1. It would incentivize corporations to narrow the pay gaps that are a key driver of the skyrocketing inequality that is undermining our economy and our democracy,
2. It would generate much-needed revenue for public services, and
3. It would encourage sound business practices. Extensive research shows that extremely wide pay divides undermine productivity. A Harvard Business School study of 1,500 firms, for example, found that companies with huge pay gaps saw significantly higher levels of employee dissatisfaction and turnover and lower sales.

Ten years later, I’m so pleased to see that this tax has functioned very well. The main measurable impact has been in revenue generation, which has averaged about $5 million per year.

It’s hard to provide evidence that it’s had an impact on narrowing pay gaps. Our grossly unfair corporate compensation system is deeply entrenched. Even I was shocked when, at the height of the pandemic, corporate boards showered their CEOs with bonuses to protect them from the crisis while so many low-wage workers were on the frontlines, risking their lives to keep our economy going.

But I know that councilor Novick’s main intent was always to do something historic that would spark similar reforms in other jurisdictions that could eventually build sufficient pressure to make our pay system more equitable. And the Portland tax has undoubtedly inspired similar efforts. San Francisco adopted a pay ratio tax in 2020 and legislators have introduced similar bills in at least 10 states and at the federal level.

And so at this moment, after 10 years of Portland bravely experimenting with an innovative approach and proving that it works, I think expanding on this success by adopting the Fair Share Tax proposal makes a great deal of sense. I’ll give five main reasons.

1. The need for new revenue is great. You all know the data on this better than I do. But Portland is not alone in facing budget challenges, particularly as the federal government slashes spending.

2. Large corporations today in general have a lot of money. While working families are struggling, U.S. corporate profits reached a record annualized rate of more than $4 trillion in the second quarter of 2026. One reason large corporations have such high profit rates is that they are paying relatively little in taxes.

The 2017 tax reform slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. That reduced federal revenue by an estimated $1.3 trillion over a decade. And while large corporations promised to use their tax windfalls to raise worker pay, instead they’ve gone on a stock buyback spree. This is a once-illegal financial maneuver that artificially inflates CEO stock-based pay while siphoning resources from worker wages and other long-term investments.

A study by economists with the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation found that the corporate tax cut of 2017 sharply boosted executive compensation while doing nothing to increase wages for workers in the bottom 90% of the income scale.

3. Expanding the Portland surtax to include more brackets makes sense. This would capture more revenue from the very largest corporations with the very largest pay gaps – in other words, those with the greatest ability to pay.

The adjusted rates and brackets would also bring the Portland tax more closely in line a federal bill called the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, introduced in the U.S. Senate and House. Oregon Senator Jeff Merkely, ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, is a co-sponsor of this bill and Senator Bernie Sanders is the lead sponsor.

In both the Fair Share Tax proposal and this federal bill, the surtax kicks in with a fairly modest rate on companies with pay ratios between 50 and 75 to 1. And then there are several more brackets, with the top one being for companies paying their CEOs more than 500 times their median worker pay.

Here’s an incomplete list of companies that operate in Portland and had pay gaps in 2025 far in excess of 500 to 1: Best Buy, Chipotle, Dollar Tree, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Target, and Wells Fargo. If they can afford to pay their CEOs hundreds – and in some cases more than 1,000 times – more than their typical employee, they can afford this modest tax on their Portland profits.

And keep in mind that this is a voluntary surtax. Companies can avoid it altogether by narrowing their pay gaps to below 50 to 1 by lifting up worker pay or reining in their CEO pay.

Also keep in mind that this surtax only applies to companies that are turning a profit in their Portland operations. And so if they responded to the tax by leaving the city, they would be forfeiting profits. As Steve Novick wrote back in 2016, “It would be absurd for Wells Fargo to close profitable branches in Portland just because they’ve become slightly less profitable.”

The introductory presentation also addressed the concern that corporations would pass on this tax to customers by raising prices. I’ll just add that if Starbucks tries to do that, I wish them good luck in competing against the many wonderful independent cafes in Portland!

