Portside

Washington policymakers fail to see that social movements, rather than individual leaders like Zelaya, Chávez, or Morales, are the most enduring and potent force of change in Latin America today. These movements were spurred by the very economic policies that the United States has promoted in the region, and repression won’t make them go away.

This is the heart of the new financialism and it is happening all over the country. If this were just one isolated case, we could probably live with it. It might even lead to a new law that would outlaw Ackman's outrageous behavior. But this kind of de-creative destruction is now a central feature of our new financialized economy. It is now routine for big-time investors to make bets against companies and then try to bring those companies down using a variety of tactics.

We can, and must, create common ground between the labor and climate movements. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if God had intended some people to fight just for the environment and others to fight just for the economy, he would have made some people who could live without money and others who could live without water and air. There are not two groups of people, environmentalists and workers. We all need a livelihood and we all need a livable planet to live on.

The bus drivers' strike in Burlington, Vermont succeeded through a powerful combination of workers organizing on the job and organized community solidarity, the roots of which go back to at least 2009.

This working paper was prepared for a forum on the top one percent to be published in the Summer 2013 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. It is an analysis of the pay of the top 1 percent, specifically CEO's and top financial professionals as a form of "rent." In other words, the pay is not related to the talent or the productive effort of these individuals and if it were cut through taxation, there would be no harm to the economy.

What Google knew; Limbaugh eats dirt; Networks take over everything; Hard world of cloud computing; Digitized underground; Robert Knight dies

Conn Hallinan remembers Carl Bloice— Foreign Policy In Focus columnist, longtime journalist and lifetime advocate for the dispossessed.

Computer modelling showed intensification of US-bound Pacific storms, driven by fine aerosols from coal power plants and traffic.

Rights for Mother Earth, not Corporations

When it comes to the environment, organized labor has two hearts beating within a single breast.