Sustainable Community Development

 Urban Sustainability Directors have created a vibrant network to share best practices, build support for each other’s work and finance shared research and infrastructure. What a great idea!

The Take Back the Land Movement  and Occupy Our Homes are fighting for the right to homeownership one house at a time.

The workers who occupied the Republic Windows and Doors plant in 2008 are now raising money to create a workers’ cooperative to buy out the owners.

Mexican Farmers organized to over turn proposed legislation to privatize ownership of of biological genetics.

Environment

Don’t Frack Ohio  is a mass mobilization to stop fracking in Ohio supported by 350.org.

Maude Barlow writes about Prime Minister’s Harper’s disasterous environmental policies in Canada.

On the brighter side, As You Sow reports significant progress on shareowner resolutions at Exxon, McDonalds and others.

Common Dreams reports on the Obama Administration’s support for fast tracking a decision to permit Arctic drilling.

Democracy and Corporate Accountability

In new study on the effects of rising inequality on civic participation,  Oren Levin-Waldman shows that as income inequality increases, civic participation in various communal affairs decreases.

John Feffer explains why our current system of campaign finance costs Americans far more than $17 per person.

Interface publishes an article about NY City’s experiment in participatory budgeting.

New York Leadership for Accountable Government applauds the introduction of a Bill for Public Financing in NY Assembly.

Macroeconomic Policy

Boston College introduces the  Summer Institute for New Economics, an intensive seminar led by Juliet Schor, Gar Alperovitz and others

Joe Stiglitz discusses Of the 1%, By the 1% and for the 1% on Democracy Now.

Alternet launches a five part series on bold ideas of  the New Economy Movement, edited by economics editor Lynn Parramore in partnership with political economist Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy Collaborative.

After JP Morgan Chases loses more than 2 billion dollars betting on corporate bond insurance, Elizabeth Warren calls for a new Glass Steagall Bill.

Social Justice

The New Bottom Line launches the Home Defenders League to organize the more than 15 million American’s whose home mortgages are “underwater” to demand that Freddie and Fannie write down mortgage principle to fair market values.

What fires activism among young millennials? A new study, Millennials, Activism and Race, from the Applied Resource Center asks them.

Thousands of Students in Quebec take to the streets to protest tuition hikes, supported by a global solidarity movement.