4. Expanding the Portland surtax would be popular. One national poll asked people their views on a tax hike on corporations with pay gaps of more than 50 to 1. Overall, 80 percent of likely voters favored such taxes, including 89 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of Republicans. This is not a partisan issue.

5. The proposal’s tax relief for small businesses is a practical addition. That would help level the playing field with large corporations that can hire armies of lawyers and accountants to exploit every loophole, including hiding profits in overseas tax havens, something small businesses can’t do.

And so for all these reasons – and maybe some I’ve left out – I strongly encourage support for this proposal. Through the Fair Share Tax, Portland would have more revenue to invest in a healthy community while also emboldening the kind of action we need around the country to tackle the dangerous levels of inequality that are fraying our social fabric and undermining our economy.

The post Increasing Portland’s CEO Pay Surtax Would Boost Revenue and Encourage Narrower Pay Gaps appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

On September 24, 2026, together with our partner organizations New Mexico No False Solutions, Fridays for Future USA, CODEPINK, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Climate Justice Squad, and Sunrise NYC, the National Priorities Project hosted a double panel event titled, War & Climate: What U.S. Imperialism Demands of Our Climate Justice Movements. The event provided a space for climate-oriented researchers and activists to reflect on and challenge U.S. militarism and the war economy at home and abroad, and to explore what our futures could look like if our government invested in people and the planet instead of endless war.

We know that the Pentagon is the largest institutional polluter in the world, that war destabilizes communities and wrecks our planet, and that the resources going towards war and weapons could instead be transformational if re-invested back into our communities and our basic needs. So, we set out to raise the elephant in the room: the U.S. military, its colossal budget, and damages done domestically and internationally. We can’t ignore war and violence when climate justice demands a better world for us to live in.

It was also the Global Week of Action for Peace and Climate Justice!

The first panel, “The Costs of War In Our Communities,” convened youth leaders from around the world to explain what war, extraction, and U.S. imperialism has been doing to each of our homelands, including Mexico, Korea, Philippines, Peru, Pakistan, and New Mexico. Our panelists represented a swath of incredible organizations: Climate Justice Squad, Nodutdol, Youth Advocates for Climate Action Philippines & Siklab Philippines Indigenous Youth Network, Sapiens, Future Generations Tribunal, and New Mexico No False Solutions. A member of Black Alliance for Peace discussed the U.S. military presence in Cuba and the Middle East, and how we need to resist data centers.

The next panel featured crucial information on the trillion-dollar Pentagon budget from us at the National Priorities Project at IPS alongside CODEPINK’s War Is Not Green campaign. I explained that most of the United States’ discretionary budget goes towards militarism, starving our communities of basic needs, including healthcare and food assistance. Instead of leading the climate fight, in the last ten years, the U.S. has contributed $79 billion to fund other militaries with weapons, while only contributing $4 billion to an international climate finance fund. And I told attendees how to get involved with the People Over Pentagon campaign that we’re a part of. Grassroots Global Justice Alliance highlighted their People’s Care Agenda as an example of what our world could look like if we divest from war and enforcement and invest into communities, especially at the local level.

The venue was beautiful, contributing to the sense of strong solidarity in the room. We gathered at the YA-YA Network in Midtown Manhattan. When you enter the sunlit youth activist space, there is art and flyers on the walls and on the tables, a warm kitchen, a cozy lounge, and a gorgeous patio garden.

We’re already planning the next event – with enough room for everyone in a growing movement. We’re actively working together, too, to stop the $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget, the very thing enabling military violence and helping fuel the climate crisis.

We know the world we want now and for future generations is one where we are safe, healthy, and cared for. Let’s work together to make it ours.

The post Climate Week NYC 2026: War and the Climate Crisis Demand International Solidarity From Our Movements appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

In 2019, Leerink sold his private investment bank, Leerink Partners, to the infamous SVB for $280 million and stayed on to manage the bank’s securities arm. The rest is history: SVB’s March 2023 collapse and subsequent federal seizure was the largest bank failure since the 2008 economic meltdown. The whole sordid affair was a textbook example of a disaster that could have been averted had Congress not capitulated to the bankers that lobbied for deregulation.

