Portside

... most people are aware that Wall Street crashed the economy and rode out of town scot-free, collecting unimaginably huge bonuses along the way. But vagueness breeds passivity. Fortunately, we now have Bob Ivry’s Seven Sins of Wall Street as an indispensable guide for tracking down live villains and unburied bodies. By the time you reach the end, all the sheer fury anyone with the merest flutter of a moral pulse felt back in 2008/2009 wells up again, white hot.

The biggest issue . . . is that this is a budget that will continue to impose a drag on the economy . . . While the stimulus approved by Congress boosted growth and added between 2-3 million jobs, the steep deficit reduction of the last three years has slowed the economy, costing millions of jobs. With the housing bubble gone, we are missing close to $1 trillion in annual demand and no mechanism in the private sector that will cause it to replace this demand on its own.

Review of George Packer's "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America." This American life is a mess. As responsible as they were for instigating the Great Recession, Wall Street and the securities industry were not the business centers solely at fault for the lead-up to the collapse. An outsized military budget, imperial wars, the decline of unions as counterweights to corporate excesses and the flight of manufacturing overseas played their parts, too.

Silicon Valley Dreams of Secession; Ms. Marvel is a Muslim; Homeland has a Muslim Problem; NFL Player Quits Football After Studying Chomsky; "Conventional" Racism

Federal Data Sources Lock-Out; NSA Holds Data Files for a Year; Twitter Diplomacy; Inner-City Kids Sophisticated Understanding of Social Media; Allende's Socialist Internet; Obamacare Glitches Shared on Democracy Now! The Shutdown is Now Clogging Up the Data Economy. Thanks,

Bill de Blasio's win in New York's Democratic primary isn't a local story. It's part of a vast shift that could upend three decades of American political thinking. Americans don't necessarily grow more conservative as they age. Sometimes they do. Economic circumstances that have pushed Millennials left are also unlikely to change dramatically anytime soon. de Blasio's mayoral campaign offers a glimpse into what an Occupy-inspired challenge to Clintonism might look like.