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The Third Party That's Winning

Sarah Jaffe In These Times
With new strategies, the Working Families Party is shaking up the two-party system.Bertha Lewis knows perhaps better than anyone else how hard those fights can be. But she thinks they're worth it. "Sometimes, in years past, you couldn't tell a Democrat from a Republican. No one wanted to talk about race; no one wanted to talk poverty. This conversation that we're having nationally about inequality is because [groups like WFP] kept to our principles and our ideas...' "

Breathless in Beijing

Jayati Ghosh Frontline (India) Print edition - March 21, 2014
The air pollution in Beijing in mid-February was more than 10 times the WHO-prescribed safe limit. It led to the authorities shutting down chemical, metallurgical and other such industries, besides banning outdoor barbecues and even asking people to stay indoors.

Tidbits - March 6, 2014

Reader Comments - International Women's Day; Cecily McMillan; Ukraine; Venezuela; Are Unions Necessary?; Gov. Christie and Bridgegate; What the Hell Is Barack Obama's Presidency For?; War in Iraq; Announcements - Dignity in Action -San Francisco -Mar 8; Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Commemoration -New York - Mar 25; New book - Save Our Unions: Dispatches from A Movement in Distress; Today in History - Supreme Court rules in Dred Scott - March 6, 1857

High Minimum Wage Equals Jobs Growth

Victoria Stilwell, Peter Robison & William Selway Bloomberg
Washington raised the minimum wage in 1998 linking it to inflation. In the 15 years that followed, the state's minimum wage climbed to $9.32 - highest in the country. Meanwhile job growth continued at an average 0.8 percent annual pace, 0.3 percentage point above the national rate. Payrolls at Washington's restaurants and bars, portrayed as particularly vulnerable to higher wage costs, expanded by 21 percent. Poverty has trailed the U.S. level for at least seven years

Bernie Sanders: `I Am Prepared to Run for President of the United States'

John Nichols The Nation
Bernie Sanders says he is "prepared to run for president of the United States." That's not a formal announcement. A lot can change between now and 2016, and the populist senator from Vermont bristles at the whole notion of a permanent campaign. But Sanders has begun talking with savvy progressive political strategists, traveling to unexpected locations such as Alabama...

Let's Make Capitalism a Dirty Word

By Carl Gibson Reader Supported News
A new, populist, explicitly anti-capitalist party must emerge and start organizing at the grassroots level to build power over time. And this new political party must be led by and represent the young, the unemployed, underemployed and misemployed, people of color, people in debt, and everyone else who has been victimized by capitalism.

Ukraine, Putin, and the West

The Editors N+1
What role has the American intellectual community played in this saga, if any? Certainly we failed to prevent it. But there is more. For the past two years, since Putin re-assigned himself to the Russian presidency, we have indulged ourselves in a bacchanalia of anti-Putinism, shading over into anti-Russianism.

Hundreds of SF residents’ homes saved from condo conversion

by Jonah Owen Lamb San Francisco Examiner
“This is a major legal victory that protects affordable housing at a time when San Francisco desperately needs it,” City Attorney Dennis Herrera said. “The displacement of Western Addition tenants from more than 1,100 apartments in the midst of the current housing crisis would have been unthinkable. And the high stakes of this potentially devastating legal attack justified the resources we deployed to defend against it.”

On Spike Lee and Hyper-Gentrification,

by Jeremiah Moss Jeremiah's Vanishing New York
In order to even begin exploring the city’s other options, New Yorkers first have to stop deluding themselves into believing that today’s hyper-gentrification is the same old thing. We all have to stop saying, “New York always changes, so this is normal.” This is not normal. This is state sponsored, corporate driven, turbo charged, far flung, and impossible to stop in its current form.

Stop U.S. Intervention in Venezuela

Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism Submitted to Portside
None of the mainstream media narrative accurately reflects the complex reality of Venezuela. U.S. news and analyses are routinely distorted, manipulated, and even manufactured to support the corporate media's narrative which is that student-led protests have been violently repressed amidst severe government repression of speech and press in Venezuela.