As Leerink leaped from the sinking SVB ship, reestablishing Leerink Partners, he plundered from the fields of life sciences and healthcare. He handled financing for Steward Health Care, cofounded by the oligarch Ralph de la Torre. A cardiac surgeon, de la Torre was formerly CEO of Caritas Christi, a nonprofit hospital network of six acute-care facilities in eastern Massachusetts owned by the Archdiocese of Boston. In 2010, he brought in the private-equity fund Cerberus Capital to acquire the hospital network for $246 million and convert it to a for-profit system.

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Read the full article on The Nation.

The post The Plundering Oligarch You Haven’t Heard Of appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

Between 2019 and 2024, average income per tax unit in the city increased nearly 9 percent after inflation, according to a new analysis from the Office of New York City Comptroller Mark Levine. Almost two-thirds of that real income growth went to the richest 1 percent of New Yorkers. The top 0.1 percent alone captured more than half. Farther down the income distribution, the post-pandemic recovery looked very different.

New York’s unequal economy

Analyzing just mean income growth risks obscuring significant inequality. Median income — that is, the exact middle number in a sorted list — fell 3.2 percent after inflation between 2019 and 2024, while average real income for the bottom 90 percent declined slightly. In effect, most of the city experienced five years of little or no real income growth.

The findings, published in the Comptroller’s September report titled Recent Trends in Personal Income & Wage Inequality, put numbers behind an increasingly familiar divide in New York. In a city that continues to generate extraordinary wealth, there is a parallel affordability crisis affecting much of its population.

In 2024, New York City’s top 1 percent—roughly 50,000 taxpayers—received about 37 percent of all income earned by city residents. That figure was 22 percent nationally. Narrow the lens further and the contrast becomes even sharper. Around 5,000 taxpayers making up the city’s top 0.1 percent had average incomes approaching $24 million and together received 22 percent of all city income.

A broader inequality measure points in the same direction. Last year, the Census Bureau reported that New York State had a Gini index of 0.519. The Gini index ranges from zero, representing complete equality, toward one as income becomes increasingly concentrated. New York had the highest estimate among the 50 states. While the figure is statewide rather than city-specific, it offers another benchmark for the extraordinary degree of income concentration surrounding New York City.

The Comptroller’s findings also illustrate the limitations of talking about economic growth without asking for whom. New York’s topline income growth tells just part of the story, and it’s important to disaggregate who captured this income.

As previously noted, city-wide average real income grew almost 9 percent from 2019 to 2024. But an average heavily influenced by gains among multimillion-dollar earners says relatively little about the experience of a typical household. The report finds that only individuals roughly in the top fifth of the income distribution ended 2024 with meaningfully higher real incomes than similarly ranked New Yorkers had five years earlier.

This means working-class incomes weren’t what drove economic growth. Instead, much of the acceleration at the top came from non-wage income: capital gains, dividends and interest, income from businesses, and rents.

Capital gains in particular receive preferential federal tax treatment compared with ordinary income — a disparity long defended through a “trickle-down” argument that lower taxes on investment ultimately spur broader economic growth. In New York, then, the economy did grow. But the gains were concentrated overwhelmingly at the top.

Economic growth and inequality — at odds? 

Wages in New York tell a more complicated story. Many relatively low-paid occupations—including food service, health-care support, transportation and sales, as cited in the report—recorded faster wage increases than better-paid fields between 2019 and 2025. The Comptroller concludes that pay differences across occupations have modestly narrowed even while overall income inequality has widened.

For New Yorkers who saw little of the city’s recent income growth, those numbers collide with the rising cost of simply remaining in the city.

The bottom 90 percent of New York City taxpayers had an average income of about $44,500 in 2024, 9 percent below the corresponding group nationwide. Once New York’s higher prices are factored in, the Comptroller estimates that the purchasing power of their income was roughly 19 percent below that of the national bottom 90 percent.

