We're sponsored this week by D.C.O.D.C. The podcast that gives you an honest look into how politics affect your life.

And D.C.O.D.C actually makes frequent appearances on this show, so if you're a regular listener of Best of the Left, you've probably heard of them as well as their great host, Jimmy Williams.

He's working politics, he's worked as a lobbyist, so he knows this stuff, and he's taking all of that experience, and he's explaining how things really work inside and outside of Washington.

D.C.O.D.C. is smart, surprising, it often challenges the conventional wisdom, like in one of their most recent episodes they exposed the little-known connection between the Second Amendment and slavery, and there was another one recently that explained why candidates who depend on small-dollar donations, very admirable, so rarely win.

So check it out, it is definitely part of my regular listening rotation, and I think you're gonna love it.

That's D.C.O.D.C. available on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcast.

And now, welcome to the Best of Left podcast with clips today from the next system project, the David Pakman Show, the Beav-Labored Podcast, Economic Update with Professor Richard Wolfe, and a TED Talk by Gunner Branson.

The economic system is producing inequality, unemployment, ecological destruction, global warming, and putting more people in prison.

That's a system that is out of control. It also seems to regularly produce more war. Doesn't much matter who's elected, it's beyond politics.

There's the crisis of inequality, the crisis of climate, and then certainly a lack of a real democracy.

1945 to 1975, I've considered the Goldie Years American capitalism, and from that particular point on, real wages for the average American working have been stagnant.

The great increase in inequality has made this process very hard to change. It's made corporate motives, very short-term motives, of corporate growth, and the world.

And the enrichment of the top 1%, effective, very hard to beat.

The policy space that we have developed to address this crisis is getting us nowhere.

People are at a dead end with traditional politics. And so either you build from the bottom up, or nothing changes.

It's going to take millions and millions of people in motion to create the kind of system change that we need.

And so we have really shifted our attention to looking at more municipal and state-level strategies.

There are things that are being done everywhere around the country, which if you brought them together, add up to a mosaic that looks like a different system, building up what we know works already in this country.

There's a wonderful experiment in Cleveland that our group was involved with in which a whole series of work-or-own cooperatives linked together in a community-building corporation, the Evergreen Corporation, right in the middle of one of the poorest neighborhoods.

We've started talking about, in really expanding the model of community land trust, which is a strategy of taking land out of the speculative market, and creating a process where community residents could actually say what they want to go into that land.

Solar panel on everybody's roof in the neighborhood all interconnected, that's a farmer's market in electrons.

As that comes, it'll have as many interesting impacts on our way of thinking about the world as the development of fossil fuel did.

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