Portside

A troubling pattern emerges as private funds seek to profit from beleaguered cities.

American workers need jobs. They also need protection from chemicals and pollutants that threaten their lives, health, environment, climate, and future. Gina McCarthy, President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, has a unique track record in protecting the environment in ways that also protect and expand jobs.

At the core of the reforms is an acknowledgement by the Cuban state that it must relinquish control over those activities and sectors, such as retail, that do not serve it strategically and that it believes have the capacity to absorb the growing labor force in coming years. If these conditions are established, non-state employment will meet its expected contribution to the economy, above all in terms of job creation and the production of goods and services.

I believe Assata Shakur to be a good and decent, a kind and compassionate person. True revolutionaries often are. Physically she is beautiful, and her spirit is also. She appears to hold the respect, love and friendship of all the people who surround her.

As the battle over Keystone moves toward a climax this summer or fall, when Obama is expected to make a final decision, it has become the central rallying point for a broad and diverse climate movement at what looks like a pivotal, and “radicalizing,” moment. More and more, what Bill McKibben recently dubbed the “Fossil Fuel Resistance” is turning to nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience to make its demands seen and heard.

This proceeding is Operation Streamline, an eight-year-old, little-known provision of immigration policy that was intended—along with the new fence that currently stretches 650 miles long and as high as 20 feet—to discourage illegal entry to the United States along the Mexican border. The provision is meant to “streamline” cases so that more undocumented immigrants can be efficiently processed in court. The harsh punishments are meant to deter subsequent re-entry attempt

Just how bad is the state of public defense in America? The charts below detail some of the biggest challenges plaguing the system.

Researchers are cautiously optimistic that the slowdown in health care spending is here to stay. Two factors potentially contributing to the record slowdown in growth to 3.1 percent during 2007-11: job loss and benefit changes shifting costs to the insured. Other fundamental changes, including less-rapid development of imaging technology and new pharmaceuticals may have led to the majority of the slowdown: 10 year savings may equal $770 billion.

It's difficult for exploited workers to organize and build popular support. Companies can pack up and move to the next low-wage country where people and governments are desperate for jobs and income, however pitiful. This cycle of exploitation is destined to continue until the world runs out of poor countries to exploit, or until citizens in rich countries, like the U.S. get over their ignorant indifference and face up to their complicity for evil done in their name.

The potential Tribune sale would be a high-profile litmus test of the unions' financial self-awareness. Public-sector workers from Massachusetts to California can force their investment managers to make a choice: sell to the Kochs, or keep managing their retirement billions. If the Kochs want to buy newspapers, this is a free country, and nobody can stop them. But the people whose benefits they want to slash don't have to help them get there.