Housing makes the squeeze particularly visible. More data from the Comptroller’s July newsletter estimate that market rents in June 2026 were roughly 35 percent above their pre-pandemic level.

The September report arrives at a consequential moment. Since taking office ten months ago, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has placed affordability at the center of its agenda. The city’s Rent Guidelines Board voted to freeze increases on both one- and two-year rent-stabilized leases. The administration has also unveiled a housing plan calling for 200,000 new affordable homes and preservation of another 200,000 over the next decade, alongside billions of dollars in planned capital investment.

New York’s affordability crisis, then, can’t be reduced to a story of rising rents and higher prices. The city has continued to generate wealth. The patterns found by the Comptroller illustrate who has benefitted as the city has grown. Since 2019, the answer has overwhelmingly been those already closest to the top.

The Comptroller’s report numbers make the distinction unequivocally clear: an economy can grow substantially without making most of the people living in it substantially better off.

The post New York Is Getting Richer. Most New Yorkers Aren’t. appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

“That means investing in journalism that is differentiated, consequential and difficult to replicate; reporting rooted in our communities and strengthened by sources, investigation, verification, context and judgement,” Greg Farmer, McClatchy’s vice president of local news, wrote in an internal email.

Staff at the chain’s papers have good reason to question that commitment.

At the Idaho Statesman, for example, 10 out of 18 reporters were laid off, in addition to three out of the four editors at the historic paper. The staff of the 162-year-old outlet — older than the state it covers — has been reduced to just nine.

“We were presented with no kind of plan or roadmap for what the future looks like,” Idaho Statesman sports reporter and chair of the Idaho NewsGuild Michael Lycklama told Tech Policy Press.

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Read the full article on Tech Policy Press.

The post Cutting Local Journalists, McClatchy Embraces AI Content appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

For many Americans, democracy is an abstraction. It’s something we learned about in school or heard a politician talk about. We have little opportunity to experience democracy as something we actually do: a system we participate in to shape the world around us.

I came back to my home state of Indiana nearly a decade ago after a decade of organizing in Minnesota. My family has lived in southern Indiana for 150 years, and I felt called to bring the thing I loved — disciplined, effective people-led organizing — back to the place where my family and community lived.

I came out of an organizing tradition rooted in relationships: bring people together around shared interests, develop leaders, build an organization, and use that collective power to change the decisions shaping our lives. I still deeply believe in the power of this kind of organizing, which in 2017 led me to found Hoosier Action, an independent, member-led citizen action organization where I serve as executive director.

Once I was back home, I began to see how much that organizing model rested on conditions I had taken for granted. It assumed a functioning “civic infrastructure”: places where people already gathered; local governments that had real governing authority and resources, and some expectation that they could be influenced; local media that would cover a public fight and be read; and a basic sense that what happened in your community was something you could have a role in shaping.

But what happens when those conditions disappear?

For a long time the conditions for democracy were almost invisible, just part of the atmosphere of community life. The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) hall. The local newspaper. Serving on the stewardship committee at church. Volunteer organizations and neighborhood associations. Places where you could walk in and know people, take responsibility for something, make decisions together, and practice being part of a community.

Across much of America, that civic infrastructure is rapidly hollowing out. And this isn’t just a rural or white working-class story. The collapse of community life is happening in different ways and in different kinds of communities all over the country. There are fewer places where people regularly come together, fewer opportunities to take responsibility for something larger than ourselves, and fewer experiences of actually shaping what happens where they live. At the same time, politics has become increasingly nationalized and something we mostly experience as spectators: two teams compete, we choose a side, and then watch the fight.

All of this is happening at a moment of extraordinary disruption. Technology is transforming our communities, local institutions have less capacity and presence in our lives, and people are being asked to absorb enormous amounts of disruption and change. Multibillion-dollar data centers are arriving in our small towns overnight, bringing decisions about land, water, energy and public resources that most residents had no idea was happening let alone any role in shaping the decisions.

