Portside

Just two weeks after pleading guilty in a major federal fraud case, Amgen, the world's largest biotechnology firm, scored a largely unnoticed coup on Capitol Hill: Lawmakers inserted a paragraph into the "fiscal cliff" bill that did not mention the company by name but strongly favored one of its drugs.

Father of Media Reform Turns 100; Aaron Schwartz case; New York Times dismantles environment desk; Google Wires NYC neighborhood - for free; free Internet in Tel Aviv; North Carolina bill bans community-owned cable networks; Is Broadband Internet Access a Public Utility?; Smartphone now has remote control of your life; Smartphone Users Demand More Data than Tablets; CNET Scandal - Can They be Trusted in the Future; The Atlantic's Scientology Problem; and more...

President Obama's second inaugural address struck a populist tone, but the real news for progressives came last Friday when it was announced that Obama's campaign organization would continue under a new name, Organizing for Action.

While access to abortion is still in theory a right every woman in this country enjoys, an economic chasm has yawned between the well-off and the poor.

The American war in Vietnam was a doomed modern military invasion against a popular, rural-based insurgency for independence...During the ten years (1961-1971) of aerial chemical warfare in Vietnam, U.S. planes sprayed more than twenty million gallons of herbicide defoliants, Agent Orange, the dioxin-contaminated and toxic herbicide constituted about 61 percent of the total herbicides sprayed in the war.The American war in Vietnam was a doomed modern military.

Leo Robinson was a leader of the longshore union in San Francisco. He died this week. For many of us, he was an example of what being an internationalist and a working-class activist was all about.

Bashkar Sunkara earns praise as the founding editor of the online magazine, Jacobin. Started in September 2010, and buoyed by the Occupy movement, the magazine brings left and Marxist reporting in a new way to a new generation.

In Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse has for the first time put together a comprehensive picture, written with mastery and dignity, of what American forces actually were doing in Vietnam. The findings disclose an almost unspeakable truth. Turse discovers that episodes of devastation, murder, massacre, rape, and torture once considered isolated atrocities were in fact the norm,...

The year 2012 may have been the United Nation's International Year of Cooperatives, but 2013 may turn out to be the more historic year for worker-ownership if the Cubans have anything to say about it. ...Cuba's new worker cooperatives will operate pretty much along the same lines as their successful cousins in the capitalist world, including Spain's Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, however they will be free from the distorting effects of capitalist competition...

Barack Obama, the president who publicly swore his second oath of office on the Bibles of Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., used his inaugural address to chart an arc of history from the liberation movements of the sixteenth president’s time through the civil rights movements of a century later to the day on which hundreds of thousands of Americans packed the National Mall to cheer for the promise of an emboldened presidency.