Wertheimer

Five tenants unions from around the country convened Tuesday to announce the launch of a new national organization to take on the power of multistate real-estate capital. The Tenant Union Federation marks the first major national effort at tenant organizing in 40 years.

. . .

Billing itself as a ​“union of unions,” the federation is seeding a movement that hopes to turn tenants into a political force that can’t be ignored.

At the local level, the group’s five founding unions have already racked up an impressive streak of wins spanning a wide range of organizing tactics.

In the last year, the Louisville Tenants Union passed far-reaching restrictions on public funding contributing to gentrification in Louisville; KC Tenants defeated a billionaire-backed stadium tax in Kansas City; Bozeman Tenants United banned new short-term rentals and elected one of their own as mayor in the Montana tourism hotspot; the Connecticut Tenants Union negotiated a collective bargaining agreement with one of New Haven’s largest landlords and Chicago’s Not Me We won ballot referenda backing a landmark anti-displacement ordinance covering the area surrounding the new Obama Presidential Center.

I promise this is true. Will answer what I can without giving away too many clues about the athlete.

Edit: @JoeByeThen@hexbear.net is the winner of this thread, meaning he has paper-scissors-rocked his way to victory over an Olympic gold medalist.

I hate Adam Gopnik.

Championed most effectively by Angela Y. Davis’s “Are Prisons Obsolete?” (2003), the cause may seem no more realistic than the defund-the-police movement that sang so loudly four years ago, at a cost to progressive candidates.

This is a lie: "There’s only one problem with this: there is no empirical basis for this claim in any of the above comments or reports. No studies, no evidence, not even [anecdotes are] ever provided."

Indeed, in a political moment like this one, worrying about the niceties of progressive reform at all may appear as self-distracting as a beachgoer worrying about sandcastle architecture as the sea pulls back on the brink of a tsunami.

Oh, fuck you.

It is also Du Boisian, it must be said, in the way that it gravitates toward class and economic explanations for phenomena not always well suited to them. Davis and others insist that the real villain of mass incarceration in the U.S. must be late capitalism or neoliberalism. In truth, we could empty our prisons tomorrow, and Apple and Google and Amazon and the rest atop the high heap of American enterprise would scarcely notice.

Writer for magazine whose logo is a fop with a monocle really hates class reductionism for some reason

Products from prison labor may slip into the supply lines, but corporations, as a rule, would prefer that they didn’t, since this results in more bad publicity than profit. Inmate labor tends to be done in the service of prisons themselves or government clients like state D.M.V.s. (There’s also the private-prison business, but it’s a shrinking one and houses a small fraction of the incarcerated population.)

The free market would never allow slave labor! And, hey, did you know that private prisons are irrelevant because they don't have the market valuation that Apple does?

There are, in any event, a great many free-market countries in the world, and very few are marked by overstuffed prisons. Mass incarceration remains a distinctively American problem. On the other hand, plenty of anti-capitalist societies have turned to mass incarceration—we speak of the “American Gulag” in honor of another, and nobody looks to Pyongyang for models of penal enlightenment.

There are more incarcerated people per capita in the United States than there were in any non-WWII portion of the gulag's existence. And those incarcerated have a lower life expectancy. (Right? I need help verifying this; I think it's a combination of two studies rather than a single unified study.) EDIT: See this post by @Awoo@hexbear.net

Pre-capitalist societies lacked mass imprisonment, but then—what with all the beheadings, beatings, and banishments—the people they considered criminals weren’t around long enough to be imprisoned.

As usual, the experiences and practices in indigenous cultures are ignored, because the arc of history is a semicircle that only includes Europe.

Sered’s points are sometimes vitiated by the weight of her pieties; her prose suggests someone constantly looking over her shoulder, like a driver going well below the speed limit but still glancing back nervously in fear of a traffic stop, or, anyway, reproach from a captious political ally. What sin might this next sentence commit?

Any problems with the prose of this book must be because of cancel culture!

. . .

