Portside

Since 2005, Amazon has helped create one of the most exploited workforces no one has ever seen. Mechanical Turk is the innovation behind “crowdworking,” the low-wage virtual labor phenomenon that has reinvented piecework for the digital age. Created by Amazon in 2005, it remains one of the central platforms—markets, really—where crowd-based labor is bought and sold.

Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Security Project, said the Obama administration “continues to fight against even basic transparency” about how it justifies the executions of thousands of people under the programme.

An estimated 15,000 activists attended the HKonJ rally last year, bringing thirty buses; this year, the NC NAACP estimated that 80,000-100,000 people rallied in Raleigh, with 100 buses converging from all over the state and country. It was the largest civil rights rally in the South since tens of thousands of voting rights activists marched from Selma to Montgomery in support of the Voting Rights Act.

While Obama talks of putting America on the path to a clean, green future, we're flooding world markets with cheap, high carbon fuels

... this social democratic culture in Latin America, this notion that democracy entails some form of economic justice, which is deep and can’t be rooted out and can’t be expunged, no matter how much Washington and local elites have tried in Latin America ...

Rahm Emanuel’s economic politics put him at the far right wing of the Democratic Party and out of step with the current breed of populist big-city leadership.

The Koch Brothers Left a Confidential Document at Their Last Donor Conference. A list of one-on-one meetings between VIP donors and the Kochs and their operatives offers a revealing look into their mighty political machine. Read It here

Last month, a small delegation of African American artists traveled through Israel and Palestine to get a firsthand look at the daily lives of Palestinians. What they saw shocked and angered them, and their eyewitness accounts are sure to spark debate here as heated as any confrontation in the Middle East. Bill Fletcher Jr., senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, led the delegation and shares his perspective on the region.

The truth about the criminal bloodbath in Iraq cannot be “countered” indefinitely.

In Their Own Words: The Purpose Of The Moral March In Raleigh