Portside

President Biden should do “whatever it takes” to avoid an economic catastrophe. House GOP-led efforts are to blame for the impending debt crisis. In 2011, the GOP’s demands for massive spending cuts sabotaged the Great Recession recovery.

The Inflation Reduction Act would not have happened without the movement for a Green New Deal, but it shouldn’t be confused for one. The climate left now faces a novel problem: how to deal with having won something—and keep fighting for more.

The 19th century origins of Mother’s Day differ vastly in spirit and purpose from celebrations of it in the 20th and 21st centuries. The first public “Mother’s Day for Peace” rally was in New York City on June 2, 1872, and has only grown more urgent.

Neither CNN nor its host was able to take control as the ex-president played steamroller, to the audience’s delight. It began and ended in a way that absolutely everyone could have predicted.

Reader Comments: GOP Defends Sex Offender; Debt Crisis; Child Labor Laws, Population Decline; Yes, I Am Latina. And No, I Am Not Mexican -An Exchange; Vietnam 50 Years Later; Charlene Mitchell Memorial Livestream Link; Yuri Kochiyama; more

“Unless and until the Debt Limit Statute is amended or revised to allow Congress to determine the priority of payments among specific programs once the limit is reached, members of Plaintiff NAGE will suffer irreparable injury from layoffs, furloughs, and loss of employment that are taken without any legitimate authority by the President"

An issue of this magnitude clearly isn’t down to a few shady companies.

Analyzing offender data on roughly 1.5 million US prisoners, researchers from the Brennan Center for Justice concluded that for one in four, drug treatment, community service, probation or a fine would have been a more effective sentence than incarceration. The study also concluded that another 14% of incarcerated individuals had already served an appropriate sentence. These people could be released within the next year “with little risk to public safety”.

Promises that a free lunch can be had by relying heavily on private investors for infrastructure should be viewed skeptically. Tax credits dangled to entice private financiers and developers to provide infrastructure provide no compelling efficiency gains and mostly just open up possibilities for corruption and crony capitalism.

Trump over performed the most in counties with the highest drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates. Much of this relationship is accounted for by economic distress and the proportion of working-class residents. However, this relationship should not be interpreted as causal. What these analyses demonstrate is that community-level well-being played an important role in the 2016 election.