A huge part of our economy is invisible, invaluable, and under siege. This book describes a growing movement to recognize and defend the commons on many fronts: community initiatives, legal actions, and visionary proposals.

• Identifies an essential but overlooked and endangered sector of our economy
• Beautifully written-clear, accessible, poetic
• Filled with examples of what can be done to protect, nurture, and share our common wealth

A huge part of our economy is invisible, invaluable, and under siege. "The commons" is a term that denotes everything we share as opposed to own privately. Some parts of the commons are gifts of nature: the air and oceans, the web of species, wilderness, and watersheds. Others are the product of human creativity and endeavor: sidewalks and public squares, the Internet, our languages, cultures, technologies, and infrastructure. In graceful and down-to-earth prose, Jonathan Rowe illuminates the scale and value of the commons, its symbiotic relationship with the rest of the economy, its importance to our personal and planetary well-being, and how it is threatened by privatization and neglect.

Rowe also describes a growing movement to recognize and defend the commons on many fronts: community initiatives, legal actions, and visionary proposals such as a "sky trust" to charge polluters and distribute the proceeds to all of us. Simple gestures can be powerful too: Rowe relates how he set some benches in a vacant lot and watched a public gathering space take shape.

For decades, people have defended the commons and not known it. They've battled pollution, development, corporate marketing assaults on their kids, and many other attacks on common wealth. What's been missing is a story that unifies all these seemingly unrelated battles with the force of a powerful idea. This is what Jonathan Rowe provides in this thought-provoking book.

• Identifies an essential but overlooked and endangered sector of our economy
• Beautifully writtenclear, accessible, poetic
• Filled with examples of what can be done to protect, nurture, and share our common wealth
• Click here for the press release

A huge part of our economy is invisible, invaluable, and under siege. "The commons" is a term that denotes everything we share as opposed to own privately. Some parts of the commons are gifts of nature: the air and oceans, the web of species, wilderness, and watersheds. Others are the product of human creativity and endeavor: sidewalks and public squares, the Internet, our languages, cultures, technologies, and infrastructure. In graceful and down-to-earth prose, Jonathan Rowe illuminates the scale and value of the commons, its symbiotic relationship with the rest of the economy, its importance to our personal and planetary well-being, and how it is threatened by privatization and neglect.

Rowe also describes a growing movement to recognize and defend the commons on many fronts: community initiatives, legal actions, and visionary proposals such as a sky trust to charge polluters and distribute the proceeds to all of us. Simple gestures can be powerful too: Rowe relates how he set some benches in a vacant lot and watched a public gathering space take shape.

For decades, people have defended the commons and not known it. Theyve battled pollution, development, corporate marketing assaults on their kids, and many other attacks on common wealth. Whats been missing is a story that unifies all these seemingly unrelated battles with the force of a powerful idea. This is what Jonathan Rowe provides in this thought-provoking book. 

In this alternately amusing and appalling expos of the standardized test industry, fifteen-year veteran Todd Farley describes statisticians who make decisions about students without even looking at their test answers; state education officials willing to change the way tests are scored whenever they dont like the results; and massive, multi-national, for-profit testing companies who regularly opt for expediency and profit over the altruistic educational goals of teaching and learning.  Although there are absurd moments--as when Farley and coworkers had to grade students based on how they described the taste of their favorite food-- the enormous importance of standardized tests in the post No Child Left Behind era make this no laughing matter.

Click here for Press Release

Recounting controversial First Amendment cases from the Red Scare era to Citizens United, William Bennett Turner shows how weve arrived at our contemporary understanding of free speech. His strange cast of heroes and villains, some drawn from cases he has litigated, includes Communists, Jehovahs Witnesses, Ku Klux Klansmen, the worlds leading pornographer, prison wardens, dogged reporters, federal judges, a computer whiz, and a countercultural comedian. This is a fascinating look at how the scope of our First Amendment freedoms has evolved and the colorful characters behind some of the most important legal decisions of modern times.

Barnes proposes a simple market-based way to provide supplemental income to all Americans.

• New analysis: Barnes explains why the plight of our middle class is now so dire that conventional policies will no longer save it.
• New solution: Barnes proposes a simple market-based way to provide supplemental income to all Americans.

Economic inequality has become like the weather: everyone talks about it, but nobody knows what to do about it. Working Assets cofounder Peter Barnes has a plan: pay equal dividends to everyone from wealth we own together.

Barnes argues that, thanks to automation, globalization, and winner-take-all capitalism, there will never again be enough high-paying jobs to sustain a large middle class. The only hope lies in nonlabor income-that is, in jobs plus something more. Building on our Declaration of Independence, an essay by Thomas Paine, and a thirty-year-old program in Alaska, Barnes proposes paying monthly dividends to every American. This supplemental income would come from assets we hold in common-the atmosphere, the natural world, our monetary system, and more. Such dividends would not only keep our economy humming but also make it unprofitable to abuse nature.

Barnes's proposal bypasses the current gridlock between left and right; once set up, the dividend system is purely market based. This work is a truly visionary yet eminently practical solution to a seemingly intractable problem.

Edward Snowden's dramatic NSA revelations are only the tip of an iceberg that threatens to sink the Constitution.

* Written by the executive director of one of the organizations representing Edward Snowden in the United States

* Warns that government-corporate "cooperation" in gathering intelligence has fueled an enormous erosion of our civil liberties

* Links the blurring of lines between government and business with the failure to prosecute those responsible for the 2008 economic collapse

Edward Snowden's dramatic NSA revelations are only the tip of an iceberg that threatens to sink the Constitution. As Beatrice Edwards reveals, a host of government agencies are rendering our Bill of Rights meaningless by heavy surveillance of average citizens, political persecution of dissenters, and the threat of indefinite detention now codified into law. Corporations assist and reap handsome profits as a result-70 percent of the $56.2 billion US intelligence budget is paid to private contractors.

As a result, we now live in a Corporate Security State where the government is more interested in safeguarding the health of the companies that serve it than the citizens who support it. How did we get here? And is there a way out?

Edwards lays out the steps intelligence agencies took in the wake of 9/11 to illegitimately extend their reach (and their budgets). Private corporations were only too eager to supply them with the latest surveillance technology and consumer data, essentially becoming an unofficial, and unaccountable, extension of those agencies. Edwards shows how the government has concealed its actions by greatly expanding both the classification of documents-the Obama administration has refused more Freedom of Information Act requests than Bush's-and the prosecution of whistleblowers, many of whom she has worked with personally.

Further, she exposes how the bogus claim of an imminent "cyber war" is being used to justify businesses spying on employees and customers, as well as government and business sharing their ill-gotten information. This is why the Justice Department isn't going after the corporations responsible for the financial collapse of 2008-as Edwards shows, all too often they're partners in crime.

But she offers a plan for fighting back-steps we can demand to restore transparency to government, keep private information private, and make democracy a reality once again.