Portside

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.

What is happening is that researchers are studying one possible factor at a time, and seeing only a tiny part of the whole picture. It’s the parable of “The Blind Men and the Elephant”, where each one describes only that which is in their range of perception, instead of examining ALL of the evidence (including reading ALL of the literature) and coming up with a theory which explains all of it. We’ve got a pile of incomplete theories all competing for the media spotlight.

In our convoluted world of constantly flowing disinformation, governments tell us the Web is a “privilege” to be paid for and lost if we misbehave, corporations tell us they invented it, and most of us use it without really thinking much about its intent.

The young are idled; their hopes crushed. Americans are paying a terrible price for Washington’s folly.