Portside

The recently published Roadmap for the Future of the Economic and Monetary Union, signed by five “presidents” — of the European Council, the European Commission, the European Parliament, the European Central Bank and the Eurogroup — it doesn’t contain much that’s strikingly new, but what it does do is systematise and confirm the abolition of national democracy.

Author and professor of political science at the University of Chicago and founder of the Black Youth Project, Cathy Cohen explains the growing role of hashtags in political discussion and what digital media can and can't do for activists.

The barriers to organizing adjuncts are real and difficult to overcome. We often don’t know our coworkers, we are decentralized and our lack of security creates a pervasive fear among adjuncts. However, the only way that we will be able to fight for increased pay, greater job security and a voice in the college is by working collectively.

It’s been 20 years since federal Pell Grants were revoked from prisons during the tough-on-crime heyday of the 1990s, amid a bipartisan political fervor that helped transform U.S. prisons from a corrections system to a punishment business. Two decades later, mass incarceration is a runaway train, and America imprisons so many more people than any other country that it’s hard to even compare the thing in one chart.

There are two reasons abortion rights activists have been boxed in. One is that we’ve been reactive rather than proactive. The second reason we’re stuck in a defensive mode is that too many pro-choice people are way too quiet.

As a discipline, urban planning is dedicated to understanding and addressing the complex problems of the city. Yet public safety is rarely taken up as a sphere of concern. Rather than rationalizing people’s failed life outcomes in a way that blames individuals for poor life choices, urban planners must help hold society accountable for past failures to construct real opportunity structures.

Any country that would challenge neoliberalism inevitably will face the assorted weapons of international capital. The central question, then, is whether a government is “willing to mobilize its people on behalf of the policies that meet the needs of people.” And this was the question I posed about Syriza in 2013: “do the stances taken by the Syriza leadership foster or weaken the movements from below?

WashPost disgraces itself; LAT disgraces itself; NYT disgraces itself; Google tax; Yay Jon

The “plan” will also toss the Kurds, one of Washington’s most reliable allies in the fight against the Islamic State, under a bus. “The Americans are not very clever in calculating this sort of thing,” Kamran Karadaghi, former chief of staff to Iraqi President and Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, told the Independent’s Patrick Cockburn. “Maybe they calculate that with Turkey on their side, they don’t need the Kurds.”

August 6 and 9 mark the 70th anniversary of the United States dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This mass destruction of civilians (not military targets, as President Truman alleged) has reverberated perversely across 7 decades, with the spread of nuclear weapons and the persistent pressure on Japan by the United States to abandon its post-war Peace Constitution.