Portside

The recent surge in interest in inversion transactions is explained primarily by U.S. based multinational firms’ increasingly desperate efforts to find a use for their stockpiles of offshore cash (now totaling around $1 trillion).

In analyzing Israel's current military campaign in Gaza, a leading Jewish activist says "the underlying problem is the denial for freedom and basic human rights to millions of people, for decades." The heart of the problem is not Hamas or who the Palestinian leadership is, it is the Israeli occupation, beginning with the expulsion of the Palestinians from their land in 1948 (what the Palestinians term the Nakba or "catastrophe").

The dogs are “true altruists,” essentially willing to shorten their lives for the sake of the hive, They’re even further along the line of evolving into the mammalian equivalent of honeybees than we thought.

In April the city’s Independent Police Review Authority recommended that Evans be stripped of police powers.

The racial disparities that define Ferguson are indeed shocking. More than two-thirds of the town’s residents are black, but almost all of the officials and police officers are white: the mayor and the police chief, five of six city council members, all but one of the members of the school board, fifty of fifty-three police officers.

If the public has a clear understanding of the agenda of the Immelts of the world, and their political allies, it will be better positioned to protect the entitlements that workers depend on have paid for.

Santana -- Soul Sacrifice. Janis Joplin -- A Little Bit Harder, Ball and Chain. Joe Cocker -- With a Little Help From My Friends. Jefferson Airplane -- Somebody to Love, White Rabbit. Woodstock Documentary--Behind the Music.

Almost 20 years after Europe’s worst genocide since World War II, a Dutch court ruled July 16th the Netherlands is liable for the murders of more than 300 Srebrenica victims, saying the Dutch peacekeeping force, the Dutchbat, "should have known" the Bosnian Muslim males it handed over to the Serbian forces of General Ratko Miadic would be massacred. However, the Dutch court cleared the Dutchbat of responsibility for the deaths of more than 7,000 others.

The immigrant workers who helped rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina are the targets of systematic civil rights violations. The federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has launched a series of race-based immigration raids wherever Latinos in New Orleans gather. And those immigrant workers who are organizing to stop what they charge are "unconstitutional, race-based, stop-and-frisk style raids" are being targeted for deportation.

Media portrayals of the mass protests in response to the killing of 18 year-old Michael Brown obscure the serious human rights issue of police violence against African-Americans. Many press reports characterized the protests as a "mob reaction," instead of a "justifiable outpouring of community anger and grief." The media is "doing incalculable damage" by not placing the outpouring of community outrage in Ferguson and beyond in its "political and historical context."