Without strong local places and relationships, we have fewer ways to make meaning of that change together and less capacity to respond to forces that originate far beyond our communities but upend our local lives.

Once we understood that the conditions had greatly eroded, it changed the question we were asking as organizers. We couldn’t ask how to organize people around an issue or campaign. We had to ask: what would it take to rebuild the conditions for people to participate in public life at all?

We started by asking people what was happening in their own lives and communities. Why can’t you drink the water in your town? Why are there only dollar stores? Why can’t your family afford to live here? Who is making decisions about your community, and why don’t you have a say?

If democracy means only voting every two or four years, it becomes something distant and theoretical. But when people come together to win a school funding referendum, hold a local official accountable, protect their community from an unwanted data center, or make sure public money actually serves the public, democracy becomes tangible. You can experience what it feels like to have some power over the conditions of your own life.

That realization has changed how we think about what an organizing organization needs to be. We describe that thinking using three metaphors: church, bomb shelter, and vanguard.

“Church” refers to creating a place where people belong and are known. “Bomb shelter” means a place that takes seriously the material conditions people need in order to participate. And “vanguard” means a place where people learn how power works and develop the skills and confidence to exercise it.

We quickly learned that we couldn’t just run people from campaign to campaign. If we wanted people to develop a sense that they could shape what happens around them, we needed a steady presence: places people could come for community, to learn something, to solve a problem together, or eventually to take collective action. There is no single policy, election, or communications strategy that can substitute for that kind of community life.

For us, that has meant experimenting with rebuilding some of the civic infrastructure that has disappeared.

Our members created SoINformed, a community newspaper that reports on local government and helps people understand decisions being made on their behalf. We’ve also started holding Civic Saturdays, where people might share a meal, learn a practical skill, work on a community project, and ask bigger questions together about why things are the way they are and who has the power to change them.

So many communities have lost a lot of what made them feel like unique places. The clubs, associations, institutions, gathering places, culture, and resources that make community life possible are increasingly concentrated in places that are also prohibitively expensive to live. Rebuilding democratic life is also about restoring a more fundamental sense of agency: our lives matter, where we live matters, and our communities can be places where we create things, make decisions, and shape a future together.

That’s part of why we’re organizing a big Future Fest next spring, inviting people from small towns and rural communities around us to imagine together: What do we need the future to be? What do we want technology to do for us? How do we want to be connected? How do we want to change the spaces and places around us?

We realized that almost nobody gets asked these questions where we live. Asking them is itself a way of saying: your life matters, where you live matters, and you should have some role in shaping what happens here. Politics is not the same thing as democracy, and our political opinions are not the totality of our humanity. We need to build something big enough for many different kinds of people to imagine themselves in and to actually have some power to shape.

If we want people to defend democracy, then we have to build places where they belong, where their basic needs are taken seriously, and where they can make decisions, create things, solve problems, and exercise power together. Then democracy stops being a word people are told to believe in. It becomes something we embody.

The post People Won’t Defend a Democracy They Haven’t Experienced appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

Video of the press briefing was published by Errol Schweizer’s newsletter “The Checkout.” Watch the full video below, and see Omar’s remarks transcribed further down.

My name is Omar Ocampo, and I am a political scientist and a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. 

It is our belief that access to a full-service supermarket should be guaranteed as a right to every resident in the United States. There are currently millions of people who live in communities that are currently underserved, therefore it is imperative for local and state governments to establish city- or publicly-owned grocery stores to fill the void left by the private market. The creation of a public option for groceries will be a vital benefit to communities who suffer from food insecurity and do not have adequate access to a grocery store. 

Our public option model, our north star, is the U.S. military commissary system, which is a network of grocery stores owned and operated by the Department of Defense. There are 235 military commissaries across the world, and this includes the 178 stores that are currently in operation in the United States. These stores are impressive enterprises that generate $4.8 billion in sales and $5.1 billion in revenue. More importantly, they are able to deliver an average savings rate of 25.2 percent for the families who have the privilege to shop there.

