Daniel Imperato – Official Website
Daniel Imperato For President 2024
Berale Crombie, co-founder of Tekuma 23, an NGO striving to build support for judicial reform, explains why he’s optimistic, despite all the hurdles and seeming lack of progress.
The post WATCH: Right-wing activist optimistic about judicial reform – here’s why appeared first on World Israel News.
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Tragedy struck in Valley Mills, Texas, on Friday when Grayson Boggs, a six-year-old boy, passed away after being struck by lightning. This same lightning bolt had taken his father’s life, 34-year-old Matthew Boggs, just weeks before.
The incident occurred on May 15 when Grayson and his brother Elijah, 11, were dropped off from school by a bus. When the family was walking home, Grayson and his father held hands when a lightning bolt suddenly struck Mr. Boggs’ body and traveled to Grayson.
The intense force of the lightning bolt caused them both to be thrown out of their shoes and to land face-down on the driveway. When family members rolled Mr. Boggs over, they saw he had already turned blue. While a neighbor started life-saving measures on Mr. Boggs, family members began CPR on Grayson. Unfortunately, Mr. Boggs did not survive.
Grayson was then taken to Baylor Scott & White McLane Children’s Medical Center in Temple, Texas, where he had been on a ventilator and having seizures for the past four weeks. Unfortunately, doctors informed the family that Grayson’s condition would not improve, and he was taken off the ventilator on Tuesday. He passed away at 5:05 p.m. on Friday.
To cover the funeral expenses, a GoFundMe page was created by a cousin. This page has since raised over $89,000.
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At a campground near the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington State, where the Beyond Wonderland electronic dance music festival was taking place, two people were killed and three more were injured following a mass shooting on Saturday night.
At 8:23 p.m. local time, law enforcement responded to reports of shots fired into the crowd. According to Kyle Foreman, a public information officer with the Grant County Sheriff’s Office, the suspect was “randomly shooting into the crowd” and eventually taken into custody. Foreman did not provide any information about the victims or the type of weapon used.
Despite the incident, the concert in the city of Gorge, located 149 miles east of Seattle, was still going ahead as planned. A tweet from the festival organizers advised attendees to steer clear of a specific gate to the campground, but stated that there was no danger.
According to Gun Violence archive, a nonprofit organization dedicated to tracking incidents, there have been 307 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2023 so far. The organization defines a mass shooting as an event in which at least four people, other than the shooter, are shot. Motives and intentions of the shooter in this incident remain unknown.
Tenants of a low-rent apartment building in Toronto, Canada, protesting evictions, July 16, 2022. (Steve Russell / Toronto Star via Getty Images)
Review of the The Tenant Class by Ricardo Tranjan (Between the Lines, 2023).
What if there is no housing crisis, but a housing market working exactly as designed?
Ricardo Tranjan’s The Tenant Class rests on this premise, effortlessly dismantling apolitical narratives of Canada’s housing system to reveal an intentionally obscured class struggle between exploited tenants and extractive landlords — most of whom wouldn’t have it any other way.
In this timely and refreshing manifesto, Tranjan takes aim at Canada’s structurally inequitable and increasingly deregulated rental market, which prevents, rather than promotes, housing security, affordability, and adequacy among tenants.
He draws parallels between exploitative labor relations and the exploitative rental market to describe how property-owning landlords amass wealth on the backs of tenants — all thanks to government complicity dating back to the dispossession of indigenous lands and creation of property rights.
He then uses historical and contemporary tenant organizing stories — alongside his own professional and lived experiences as a political economist, policy researcher, and child of turbulent 1980s Brazil — to argue that the only solution is a struggle: the tenant class must organize to build political power and demand a more equitable, regulated, and largely nonmarket housing system.
To create the conditions for social change, Tranjan also calls on progressive researchers and allies to practically feed and support on-the-ground movements. After all, “it takes political power to go up against the landlord class and force governments to rein in markets,” and part of building that power involves addressing the cultural marginalization of the tenant class.
