Portside

A conversation with Tony Romano of the Right to the City Alliance. What are the systemic challenges to democratic and equitable control over public space? What kind of popular mobilizations can build towards systemic alternatives guaranteeing the human right to housing? To help answer these questions, we spoke with Tony Romano, Organizing Director for the Right to City Alliance. Our conversation is below.

A years-long struggle to eliminate an undemocratic system of at-large voting in Whittier California has resulted in an historic victory for the community. Democrat Josue Alvarado has won a hard-fought electoral campaign to become the first person elected to represent Whittier’s newly configured Council One. He is only the second Latino to hold a council seat in that city in 118 years!

Remarks by the leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz, during the closing of the 7th Communist Party of Cuba Congress.

If you say you’re on the freedom side, then that means you will join us in asking the rich to pay their fair share; calling on the city and state to stop the attacks on public and higher education; in asking the banks to end their predatory deals that strip vital dollars from our schools; in fighting for stronger neighborhoods and job creation, and access to health care and not just health insurance.

The renewed focus, particularly on the left, on precariousness constitutes a recognition of the harsh reality of capitalism, and particularly of today’s globalized monopoly-finance capital. More than a century of Marxian political-economic critique allows us to appreciate the extent to which the conditions that Marx described, focusing on a small corner of Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, are now global, and all the more perilous.

The richest Americans now live 10-15 years longer than the poorest.

Despite the mixed impact that big-money groups have had on the presidential contest so far the biggest surge of cash is likely to come this fall, when millionaires and billionaires aligned with both parties fully engage in the fights for control of the White House and Congress.

Experts say listing cannabis among the world’s deadliest drugs ignores decades of scientific and medical data. But attempts to delist it have met with decades of bureaucratic inertia and political distortion

Corruption is not the cause of the effort to oust Brazil’s twice-elected President, Dilma Rousseff, merely the pretext. Brazil’s elite and their media organs have repeatedly failed to defeat Rousseff and her Workers' Party at the ballot box. So the plutocrats are now attempting, through a bizarre mélange of evangelical extremists, far-right supporters of a return to military rule, and non-ideological backroom operatives, to simply remove her from office.

On this month’s 50th anniversary of one of the all-time edgiest Beatles tracks, our super rich have a special reason to look back fondly on the lads from Liverpool.