Portside

When you dare to do big things, big results should be expected. The Sanders program is big, and when you run it through a standard model, you get a big result. - James K. Galbraith (former Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee - the congressional counterpart to the CEA). Paul Krugman in The New York Times has attacked Sanders' economics. Here a number of prominent economists respond, showing how big a change the proposals actually are. They are HUUUGE.

An amazing turn for a major leader of the American Jewish mainstream - David Gordis rethinking view of Israel. He writes: Present day Israel has discarded the rational, the universal and the visionary. These values have been subordinated to a cruel and oppressive occupation, an emphatic materialism, severe inequalities...and distorted by a fanatic, obscurantist and fundamentalist religion which encourages the worst behaviors rather than the best.

Socialism can mean what we citizens wish for it to mean, by exercising our People Power! Hooray for Bernie Sanders! His vision and his rousing passion for the plight of the people is the greatest remedy for the painful ills of humankind that fear and greed have brought us. I warily approve of Hillary Clinton and would want for her "negotiating experience" to prevail. I've been joking for some time now about him teaching her, and teaming up. This would be powerful.

In 1989 five young black men were wrongfully convicted of raping a woman jogging in New York City. Leading the charge against them was a real estate mogul whose divisive rhetoric can be found in his presidential campaign today.

We must resist those voices who urge us to settle for the world as it is.

The uproar over #OscarsSoWhite made me curious. What does the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences value in black performance? Black artists have been nominated for best actress or actor on 30 occasions, for work spanning 28 films. Over the last few weeks, I watched all of them.

From Haiti to Michigan and across the world, millions - especially poor and marginalized populations - are being denied the human right to clean water and sanitation. These water crises, though distinct in important ways, can both be traced back to longstanding human-made systems that have simultaneously neglected and exploited low-income communities of color.

On February 22, Capital & Main launched a week-long series on California’s increasingly severe affordable housing crisis. “No Direction Home” explores how escalating housing prices are undermining the state’s already embattled middle class and exerting intense economic pressure on millions of poor and working-class residents.

After completing a 3-month, 5 nights a week, Metalworkers’ Union Education Program—the “Integrated Program”—Ana received an elementary school certification, vocational training, along with critical thinking. Ana told me after graduation, “Now I am somebody. Now my son talks to me.“ Pride and self-confidence lit up her eyes.

Spike Lee endorsed the Vermont senator on Tuesday. He is the latest in a series of black intellectual heavy-weights to have come out in support of him.