Excerpt: The US grocery market is a picture of consolidation dominated by Kroger, Albertsons, Walmart, and Costco. These corporations don’t care about food access in a given neighborhood; they care about quarterly earnings. When profits dip, they shutter stores, leaving behind food deserts and economic sinkholes…

If this is what “the market” results in, abandoned neighborhoods and shuttered stores, the logical response is not to plead for more corporate investment but to recover the ambition to pursue alternatives ourselves. Across the country, communities are turning to what some call solidarity economies: locally rooted, democratic systems of connected cooperatives, community land trusts, and municipal services that prioritize care over extraction. These forms of economic activity are not utopian experiments. They’re practical necessities that allow people who live in places capitalist markets have abandoned to sustain quality, dignified lives.

Municipal groceries are a natural extension of this work. Like public libraries or transit, they are collective goods: universal, local, and accountable to the communities they serve. Their purpose is not to deliver quarterly returns to profit-motivated shareholders. Their purpose is to deliver food, jobs, and stability to communities. The same logic of public ownership that built Milwaukee’s sewers can close today’s food deserts.

This is an audio file from a podcast, an interview with Fawzi ‘Benny’ Benhariz, Seattle’s homeless rock-stacker. After the ordinary namby-pamby opening — listener discretion advised, because oh my god there’s a reference to suicide, and the inevitable and unwanted tinkle-tinkle music, and the host’s imitation-NPR tone — it gets pretty dang faskinating when Benny starts talking.

Excerpt: Real “warriors” aren’t afraid of books. They don’t need to silence critics or eliminate diverse perspectives to feel secure. They don’t demand protection money from news organizations or avoid public transportation out of fear.

Real strength comes from being able to engage with challenging ideas, to learn from different perspectives, and to adapt to complex situations. The Trump administration’s version of strength looks more like fragility dressed up in insecure tough-guy language.

That’s in keeping with my longtime observation that about 1/3 of humans are horrible. But about 99% of our ‘leaders’ come from that 1/3, so here we are.

Excerpt: “History is best told as a story of organized crime,” Kemp says. “It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.”