Salon.com > Kansas City

Can crowdfunding kickstart struggling cities?

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 22:34:00 +0000

The belts can’t get much tighter for local governments. As tax bases have shrunk, teachers have been laid off, the number of sheriff’s deputies and jail beds have decreased, and library hours have been reduced.

Citizens feel a need to act to be invested in their communities. Most civic projects led by private citizens tend to be restricted to groups of people with a specific interest—whether they share specific political views or just want to see a tennis court built in their neighborhood. But with crowdfunding gaining ground and companies like Kickstarter thriving, thought has turned to how public projects might be privately funded by a much broader base of donors.

These are the early days of crowdfunding local public projects. (Think of it as holding Internet bake sales for anything from a hiking trail to a bookmobile.) But already a number of organizations and companies have launched funding platforms to allow people with a civic goal to gather money for it online. While the problems with such platforms are many and daunting, some progress has already been made.

Be very afraid of what’s in your red meat

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 15:32:00 +0000

If acclaimed authors Upton Sinclair (The Jungle), Jeremy Rifkin (Beyond Beef) and John Robbins (Diet for a New America) haven’t given you enough reasons over the last century to be wary of the meat industry, then a year-long investigation by the Kansas City Star may do the trick.

Mike McGraw kicks off the KC Star’sinvestigative series by introducing Margaret Lamkin, who has been forced to wear a colostomy bag for the rest of her life, after a medium-rare steak she ordered three years ago at Applebee’s was contaminated with a pathogen. The resulting illness destroyed her colon.

Of course we already know about E. coli and other food-borne pathogens; people have gotten sick from everything from spinach to peanut butter. But the news here is that what sickened Lamkin wasn’t just the meat, but a process the industry uses to tenderize it. McGraw explains:

Wall Street Journal elitism, by the numbers

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 17:14:00 +0000

Social pain, anger at ecological degradation and the inability of traditional politics to address deep economic failings has fueled an extraordinary amount of practical on-the-ground institutional experimentation and innovation by activists, economists and socially minded business leaders in communities around the country.

A vast democratized "new economy" is slowly emerging throughout the United States. The general public, however, knows almost nothing about it because the American press simply does not cover the developing institutions and strategies.

For instance, a sample assessment of coverage between January and November of 2012 by the most widely circulated newspaper in the United States, the Wall Street Journal, found ten times more references to caviar than to employee-owned firms, a growing sector of the economy that involves more than $800 billion in assets and 10 million employee-owners—around three million more individuals than are members of unions in the private sector.