Commoning Our Cities: Mary Miss, Silvia Federici, Peter Linebaugh

Caledonia Curry's art has helped rebuild communities abroad.

Move money and power from police to communities and invest in local control. In the face of ongoing police brutality against African Americans and the disproportionate impact of the Covid-19 epidemic on people of color, the nation has reached a tipping point in relation to racism, policing and public health. The Newark Community Street team in Newark, New Jersey serves as a viable model for realizing many of the demands of advocacy groups such as the Movement for Black Lives, Reclaim the Block, and Black Lives Matter. In February, Laura went to Newark to report on how the Street Team leverages community relationships to prevent violence, address abuse and transform trauma into power. This episode offers a timely glimpse of what it looks like when more responsibility for public safety is put in public hands.

How can we harness the transformation of the information revolution for good?

As we go to air, it looks as if the mega-retailer Amazon has pulled out of plan to build its New York City headquarters. In a conversation recorded before that news broke, we looked at the resistance the plan provoked and why, and considered how development might be possible without displacement. In this week's show, residents of Long Island City talk about their problems with Amazon and we take a tour of the place with a Long Island preacher’s son.

It has been 10 years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the financial crash. One thing we've learned since then is that there is more than one economy in the U.S., and many kinds of economic actors.

This week's episode is about food: from where it grows to where it goes — all of it matters to our bodies and our communities.

On July 26th, America marked the 28th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Thousands of disability activists, including many of those who made this civil rights landmark a reality, convened at the National Council on Independent Living’s (NCIL) 2018 Annual Conference. Celebrating #ADA28, alongside disability activists allows us to revisit the story of how disability came to be a civil right, even as it was pathologized and co-opted into ableist narratives. How can we make this not a conversation about ability, but accessibility, one that is intersectional and empowering?

Two forms of government have dominated in the west over the last hundred years. In one big power is vested in the state, the government, in the other policy is dominated by the influence of big industry, big corporations, or big money. Well a hundred years after the Russian revolution, and ten years after the financial crash, a whole lot of people all around the world are saying “are there any alternatives?” especially as neither of those models has delivered on a promise of shared prosperity. In Preston, Lancashire, England, a formerly industrial city, the birthplace of the industrial revolution in many ways, they’ve seen ten years of austerity, and partly out of need, and partly out of aspiration they’re practicing, experimenting, with a new model. They’re calling it the Preston model of community wealth building, and it’s inspired by a model in another formerly industrialized city: Cleveland, Ohio, the Evergreen Cooperative model. On today’s program a transatlantic experiment in cooperative community wealth building. This episode is co-produced with the Democracy Collaborative and the Laura Flanders Show.

Maurice Mitchell, the new National Director of the Working Families Party, discusses the party's national and international vision.

Economist Michael Hudson discusses infrastructure spending.