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Chokwe Lumumba has died, an extraordinary leader who carried a radical vision forged in the 1970s black power movement into the 21st Century where he retooled it for eight transformational months in city government.

By Noah De Lissovoy, Alex Means, and Kenneth Saltman

Excerpted from Toward a New Common School Movement (Paradigm Publishers 2014)

In this excerpt the authors first describe the enclosure of public education as another feature of global capitalism's "efforts to transfer aspects of the commons from collective management for common benefit to private ownership for private gain." They then lay out four proposals to help "imagine pedagogical practices, curriculum, and school organization that enact the global commons."

Bruce Wallace, http://www.npr.org

On Tuesday February 25th, 2014 Mayor Chokwe Lumumba unexpectedly passed away. The Jackson Rising: New Economies Conference (May 2-4, 2014 at Jackson State University) was intended to be one of the primary initiatives and vehicles of the Lumumba administration to build a more equitable and democratic economy in Jackson, MS. The organizers intend to fulfill this mission.

Back in 2010, I co-wrote a paper called ‘The co-operative path to food security‘. In it, I pointed to the increasing volatility of global food prices as speculators moved their gambling activities from financial products to commodities markets. Charities working with the poor of the global South are increasingly focusing on the link between poverty and control over food supplies, which includes ownership of land.

Worker cooperatives in Spain have grown by 32% in the third quarter of 2013, compared to the same period last year, according to data recently released by the Spanish Ministry of Employment and Social Security. Again, this demonstrates how this business model grows and its resilience in spite of the economic situation.

Read the full article here.

Dear worker co-op friends and allies,

Many design agencies and arts organisations use a constant churn of skilled and productive long-term interns, sometimes comprising a third or more of the workforce, with only the more senior employees earning what would have been considered a decent income twenty years ago.

Southern pews and pulpits weren’t the only source of people power during the long civil rights movement. So, too, were cooperative economic enterprises. These worker or consumer-owned alternatives to U.S. capitalism helped train and produce civil rights leaders from A. Philip Randolph to Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer to sitting congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.).

At six-foot-six he was a towering breath of fresh air for the thousands of Co-operative Group employees who pined for change.

And, for a while, co-op democrats inside and outside the Group were in awe of a fresh change in management from Euan Sutherland; a renewed business focus.

But as will undoubtedly become clear in the Kelly Report next month, there is and always has been a deep divide between the elected board members at the Group and the management they appoint – a phenomenon not just exclusive to this co-operative.

The emerging constellation of alternative economic activities celebrated on Shareable.net goes by many names—shared, gift, solidarity, social, cooperative, rooted, generative, and new economy are just a few—but they share many core values and aspirations in common.

[I]f we accept that difference in human communities is good and normal and expected, then we have got to learn how to be at ease with the range of human experience, bodies, cultures, subcultures, and values. If we want to be at ease with the complex reality of human difference, then we have got to learn how to be good to each other when we bump up against it – which we will, regularly, unless we want a conformist monoculture in which everyone behaves, thinks, and feels the same way.

American consumers benefit to the tune of $8.5 billion due to credit unions’ presence in the marketplace.

And the nation’s 98 million credit union members received $6.1 billion in benefits during the year ended Sept. 30, 2013, in the form of lower loan rates, higher dividends, and fewer and lower fees.