So, it is no surprise that military commissaries are extremely popular and households prefer to shop there. And this is evidenced by the fact that Consumer Reports rank commissaries as one of the top supermarkets in the country and that, over the past five years, sales and total revenue continue to increase year-after-year. 

This is a benefit and service that we wish to expand, and it is crucial for us to want to follow the model they have established, which is improving the quality of life of their customers by providing them with significant savings on their grocery products. 

Grocery items found in military commissaries are the same as those found at large corporate retailers. The difference is that the goods are sold at cost and not for profit. In other words, there is no markup. The commissaries sell their products at the same price that they were purchased. In addition, these stores are exempt from sales taxes at the local and state level, and these savings are passed on directly to the customer. 

These discounts are made possible by two factors: federal funding and the purchasing power of the U.S. military. 

In the fiscal year for 2025, taxpayers directly contributed $1.57 billion to the commissaries. These resources are used to pay the salaries and wages of unionized workers employed in the grocery store, to ensure that commissaries located in remote areas remain open, and to provide a direct subsidy that lowers the prices of items at the commissary. This sustained federal funding is absolutely crucial for guaranteeing affordability and improving the economic security of households. 

In the grocery business, economies of scale are of critical importance. One of the advantages that corporate retailers like Walmart have is that they are able to purchase goods in bulk, and their purchasing power allows them to negotiate favorable prices with wholesalers.

With more than 200 stores, military commissaries are also able to take advantage of the purchasing power that they wield. They are able to negotiate price concessions from wholesalers and manufacturers because of their ability to purchase goods at a high volume. This is another benefit that they pass on not to shareholders, but to their customers in the form of savings. 

All of this to say that a public sector for grocery stores already exists. It not only works, but it also delivers on low prices while giving customers a premium shopping experience. This model could vastly improve food access and ease the financial strain on household budgets. It could help combat the price discrimination that is prevalent in the market.

This is why this model is seen as our north star. It provides us with examples and lessons that we can learn from as we build out a public option for groceries. These include exemptions from property taxes and rent. This is the creation of well-paid jobs where the workers are city employees. This is the strengthening of buying capacity where the city can organize a purchasing co-operative with other independent grocery stores and food co-ops to help leverage their collective purchasing power to secure the best deal with the lowest prices possible. 

Public investment is essential to deliver competitive pricing and expanding food access. The return on investment is improved health outcomes, stronger neighborhoods, greater accountability to constituents, the creation of jobs, affordability, and the elimination of food insecurity. This is only possible with the creation and expansion of a public option for groceries. Thank you.

The post VIDEO: A Successful Public Option for Groceries Already Exists: Military Commissaries appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

The U.S. Open has not always needed a $100 ticket program though. For decades, affordable tickets were simply part of the Queens-based tournament.

In 1999, a U.S. Open ticket was $35. In 2012, a grounds pass cost as little as $54, which gave fans access to the tournament’s outside courts and unreserved seating without buying a ticket to Arthur Ashe Stadium. In 2015 and 2018, USTA offered grounds passes for finals week at just $25.

“For generations the US Open has traded on its reputation as the people’s slam,” sports writer Bryan Arman Graham recently wrote in The Guardian. “Take the 7 train to Queens, buy a grounds pass and spend the day milling about within a few feet of the world’s best tennis players.”

The phrase “people’s slam” sounds quaint in a new era when a seat close enough to see the players’ faces can cost more than many New Yorkers earn in a week.

This year, grounds passes started at just $65, but tickets reached $363 on the tournament’s official resale market. Before the tournament, the average get-in price for a first-round session was $197, up 33 percent from the previous year. And in Arthur Ashe Stadium, a single courtside seat could cost more than $2,000, while hospitality packages ran into the tens of thousands. The traditionally affordable event has become an ostentatious show with prices out of working-class budgets  — something The New York Times recently described as a “tale of two U.S. Opens.”

