Common Assets

One of Dick Cheney’s final acts when in government was to change the legislation so that the companies carrying out fracking are exempt from the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and a raft of other environmental legislation. – Rob Hopkins

It seems that every day there’s a new threat to our lives, our health, our futures. Forced vaccinations, school closings, drones, crackdowns on small farms producing local food… the corporations always seem one step ahead of us, and ready to buy off our legislators. But here’s one place we can act before they do: ban fracking in Vermont. What...

Here are some photos (click to enlarge) from the National Student Walk-Out. This was a day that witnessed thousands of college students and from across the country in protest of mounting student debt. Dozens of students and professors gathered at the University of Vermont in support of FED UP and their continued campaign of bravery against the school-sanctioned culture of sexism and rape culture....

The Bank of North Dakota holds the state general fund as deposits, meaning the bank and lend money into existence using the general fund as the reserves. This allows the state to self-finance public capital projects without borrowing money at high interest from Wall St bond markets. This also means North Dakota's community banks have the state bank backing them up and guaranteeing their loans, which results in low-cost accesssible credit to North Dakota's small business and agriculture economy. This is win-win-win, for everyone, including the community banks, and is a central reason that North Dakota has the strongest economy in the US. 

Vermont Commons and the Vermont Monetary Policy Group have been working on the issues of...

Here's where the left/right political lines evaporate into meaninglessness, and we are forced to realize that there are only two political options: Local control and self-government, or central-state-government control and fascism. Centralist or decentralist. Those are the only real political paradigms we have. Everything else is a fictional choice.

99% of Democrats and Republicans are Centralists who want to eliminate all of our rights to self-government and control everything from distant corporatist bureaucracies. 

Many sustainability activists and progressives like Richard Heinberg and Mike Ruppert have realized that decentralization is the only path to sustainability and...