But more than that, it requires that the rest of society sees and names the class struggle within Canada’s housing system for what it is. To this end, Tranjan advances a simple and unsettling provocation in the last chapter, reminding readers of their own agency: “now the question is . . . where you stand.”
The message is clear: it’s time to pick a side in this class struggle. There is no neutrality in the face of injustice, disinformation, and exploitation.
The Tenant Class practices what it preaches, systematically busting harmful myths about tenants and “struggling landlords” while offering compelling and research-backed arguments, stories, and quips, which can be mobilized by organizers and advocates to push for housing justice. And though it may not be politically palatable to the roughly two-thirds of the population who benefit from the status quo (namely, property owners), Tranjan’s clear and incisive class-based analysis extricates itself from the endless housing “policy merry-go-round” in important and radical ways.
For one, Tranjan decisively names the power-holders that feed, constitute, and enable the elite landlord class in its mission to extract more and more income from tenants. From homeowners to industry players, landlords, real estate investment firms, pension funds, developers, banks, and other mortgage providers, he makes apparent that a huge segment of the population benefits from a housing market in which rents rise faster and faster, untethered from income, inflation rates, and vacancy rates (not to mention human rights standards).
This doesn’t happen in a vacuum, however — government laws and policies (or lack thereof), institutions like landlord and tenant boards, and mainstream moral standards permit and legitimize this wealth accumulation. Meanwhile, disproportionately racialized, low-income, and already marginalized peoples in, or in need of, rental housing face deepening intergenerational poverty at the hands of the property-owning elite — a fact that is conveniently obscured in our mainstream news media and consciousness.
Tranjan thus argues that mainstream narratives that frame the “housing crisis” as an apolitical, complex, or new issue that requires technical or win-win solutions only serve the interests of the elite. In fact, these elites pour money and resources into making these narratives appear to be common sense or the way of the world, particularly through their influence over news media and government. They even co-opt progressive language (like the language of human rights, equity, and “affordable housing”) or use disinformation to undermine criticism, disguise their exploitative policies and practices, and maintain the status quo.
“Supply-side” arguments constitute one such narrative, suggesting that we simply need to build more housing faster to make housing affordable — a solution that conveniently involves sweetening the deal for developers and landlords through financial incentives. And, as Tranjan notes, our governments reproduce, pander to, and invest in these narratives.
Take Canada’s National Housing Strategy, for example. Steeped in supply-side logic, the strategy funnels billions of dollars to for-profit developers who produce housing that, more often than not, ends up contributing to, rather than addressing, the root causes of unaffordability, homelessness, and housing inequity. Yet, insidiously, the strategy uses the language of human rights and affordability to disguise these extractive practices.
In the context of my own work to implement the human right to adequate housing via federal policy, I see these dynamics firsthand. Well-intentioned and progressive housing policy professionals too often become trapped in cycles of consultation, make-work, and self-censorship with governments, only to have their research and solutions shelved time and time again.
Government and sector leaders engage in the endless “merry-go-round” of debating policy tweaks or Band-Aid solutions to homelessness and inadequate housing rather than meaningful, structural, and human rights–based change. And all the while, our political and policy leaders (many of whom are part of the elite class) manage to evade naming and regulating the profiteers and beneficiaries of housing injustice.
This reality is what makes The Tenant Class so powerful, timely, and necessary. It resists the cyclical dynamics of the housing discourse and reminds readers of what tenant movements have known for decades: the problem is political, not technical. And importantly, profit doesn’t have to be part of the housing equation.
Drawing from inspirational stories of defiant tenant movements, resistance, and power, Tranjan places our contemporary “housing crisis” within a century-long history of class-based struggles — struggles that are ongoing.
The book reminds tenants of their agency and allies of the need to center and support those tenants, all while recognizing that “the challenge for the tenant class is not to find solutions for the so-called housing crisis, but to enact the solutions we know work”: namely, moving as much housing as possible outside of the private market (i.e., to increase nonmarket housing); tightly regulating private market housing (i.e., via tenant protections, rent and vacancy controls, etc.); and keeping tenants organized to ensure ongoing political pressure and access to adequate, affordable, and secure housing.