Growing demand can explain part of the U.S. Open becoming such an expensive sporting event. The tournament surpassed one million visitors for the first time in 2024 and welcomed nearly 1.2 million in 2025. But the U.S. Open is also changing what it sells.

Arthur Ashe Stadium is currently undergoing an $800 million transformation. The project will add 2,000 courtside seats, expanding the courtside section from 3,000 to 5,000 seats, alongside new luxury suites and hospitality spaces. At the same time, roughly 3,500 moderately priced loge seats are being removed. The old loge inventory averaged about $291 per session; many of the new courtside seats replacing it average more than $560, while some hospitality offerings cost more than $2,300.

The pattern is familiar across American sports. Professional leagues have long operated as profit-maximising enterprises, but the ways they generate revenue — across premium seating, private equity, and increasingly expensive fan experiences — continue to evolve toward broader unaffordability. The U.S. Open is following that broader commercial logic even as it tries to cultivate the image of an accessible New York institution.

That tension raises a pressing question: can the U.S. Open remain a “people’s slam” when access to its most valuable spaces increasingly depends on who can pay?

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani offered one answer this summer.

In August, his administration worked with the USTA to make 1,000 US Open tickets available exclusively to New York City residents for $100 each. The tickets included seats in Arthur Ashe and Louis Armstrong stadiums and grounds access to the rest of the tennis center. New Yorkers could purchase up to two tickets on a first-come, first-served basis.

The response was immediate. Reports put the online queue at more than 100,000 people, and, at its peak, over half a million. Clearly, there was significant demand for affordable access to the tournament.

The $100 ticket program is far too small to change the economics of the US Open. One thousand tickets represents a negligible share of a tournament that draws more than a million people.

That doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful. This summer, the city carved out an affordable space inside an increasingly exclusive system. The discounted ticket program establishes a pool of tickets in which residency and interest, rather than purchasing power, determine who gets access. For the program, affordability is an explicit goal — much like the administration’s reduced World Cup tickets and the broader platform of city leadership.

That is a limited form of economic democracy: not an attempt to remake the business model of professional tennis, but an acknowledgment that access to a major institution can be treated as a public concern in addition to a commercial one. Crucially, the program advances the simple principle that New Yorkers should have some opportunity to attend the major sporting event that takes place in their own city.

For a sport with such a long history as a class marker, that assertion is a marginal but meaningful shift. Economic democracy has found a foothold, however small, at the concrete courts of the U.S. Open. The “people’s slam” in New York is still an idea worth fighting for.

The post Can the US Open Still Be the ‘People’s Slam’? appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

This month, the 55 residents who turned out were invited to bring not only a dish to share but also photos of deceased loved ones or beloved animals to place on the community altar.

Food and memory were in equal supply. Meg (that’s what her name tag says—neighbors know her for longtime involvement in the local community theater) brought a generous tray of macaroni and cheese that proved especially popular with children, who lined up for seconds. Dan and Mike arrived with marinated pulled chicken and always happy to talk about gardening. Rick and Jeanette’s enchiladas go fast—they’re both older and relative newlyweds, and bring the dish often—but there’s a healthy variety of chili to choose from.

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Read the full article on Resilience.org.

The post Our Town, Our Table: The Community-Building Power of a Shared Meal appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

Rick Zamore, a volunteer co-host, taps on his cup, bringing the room to a hush.

“As is our tradition, we’d like to have folks introduce themselves,” he said. “Please say your name, the road you live on, and one topic you’d like to talk to your neighbors about.”

The group went around the room. Candace doesn’t know what to do about a mangy fox that keeps showing up in her yard. Ann is concerned about the threat of ICE picking up her neighbors. David is curious if anyone has advice about moving a parent into assisted living. Bill mentions he needs a ride to Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center for a procedure, and he is immediately matched with a volunteer.

“You can’t help but feel the weaving of community relationships and bonds,” said Rick about the weekly gathering. “It’s become a necessary ingredient of any intentional mutual aid program in town.”

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Read the full article on Resilience.org.

The post Does Your Neighborhood Need a Coffee Klatch? appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.