Portside

A years-long struggle to eliminate an undemocratic system of at-large voting in Whittier California has resulted in an historic victory for the community. Democrat Josue Alvarado has won a hard-fought electoral campaign to become the first person elected to represent Whittier’s newly configured Council One. He is only the second Latino to hold a council seat in that city in 118 years!

A conversation with Tony Romano of the Right to the City Alliance. What are the systemic challenges to democratic and equitable control over public space? What kind of popular mobilizations can build towards systemic alternatives guaranteeing the human right to housing? To help answer these questions, we spoke with Tony Romano, Organizing Director for the Right to City Alliance. Our conversation is below.

Le Carré's 1993 novel comes to life in a six-part AMC series. John Powers says the show, which jets from Egyptian streets to posh Alpine lodges, is one of the most enjoyable thrillers he's seen on TV. Over the years, le Carré's anger at those in power has become less ambiguous and more sharply focused, whether he's going after drug company profiteering or America's approach to the War on Terror.

If well organized and militant union members at Verizon—who have gone on strike against the company and its predecessors in 1983, 1986, 1989, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2011 and now—can’t stop the outsourcing and destruction of decent jobs, unorganized workers spread across the planet in industries like telecommunications will find the task insurmountable.

Experts say listing cannabis among the world’s deadliest drugs ignores decades of scientific and medical data. But attempts to delist it have met with decades of bureaucratic inertia and political distortion

Despite the mixed impact that big-money groups have had on the presidential contest so far the biggest surge of cash is likely to come this fall, when millionaires and billionaires aligned with both parties fully engage in the fights for control of the White House and Congress.

The richest Americans now live 10-15 years longer than the poorest.

The renewed focus, particularly on the left, on precariousness constitutes a recognition of the harsh reality of capitalism, and particularly of today’s globalized monopoly-finance capital. More than a century of Marxian political-economic critique allows us to appreciate the extent to which the conditions that Marx described, focusing on a small corner of Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, are now global, and all the more perilous.

If you say you’re on the freedom side, then that means you will join us in asking the rich to pay their fair share; calling on the city and state to stop the attacks on public and higher education; in asking the banks to end their predatory deals that strip vital dollars from our schools; in fighting for stronger neighborhoods and job creation, and access to health care and not just health insurance.

The Reaper has been busy in 2016, Prince is dead at 57 years old and only recently on the road doing a well-received solo piano tour. Looking back at nearly four decades of hybridizing rock, funk and dance music, there can be no doubt that the man was a pioneer, sonically, aesthetically and as an artist who stood up and fought back against a music industry that alienated his labour.