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By Grace Lee Bogs
The greatest human need facing the American people is to stop shirking responsibility and to start assuming responsibility. This is what Jimmy Boggs wrote in 1963 in The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Workers Notebook, which has just been reissued with a new introduction by me and commentaries by six other [...]
By Chuck Collins
In the Boston neighborhood around our church, the wreckage of the economic meltdown is still palpable. Foreclosed houses sit empty, metal grates shutter businesses and the view toward the future is anxious.
Many of my fellow congregants have watched their job security vanish and savings evaporate. Grown children have moved in with their parents. [...]
By Katrina Vanden Heuval
Chuck Collins, co-founder of United for a Fair Economy and a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, describes the difference between this financial crisis and those of the past.
“The risk of this economic crisis is that people stay isolated, hunkered down and afraid,” Collins says. “What’s different from the serious [...]
By Sam Pizzigati
In closely knit communities, people care about each other and help each other, too. But healthy “social fabrics,” as the expression goes, can tear. Inequality can tear them. The wider the income gaps between us, the less we share in common, the less we care about those around us.
Over time, in a deeply [...]
By Chuck Collins
When the financial world hit full-blown crisis mode last fall, it seemed there was little for ordinary people to do but helplessly watch their savings and their jobs melt away, victims of risky speculation by a poorly regulated industry.
But in the midst of the meltdown, people throughout the U.S. were joining with their [...]
By Chuck Collins
Earlier this year, I wrote an article in Sojourners about Common Security Clubs: a mini-movement of people coming together in churches, community centers, and union halls to help each other understand and cope with the economic crisis.
After it was published, more than 50 clubs immediately formed in congregations around the U.S. Organizers said [...]
By Chuck Collins
The U.S. economy has lost more than 2 million jobs this year, ratcheting the unemployment rate to 9.7 percent, the highest level since 1983.
But the politicians and pundits didn’t seem to notice. They’re fixating instead on the stock market’s rebound as a sign of recovery. While that might mean a boost for Wall [...]
Initiative positions self as national model for troubled times
By David Taber
If anyone is looking for a neighborhood where aspirations to mutual aid and barter, community building and political aid and advocacy might have some traction, they could do worse than Jamaica Plain.
A new initiative being undertaken with support from the JP-based New England [...]
Sojourners magazine article: As our economy continues to decline, “common security clubs” are one way people can support each other and take action for a more just future.
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