On Friday, a group of young Stratford mums occupied the East Thames Housing Association building (and showroom) and Newham council’s housing offices as part of their ongoing fight for decent social housing in Newham.
Their fight is becoming more and more relevant to anyone who does not have secure housing – which includes a great many people.
Michael Hudson sees a parasitic financial industry that looks only to determine how much wealth it can extract via fees, interest income, and tax breaks, rather than providing capital to increase.
In crucial ways – the scale of its attacks on social security, service privatisation and falling living standards for the majority – Cameron’s coalition has outdone even Margaret Thatcher. Its austerity programme halted recovery for four years and has cut most people’s real terms pay deeper and over a longer period than at any time since the 19th century. Wealth is being energetically redistributed up the income scale.
California’s eugenics program proved so efficient that in the 1930s, Nazi scientists asked California eugenicists for advice on how to run their own sterilization regime. “Germany used California’s program as its chief example that this was a working, successful policy,” says Christina Cogdell, author of Eugenic Design. ”They modeled their law on California’s law.”
After hearing the verdict in the Mark Duggan inquest I went with his family and friends to a local church in Tottenham where we tried to share a private moment before facing the media. A range of emotions was on display, but it is fair to say that stunned disbelief and anger dominated.
The Metropolitan Police Service want their water cannon; they want it by this summer. Previously only employed on the streets of Northern Ireland, the introduction of water cannons is keenly supported by London Mayor, Boris Johnson, to apparently combat a repeat of the 2011 riots
Channel 4’s attempt to stereotype and demonise all of Britain’s 2.49 million unemployed by focussing on just 6 carefully chosen people and showing them in the worst possible light in their programme Benefits Street last night was so successful that Twitter exploded with threats of violence and even death against the participants
On the same day that the government announced it was scrapping the £180-million-a-year Social Fund for the destitute, a new survey showed that the big US internet companies operating in Britain have increased their UK sales last year by 18 per cent but paid even less tax to the Treasury than the year before.
The bill would permit injunctions against anyone of 10 or older who “has engaged or threatens to engage in conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person”. It would replace asbos with ipnas (injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance), which would not only forbid certain forms of behaviour, but also force the recipient to discharge positive obligations. In other words, they can impose a kind of community service order on people who have committed no crime, which could, the law proposes, remain in force for the rest of their lives.
On March 8, 1971, a group of eight Vietnam War protestors broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation field office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole hundreds of government documents that shocked a nation.
The stolen memos, reports and internal correspondence provided the first tangible evidence that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was systematically targeting and harassing hundreds of American citizens then known collectively as “the New Left.”
Millions of older Americans say they will never be able to retire. They simply don’t have the savings. According to CNN, “Roughly three-quarters of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, with little to no emergency savings…50% have less than a three-month cushion and 27% had no savings at all….”
The uprisings of the Arab Spring have so far produced anarchy in Libya, a civil war in Syria, greater autocracy in Bahrain and resumed dictatorial rule in Egypt.
