostly food / agricultural produce. Food sellers and farmers. And what’s your role there? I’m the incoming director, dealing with business development and funding.

«1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 »

Daily movement news and resources