Oct 10, 2026 · 4h 20m
Local currencies and worker campaigns challenge concentrated power
It Could Happen Here Weekly 253
The episode connects community-controlled money, delivery-worker organizing, Palestinian healthcare restrictions, and political crises to competing visions of power and accountability.
- 1BerkShares shows how a local currency can keep spending circulating through community businesses while resisting centralized financial power.
- 2New York City organizers frame direct employment and enforcement as essential to making delivery companies accountable for labor conditions.
- 3The Gaza interview describes healthcare degradation, blockade restrictions, and de-development as a systematic political strategy rather than accidental scarcity.
Don't miss
Yara Asseh explains how healthcare restrictions in Gaza fit a broader strategy of de-development, extending beyond immediate wartime destruction.
The brief
The compilation opens with a question about whether capitalist crises can be answered through institutions built around cooperation, local control, and worker power rather than concentrated ownership.
BerkShares offers the episode’s most concrete experiment: a one-to-one local currency administered through community institutions, designed to keep money circulating among participating businesses.
New York City delivery organizers argue that subcontracting lets Amazon and other logistics companies evade responsibility, while the proposed Delivery Protection Act would tie safety and labor standards to direct employment.
Yara Asseh describes Gaza’s healthcare collapse and defines de-development as the deliberate imposition of limits on Palestinian infrastructure, treatment, and ordinary life.
The closing news roundup widens the frame to media consolidation, French protests, Brazil, deportation policy, public-health threats, and the political uses of sexual violence and institutional memory.
Books & mentions
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