Portside

• 500 signatories include five Nobel prize winners • Writers demand 'digital bill of rights' to curb abuses

Blame interest-rate swaps, not retirees, for the Motor City’s downfall.

The word “inequality” makes conservatives uncomfortable, as if it invokes class struggle, the 99 percent versus the 1. They much prefer “mobility,” which connotes a purely aspirational relationship to wealth and the wealthy.

With our inequality coming close to that of Jamaica and Argentina, as Obama pointed out in his Dec. 4 speech on inequality and social mobility, we can no longer ignore the danger it poses to our democracy and living standards.

With Washington tied up on other issues, states and municipalities are handling minimum-wage increases on their own. Legislators and voters in five states — California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island — and in four local governments this year approved measures raising the minimum wage above the current national rate of $7.25 an hour, in one case as high as $15 an hour.

Malta's prime minister, Joseph Muscat, exclaimed to journalist Gwynne Dyer that "we are building a cemetery within our Mediterranean Sea.” An NGO, Fortress Europe, says 6,450 died in the channel between Sicily and North Africa between 1994 and 2012. This figure is similar to the 5,570 people found dead in the desert between Mexico and the United States from 1998 to 2012, and has earned the Mediterranean the nickname “sea of death.”

It’s not so much that Obama “sold us out” to a powerful constituency as that he picked the wrong powerful constituency. A quick look at the financial details reveals that health insurance nationalization was always the real “path of least resistance.”

Education reform must be in the public interest—on behalf of public schools and the children who attend them—rather than private interests. This coalition has set itself the task of nothing less than reclaiming “the promise of public education as our nation’s gateway to democracy and racial and economic justice.”