Reminder that Adam Gopnik wrote a book about how sad he is that his daughter has better politics than he does. : "A specter is haunting the straight white liberal sixtysomething American dad—the specter of his damn socialist kids. A generation that grew up eating Cold War propaganda with their cornflakes confronts one in which socialism regularly outpolls capitalism, and it’s happening across the breakfast table. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik’s new book, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, is a manual for the dad side, a work of rousing reassurance for open-minded men who are nonetheless sick of losing political debates to teenagers whose meals they buy."

@UlyssesT@hexbear.net got another one? (Calley died in April, but it wasn't reported until today.)

, but many decades too late

https://www.theonion.com/right-ear-right-now-1851606905

You guys would be cluggin' a few cans, too, if you had my wife.

The sister of Willie McCoy, who Vallejo police fatally shot in 2019, was killed in a crash last week and police are investigating the death as a homicide, according to police and the family’s attorney.

Sharmell Mitchell, 48, was taken off life support on Friday after being ejected from a vehicle and suffering head injuries, according to Vallejo police and attorney Melissa Nold.

. . .

One of the detectives assigned to the investigation into Mitchell’s death is Jarrett Tonn, the Vallejo police officer who fatally shot 22-year-old Sean Monterrosa, a San Francisco resident, in 2020 during a night of protests against the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd.

After a third-party investigation found he violated department policies led to his termination, he was reinstated to the department in August 2023. Like the shooting of McCoy, Monterrosa’s killing prompted protests against Vallejo police and calls for justice.

The proponents of a ballot initiative that would allow a new city of 400,000 residents to be built in east Solano County have decided to withdraw the measure and instead prepare a full environmental report on the impact the project would have on everything from the traffic to water to the county’s budget.

In a statement, Solano County Supervisor Mitch Mashburn said the decision came after conversations with California Forever CEO Jan Sramek.

“We have agreed that they will withdraw their measure and not proceed with the election in November,” Mashburn said in a statement. “I think it signals Jan Sramek’s understanding that while the need for more affordable housing and good paying jobs has merit, the timing has been unrealistic.”

. . .

The decision comes two days after a consultant for the county released a scathing assessment of the ballot measure, saying that the plan for the new city was so vague and had so few concrete details that voters lacked the information needed to make an informed decision.

WASHINGTON—In what was widely regarded as a misfire by the 81-year-old as he formally bowed out of the 2024 election, President Joe Biden repeatedly flubbed his exit speech today, saying he would “rule the country with an iron fist for one thousand years.” “Tonight, I, Joseph R. Biden, vow to take back my rightful throne atop the nation and continue my violent reign of terror until the end of time,” said a visibly shaky Biden, who, despite his best efforts to string together a coherent resignation, let out bloodcurdling screams, held up a human skull, and threatened to swiftly vanquish any American foolish enough to oppose him. “Though I may no longer be the Democratic nominee, I shall instead be the Supreme Leader of the United States of America, and all 340 million Americans will address me as such. Otherwise, I shall burn our nation’s cities to the ground and bathe in the ashes. I shall drink the blood of my enemies. And all shall cower before the divine will of Joe Biden! You fools. Ha ha!” At press time, worried-looking aides were shuffling Biden off-camera and telling the press corps that his repeated order to ‘Bow down to the Almighty Biden or be doomed to perish’ was the result of his struggle with a lifelong stutter.

Two days later, crime analyst Kimberly Dunn of the Records and Identification Bureau emailed a team of crime analysts working within the Sheriff’s Information Bureau with instructions to “keep an eye” on me.

“Freelance journalist Cerise Castle is currently working on a series of articles that started being released yesterday. The project is called “A Tradition of Violence: The History of Deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department,” she wrote. “Just something to keep an eye on – to monitor what else she posts as part of this project, and for potential doxing purposes, as well.”

Pat Bev, a basketball player known for dirty plays and last seen throwing a basketball so as to injure a fan, only to miss that fan and hit a woman sitting nearby, has signed with an Israeli team.