In this way, The Tenant Class stands apart from the mainstream housing paradigm and gets to the heart of Canada’s so-called housing crisis with precision and conviction. Weaving together history, data, and stories with thoughtful ease that makes the complex feel accessible, it serves as fuel for social change and vividly demonstrates the power of collective action. It paints a vision of a housing system that decenters profit in favor of justice, democracy, and human rights — one in which everyone has access to safe, affordable, and dignified housing.
And, most importantly, it makes social change feel possible so long as readers confront the reality of our class-based housing system head on.
This book is, therefore, a must-read for tenants, housing advocates, policy professionals, or “anyone else interested in rental housing.”
To tenants, it says: join or start a tenant union — you have the power to fight back.
To housing advocates and policy wonks, it says: now is the time to organize, build political pressure, and link arms with tenant movements who have been doing this work all along.
And to everyone else, it says: pick a side. Do you stand in solidarity with the rising tenant class, or will you uphold the exploitative status quo?
Tranjan doesn’t let anyone off the hook in this compelling piece, asserting that it is up to all of us to take up the mantle of tenant organizing, to support those on the front lines of the struggle, and to demand a world in which adequate housing is truly for everyone.
The site of the planned consular office is currently being used as a parking lot.
By Pesach Benson, TPS
Russia and Israel signed an agreement to open a consulate office in Jerusalem, Israel’s Foreign Ministry and the Russian embassy announced on Friday. But why now?
The agreed-upon location in central Jerusalem resolves a long-running dispute over a plot of land located at the corner of what is now King George V and Ma’alot Streets. The plot of land was purchased by Russia in 1885.
The Jerusalem municipality is reportedly relinquishing claims on years of unpaid taxes as well as cancelling a plan to expropriate a portion of the property for the construction of a light rail line on King George St., a main traffic artery.
The site of the planned consular office is currently being used as a parking lot. The announcements did not indicate a timetable for when construction will begin or when the Russians hope to open the consulate.
Professor Ze’ev Khanin, an expert on post-Soviet politics and society at Bar Ilan University, told the Tazpit Press Service that there were several factors behind the timing of the agreement.
“There are very few Western countries that are ready to have anything to do with Russia. It’s important for them that Israel as a Western country is able or ready to sign an agreement. They need to show to the Russian public any success in a foreign policy issue. That’s what they need at the moment,” Khanin explained.
Another reason, Khanin said, is that “Putin is desperate to reach understandings and get support from the Arab countries, like the Saudi bloc.” Opening a consulate in Jerusalem signals to the Arabs that “Russia has other options in the Middle East.”
Khanin also noted that the agreement on the consulate was actually reached a month ago, but the announcement’s timing may also be a counterweight to Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska’s visit to Israel this week.
Khanin said that “Israel is interested to keep a balanced relationship with Russia, meaning our interest on the northern borders like Syria and so on,” referring to Israeli airstrikes against Iran and its proxy terror groups. Israel and Russia have security coordination to avoid firing on each other, but that arrangement has been strained by the war in Ukraine.
Then there’s the issue of Russian Orthodox Church properties in the Holy Land.
That issue, he explained, goes back 20 years to the unification of the Russian Orthodox Church, which split during the Bolshevik Revolution. The church owns dozens of properties in Jerusalem and more around Israel that were purchased in the 19th century.
“Now Russia is demanding these properties back. Some properties have been returned, and it’s in Russia’s interests to get the rest of the properties back. It has a lot to do with church politics,” Khanin said. “Israel wants to close this chapter on the church properties.”
Khanin stressed that a number of European countries also maintain consulates in Jerusalem, so the fact that Russia is doing likewise “is not dramatic.”
Russia unexpectedly recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in April 2017, but maintains its embassy in Tel Aviv.
The U.S., Guatemala, Honduras and Kosovo maintain embassies in Jerusalem.
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Dimitri Lascaris will embark upon a Canada-wide speaking tour next week to report back to Canadians about his recent mission of peace to Russia. The title of the tour is “Making Peace With Russia, One Handshake At A Time.”
In …
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