Portside

NSA phone surveillance will have 'chilling effect' on ACLU'.

Changes are happening. Despite the challenges, more unionists are taking on the job of reform, pushed by the desire to save their unions and keep employers from implementing their unfettered agenda. In the process they are bucking the conventional wisdom that workers should live with less than previous generations.

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

I am genuinely puzzled as to why the Fourth Amendment is no longer taken seriously, much less literally, by any significant faction in American politics. My hypothesis is that whereas the gun manufacturers clearly make big bucks off their weird absolutist interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, there is no set of corporations that would lose billions of dollars if the government snoops into your phone records or email traffic.

Conservative Republicans in our nation’s capital have managed to accomplish something they only dreamed of when Tea Partiers streamed into Congress at the start of 2011: They’ve basically shut Congress down. Meanwhile, the nation's political work has shifted to the states, and the political division among them is widening.

The U.S. owes more than empty apologies in Central America.

Government spying on millions of innocent Americans is undermining our democracy, destroying our privacy, and quite likely unconstitutional. It is also counterproductive and does not make us safer. But the seeming need for government to collect more and more information keeps on expanding.

Lumumba’s victory gives impetus for progressives to rededicate to the crucial importance of the battle for the South. The South is the historic home of racism, poverty and militarism and the base of the rightwing. The defeat of the personhood amendment and the election of Lumumba give renewed impulse and energy to recent motion of social justice forces throughout the country to make electoral work a key part of our struggle for freedom.

The Standard Model is a physical theory of a spectacularly successful sort. It is built on beautiful and deep mathematics, covers almost all known physical phenomena, and agrees precisely with the result of every single experiment ever done to test it. It leaves open a very small number of questions: why this specific combination of groups? What determines the parameters of the model? What about gravity? Does it need to be extended to account for dark matter?

Manning, by whatever means, stumbled into a massive archive of evidence of state-sponsored murder and torture, and for whatever reason, he released it. The debate we should be having is over whether as a people we approve of the acts he uncovered that were being done in our names.