Portside

Congress has backed a continuing resolution that pushes back against the current push to end Saturday delivery. But this “fix” is only temporary. And there are more threats on the horizon.The founding document is clear. Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 gives Congress the power and the responsibility: “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.”

There isn't any evidence that the U.S., or other countries that borrow in currencies they control, face some debt tipping point after which borrowing costs spiral out of control. There isn't even much evidence this is true of Europe's troubled economies. Borrowing costs fell for the PIIGS in 2012 (one year after Greenlaw & Co.'s sample ended), not because those countries reduced their debt burdens, but because the ECB promised to do "whatever it takes" to save the euro.

You don't have to look far to see the connection between workplace and housing struggles. People lose their homes or get evicted from rentals because of unemployment, underemployment, low wages, or health care bills. Organizing works: activists consistently force the banks and mortgage lenders to back off specific homes.

With the Dow Jones industrial average flirting with a record high, the split between American workers and the companies that employ them is widening and could worsen in the next few months as federal budget cuts take hold.

Thousands of Spanish doctors, nurses and other health care workers demonstrated on Sunday in 16 cities against budget cuts and plans to partly privatise medical services.

While some of the world's economic and political elite gathered in Davos, Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum, a United Nations agency reported that there has been an increase in unemployment planet-wide of 28 million since the onset of the current economic crisis five years ago. One million jobs were lost in western capitalist economies last year alone and three million in the rest of the world.

CORRECTION: Savaging Primitives: Why Jared Diamond's `The World Until Yesterday' Is Completely Wrong; Reader Comments on Jared Diamond; Julian Assange; Henry Wallace; Mali; Announcements - Everybody Against Austerity; Rally for the Cablevision 22 - New York - Feb 6; Students are Crashing Fashion Week; Adidas Workers Speak Out at NYC Fashion Week! - New York - Feb. 10