Portside

In an era of fiscal austerity and crisis, mass incarceration has enabled private contractors, municipalities, counties, and states to make money off large numbers of America’s most vulnerable residents. The historical roots of these extractive practices stretch far back in the American past.

Leaks; Hacks; Tweets; Shots; Encryptions

In a groundbreaking effort to close the wage gap between men and women, Massachusetts has become the first state to bar employers from asking about applicants’ salaries before making them job offers. In addition, companies will not be allowed to prohibit their workers from telling others how much they are paid, a move that advocates say can increase salary transparency and help employees uncover disparities.

What we are experiencing today is the natural repercussion of the implosion of centrist politics, owing to a crisis of global capitalism in which a financial crash led to a Great Recession and then to today’s Great Deflation. The right is simply repeating its old trick of drawing upon the righteous anger and frustrated aspirations of the victims to advance its own repugnant agenda.

"By collecting a variety of documents and datasets about the surveillance industry into a single, comprehensive archive, the Surveillance Industry Index offers one of the most complete overviews of surveillance tech being sold around the world," said M.C. McGrath of Transparency Toolkit, who added that the SII "enables people to rapidly filter, find, and understand the surveillance technologies likely to effect their lives and work."

The battle over public education is, in large part, a battle over labor, and there’s no better illustration of that than Philadelphia. In 2013, the city’s School Reform Commission (which is appointed, not elected) closed roughly 10 percent of the city's schools, laid off almost 4,000 teachers and other school staff and, in 2014, terminated the teachers' contract to save on health insurance costs. They remain without a contract to this day.

What do you think #SafetyIs? Too often, conversations about safety revolve around crime and fear. Now more than ever, we know that police are not the pathway to safety, especially for black and brown communities. Join us on August 2nd for Night Out for Safety and Liberation (NOSL) as we redefine and reimagine what public safety really means for our communities.

Strangely, amid the spike in racial tensions after the killing of two black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, and of five white police officers by a black sharpshooter in Dallas, one American reality has gone unmentioned. The U.S. has been fighting wars -- declared, half-declared, and undeclared -- for almost 15 years and, distant as they are, they’ve been coming home in all sorts of barely noted ways.

A new book puts recent bombings in a larger context.

The new initiative will produce the first "truth report" on the U.S. invasion of Panama and could pave the way for reparations for victims.