Portside

Many American renters are already extremely burdened when it comes to housing costs, with about 25% nationally paying more than half their monthly income toward housing. On May 12th 2015 Tenants Together released a report on the experience of tenants renting single-family homes from the three biggest Wall Street landlords in California: Blackstone/Invitation Homes, Waypoint Homes, and Colony American Homes.

Exciting video with English captions from 15M Movement in Spain with lessons for USA activists.

Justice for Janitors posting response: Many of the janitors and leaders who fought in Century City were the Central American immigrants coming into LA from the wars. Their experience in their home countries was very important in their willingness to fight, and the use of the tactics of mass demonstrations and even CD in the street. They’re one of the best examples of the way migration, for all the pain it causes migrants, has benefited our labor movement enormously.

Medicalizing normal human behavior or common symptoms, and renaming subsets or combinations of symptoms, are common strategies to sell drugs.

The tension between religiosity and secular government goes back to the nation’s founding.

Despite our growing economy and the fact that poor workers are now more educated than ever, rising inequality has worked to keep low-income people in poverty. This increase in inequality was driven by stagnating wages for low- and middle-income households. Since 1979 increasing inequality has been the largest poverty-boosting factor, outweighing racial identity and family structure and completely eclipsing the effects of overall economic growth and educational attainment

The path to laser weapons is littered with dead lasers. The December 2014 tests on the US Navy's laser weapon were underwhelming. They reminded me of an old cartoon in which someone shot an arrow at the side of a barn, then painted a bulls-eye around the spot where the arrow landed. To add to the questionability of the December tests, they look like they were conjured up in a hurry—perhaps to impress those in charge of the purse strings.

Qatar will host the 2022 Soccer World Cup, and this week the International Trade Union Confederation, Play Fair Qatar, and NewFifaNow launched a campaign to force sponsors of the Fédération Internationale de Football (FIFA) to demand a change in the slave-like conditions endured by migrant laborers building Qatar’s tournament infrastructure. According to Play Fair Qatar, “As things stand, more than 62 workers will die for each game played during the 2022 tournament.”

The New York City Police Foundation (NYCPF), a private body funded by the city’s largest finance, real estate, tourism and private prison interests, has bankrolled another proposal to overhaul the New York Police Department. This “re-engineering” is underwritten by the NYCPF, overseen by consultant John Linder and supported by Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, the triad responsible for the 1994 NYPD reorganization that introduced the “broken windows” theory of policing.

Earlier this month, the Israeli Defense Minister both admitted Israel has nuclear weapons, and discussed the possibility of using them against Iran, citing the U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as moral justification. Yet, the U.S. media has completely blacked out these incendiary remarks. Had the Iranian Defense Minister referenced Hiroshima in a discussion about Israel, it would have been front page news.