A perfect storm of causes of the housing crisis, both federal and state

The termination of the Federal Government’s public housing programs was a major cause of the housing crisis. By DICK PLATKIN, May 26, 2023, LA Progressive The United States is in the midst of a severe housing crisis that is of its own making. This crisis results from several generations of awful housing policies, some of which date back a half …

50 Hours of Nature Sounds to Bring You Calm and Joy

BBC Earth created five 10-hour “visual soundscape” videos after researchers found that nature footage boosts bliss.By Melissa Breyer, May 19, 2023 https://www.treehugger.com/50-hours-nature-sounds-calm-joy-7500244 News Environment Business & Policy Science Animals Home & Design Current Events Treehugger Voices News Archive With a growing body of research linking nature and happiness, it’s becoming increasingly evident that a dearth of trees and fresh air …

Evidence from Case Studies of 14 Large Bicycle-Friendly Cities in Europe and North America

by Ralph Buehler 1,* andJohn Pucher 21Urban Affairs and Planning, Virginia Tech Research Center, Arlington, VA 22203, USA2Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Sustainability2022, 14(12), 7293; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14127293Received: 27 April 2022 / Revised: 7 June 2022 / Accepted: 10 June 2022 / Published: 14 June 2022 (This article belongs to the Section Sustainable Urban and Rural Development)DownloadBrowse FiguresVersions Notes WASHINGTON In …

New Study Finds a High Minimum Wage Creates Jobs

MAY 13, 2023 By Eric Levitz, features writer for Intelligencer who covers politics and economics Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images A decade ago, conventional wisdom held that raising the minimum wage would not necessarily benefit low-income workers. The logic of this view went like this: Although some workers would benefit from the government forcing their pay up by fiat, others …

Deb cancellation call

The various debt suspension programmes, such as the Debt Service Suspension Initiative – endorsed by the World Bank and the G20 Finance Ministers – are simply inadequate; a new Oxfam report shows that all of the countries that are eligible for this initiative are still required to pay a minimum of US$33.7 billion to service their debts this year. The amount that is being …

What percentage of Americans are (now) fascist?

Sharlet offers no empirical data on how many US-Americans now fit the fascist/neo-fascist/ “true fascist” profile – the prolific and quantitatively astute political scientist and Marcon Center researcher Anthony DiMaggio (author of Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here) tells me it’s about a quarter of the nation. Sharlet doesn’t tell you how and why the nation’s fascist minority has such lethally …

“Court Reform” or a New Constitution and Real Protection of Liberties?

MAY 19, 2023 “Court Reform” or Popular Revolution, a New Constitution, and a Socialist Supreme Court?BY PAUL STREET What’s really required and cannot be spoken in supposedly “left” liberal circles is a radical reconstruction of the US political superstructure.  We need to move off the killing confines of the 18th Century slaveowners’ constitution that we are still so sickeningly straightjacketed by …

Against Inequality: The Practical and Ethical Case for Abolishing the Superrich

The US could completely eradicate homelessness by taxing away just 2 percent of the wealth of a mere two billionaires, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. If we redistributed 2 percent of the wealth of all the world’s billionaires, leaving completely untouched the wealth of well over 99.9 percent of the world’s population, we could eliminate extreme poverty entirely. Billionaires, meanwhile, would likely …

Forming a distributed and diversified content production and dissemination network to share content and media experiences

…it is essential for progressive media from and sympathetic to the Global South to form a distributed and diversified content production and dissemination network, share content and media experiences, and establish a united international communications front against imperialism and neocolonialism to advocate for peace and development. May 20, 2023, excerpt from Vijay Prashad https://popularresistance.org/can-the-global-south-build-a-new-world-information-and-communication-order/ In the 1970s, as part of …