Ownership & Assets

After all the rhapsody about the digital age, it was skyrocketing home prices and sales that finally shook the U.S. economy out of its doldrums this year. While stock markets languished, mortgage refinancing pumped more than $1 trillion into consumers' pockets. Nationally, average home prices rose above the $200,000 mark for the first time ever. But rather than signal prosperity, the housing boom may be largely driven by the financial maneuvers of wealthier Americans. Housing, in fact, has become part… more

In Silent Theft -- a new book by New America's Public Assets Program -- David Bollier describes America's vast "common wealth" and the increasing threat of commercial enclosure that is denying a fair return to taxpayers and eroding shared cultural values. The American Commons encompasses both tangible assets and resources that are neither private nor public property in a conventional sense including natural systems, such as the atmosphere, the airwaves and the human genome, but also resource management regimes,… more

A lawyer friend of mine cruised through law school at the end of the millennium. He racked up about $30,000 in student loans each year. Oh, yeah -- and he bought a lot of books and CDs. The student loans came due in December, and now he and his new wife are living in her parents' basement. Luckily, he gets along with his in-laws. But still, that wasn't the plan when he took out all those loans.

My friend isn't… more

Good morning members of the Commission. My name is Maya MacGuineas and I am a Fellow at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan think tank in Washington DC, where I work on fiscal policy. Thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today. I realize that most of the country’s attention is focused on more immediate threats -- as is only appropriate. But it is important that at the same time, we take action to address the longer-term threats… more

This bold book proposes to take American politics in a totally new direction -- away from "our rigid two-party cartel" and toward a centrism that currently doesn't exist in an electoral sense.

Please see below for a sampling of the reviews garnered by The Radical Center:

Sunday, November 11, 2001 Someday, it is… more

A century ago, great fortunes derived from private control over oil, coal and steel -- the essential inputs to mass industrial production. Today the American people collectively own the most valuable resource in the emerging information economy: the airwaves, also known as the electromagnetic spectrum.

Cellphone use is exploding, and wireless Internet access already is available in certain central city and campus locations. Later in this decade, devices providing anywhere, anytime access to e-mail, entertainment, video-conferencing and databases worldwide could… more

Everett Carll Ladd, a political scientist, once remarked, "Social analysis and commentary has many shortcomings, but few of its chapters are as persistently wrong-headed as those on the generations and generational change. This literature abounds with hyperbole and unsubstantiated leaps from available data." Many of the media's grand pronouncements about America's post-Baby Boom generation -- alternatively called Generation X, Baby Busters, and twentysomethings -- would seem to illustrate this point.

The 1990s opened with a frenzy of negative stereotyping… more