Portside

“Profiting from Probation: America’s ‘Offender-Funded’ Probation Industry,” describes how more than 1,000 courts in several US states delegate tremendous coercive power to companies that are often subject to little meaningful oversight or regulation. In some of these cases, probation companies act more like abusive debt collectors than probation officers, charging the debtors for their services.

The dark money strategies Noble helped pioneer at the Center are likely to play a substantial role in the upcoming midterms. Targeted blasts of spending by outside groups could have far more effect on this year’s smaller slate of congressional and local races than they had on 2012’s megabuck national and statewide contests, campaign finance experts said.

In one of the worst coal ash spills in U.S. history, up to 27 million gallons of contaminated water and 82,000 tons of coal ash spilled into North Carolina’s Dan River after a pipe burst underneath a waste pond. Did state regulators intentionally block lawsuits against Duke Energy in order to shield the company where Republican Gov. Pat McCrory worked for 28 years?

The well-publicized debate at the Creation Museum was not about two minds sparring.

The story we're told about the protests gripping Kiev bears only the sketchiest relationship with reality

Historic election brings outside interference in the vote of Chattanooga Volkswagen workers

... if the candidate has a real mass base, is building a broad progressive front around a clear, transformational program, and sees the candidacy as one step in a multitiered process, then it might be worth going for it.

"We would no longer know how much was applied and where."

Moral March, Cuba, Koch prosperity, Comcast, UAW Chattanooga,

During the Civil War, strikers and other workers with grievances found a sympathetic ear in the White House and a willingness to use what Lincoln saw as the limited power of his office to allow for a fair contest in disputes between labor and management...