From all of us at The Democracy Collaborative, we wish you a happy near year. We are more convinced than ever that we are at the precipice of a political and economic transformation in this country and around the world, and we will be redoubling our efforts this year and beyond to see this come to pass. As my colleague Marjorie Kelly, Executive Vice President of TDC, recently stated in an interview with Laura Flanders, “the economy is designed for the outcomes that we have where three billionaires have more wealth than the bottom half of Americans combined. But a different kind of economy is growing.”

As we look ahead to a new decade, it is apparent that our world has reached an inflection point. The old ways of operating simply do not work anymore and we face an uncertain and ever more challenging future. As The Democracy Collaborative’s (TDC) Director of European Programs Sarah McKinley remarked at the recent Meaning Conference in Brighton, England, “we’ve spent too long cleaning up the edges of a system that puts extraordinary power in the hands of a few.”

Climate change is an unprecedented global social, political, and economic crisis and will undoubtedly be one of the most prominent political and economic challenges of the 2020s. As we explore potential solutions, we can look at our history for tools to catalyze action at the scale and magnitude we need. Our latest report, authored by Director of Research Thomas M. Hanna, explores the surprisingly rich history of nationalization in the US, demonstrating that there is historical precedent for leveraging the economic power of government to address large-scale social and economic crises.