The United States is experiencing an acute, long-term land and housing crisis. Decades of racist and exclusionary public policy along with rising housing costs in many communities have intersected with other structural economic problems, such as low wages and high debt loads, to drive up racial and generational inequality and supercharge displacement and community instability.

After a year of chaos and turmoil related to the COVID-19 pandemic and its social, economic, and political effects, we find ourselves faced with the question of what comes next. Down one path lies the notion of returning to business as usual, which in truth is a dangerous and impossible fantasy.

On October 20, 2020, the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust action against Google, the first step in what might be one of the biggest anti-monopoly cases of this century.

We are at a historic juncture. If we can secure a transformative and green recovery from Covid-19, the crisis could prove a watershed moment - a break from an unsustainable present and unjust past towards a reparative future anchored in a purposeful, inclusive economy.

Joe Guinan and Seán Byers argue that Community Wealth Building approaches are adaptable and implementable everywhere in Ireland, from deindustrialised East Belfast to the decaying communities of Ireland’s Western and border regions.

The current public health crisis is demonstrating how deficiencies in our approach to intellectual property (IP)—a unique set of rights and protections that applies to the creations of the human intellect—and research and development (R&D) imperil the health, safety, and livelihoods of millions of people around the world.

The global spread of COVID-19 has shone a bright spotlight on both the vital need for reliable high-speed internet and the inadequacies of the for-profit, corporate model in delivering it.

The U.S. fossil fuel industry continues to seek bailouts during the COVID-19 crisis, as global oil demand craters and crude oil floods an already oversupplied market. These twin phenomena have combined to crash the price of oil, threatening the stability of the U.S. oil and gas sector.

Our current political economic system is in crisis. Forty years of market fundamentalism, privatization, and unchecked corporate power have led us to the point of ecological collapse, increasing economic and social inequality, and dangerous political instability and backlash.

Climate change is an unprecedented global social, political, and economic crisis. Without drastic action, the United States will likely experience rising sea levels that will regularly flood major cities, more intense weather patterns that will destroy homes and businesses, longer and deeper droughts that will disrupt agricultural production, and an increase in disease that will put stress on the healthcare system.

Anchor institutions can play a key role in helping the low-income communities they serve by better aligning their institutional resources—like hiring, purchasing, investment, and volunteer base—with the needs of those of communities. The recommendations in this “playbook,” drawn from research carried out to help Rush University Medical Center (RUMC) align around its Anchor Mission, are being published to help other hospitals and health systems accelerate their own efforts to drive institutional alignment with community needs.

Our new report, Higher Education’s Anchor Mission, examines how an ongoing—and expanding—effort to track the impact of colleges and universities on the financial and social well-being of their surrounding neighborhoods is helping these anchor institutions align their resources to build stronger community partnerships and create more inclusive local economies.

In Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in Britain and in the emboldened left politics of Bernie Sanders and the Justice Democrats in the United States, a promising economic agenda is taking shape. Joe Guinan and Sarah McKinley guest edited a special section of Red Pepper magazine on the transatlantic left.

We can displace corporate power over our health and lives by moving towards a democratic, publicly-owned pharmaceutical sector, designed to respond to public health needs and deliver better health outcomes at lower costs.

In ways unimaginable just a few years ago, public banking and its potential for catalyzing a transition to a green and just future have been catapulted to the center of political and economic debate.

This report explores the “right to own”—giving workers the right of first refusal anytime their workplace is up for sale—as a strategy to massively scale up employee ownership in the economy.

Electric utility (re)municipalization is gaining popularity as a strategy to shift away from a reliance on fossil fuel extraction in the context of combating climate change.

Creating climate-resilient cities takes more than a series of infrastructure investments; more than sea walls and permeable pavement. It takes investment in people.

In the report, Gutierrez powerfully demonstrates how any community wealth building effort that does not commit to the work of decolonizing its concepts and strategies will fail to accomplish what it sets out to do. As she notes: « Indigenous communities have the power, strength, and intelligence to develop culturally specific strategies of liberation, health, and well-being. Indigenous people have the right to accept new ways of thinking, reconstruct them, or to deny them.

The challenge of mounting an adequate response to climate change has to be understood within the context of the larger systemic crisis facing the United States. The 1972 Limits to Growth, published when environmental movements were forming in this country, emphatically explained that our economic system was incompatible in the long term with the health and productivity of our finite planet.