Balle, October 31, 2012 Occasionally we’ll be sharing our blog space with guest voices from the Localist movement. These are the best of the best, the most awesome of the most awesome, and the all-around most interesting people we know. Here’s our first guest blog post, by Stacy Mitchell, a senior researcher with the Institute for … Read More
Midwest Energy News, October 26, 2012 As energy market forces continue to shift, Minnesota’s largest utility now foresees meeting modestly growing electricity needs primarily with natural gas and hydropower imported from Canada. Xcel Energy, which serves about 1.4 million customers in Minnesota, has filed major revisions to its latest long-range plan twice since 2010. The picture … Read More
Forbes, October 24, 2012 Forbes’ CIO Network carried this article co-authored by our own Christopher Mitchell and Todd O’Boyle, the Program Director for the Media and Democracy Reform Initiative at Common Cause. The same article also ran on the CommonBlog under the title “Debunking ALEC, Broadband Edition.” Not long ago, the United States led the world in … Read More
Daily Yonder, October 22, 2012 Chanute, Kansas, two hours from Tulsa, Joplin, and Kansas City, is home to about 9,100 people. As has been true in much of the rural U.S., existing telephone and cable companies were slow to upgrade broadband service here. But local leaders decided broadband was too important to wait for and embarked … Read More
Lewiston-Auburn Sun Journal, October 20, 2012 LEWISTON — “I put a lot of my making-the-world-better energy into becoming a better consumer,” said Stacy Mitchell, a researcher and writer at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which challenges corporate consolidation of the economy. “(But) what we really need to do is change the underlying policies that affect the … Read More
Climate and Capitalism, October 10, 2012 As I post this, Walmart workers from 28 stores in 12 U.S. states have walked off the job to protest company attempts to “silence and retaliate against workers for speaking out for improvements on the job.” ….snip…. In 2005, the giant retailer (biggest in the world) announced three “aspirational [there’s … Read More
St. Paul Pioneer Press, October 1, 2012 The streets have yet to be ripped up, the trenches yet to be dug, for a proposed $14 million ultrafast fiber-optic underground broadband network in Ramsey County. The county has long said the network would be exclusively for government use. Facilities without fiber connectivity, like the county workhouse, or … Read More
County News, September 24, 2012 The success of two South Carolina counties’ plans to provide broadband access to rural areas could be in jeopardy because of a new state law that severely restricts public broadband projects. It also essentially bans new ones. … Oconee County was awarded $9.6 million for a so-called “middle-mile” project to build … Read More
Atlantic Cities, September 24, 2012 More than 20 wireless routers sit on rooftops in Washington, D.C.’s Bloomingdale neighborhood. About a mile away in Mt. Pleasant, eight such routers have already been installed, with plans for an expansion into neighboring Columbia Heights. In each neighborhood, the routers form the basis of a community mesh network—wireless networks openly … Read More
