Portside

Scary because ... over 100 bills introduced in 2013, backed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and heavily funded by the Kochs, seek to drive down wages, benefits, and worker rights.

In recent months -- and it’s the curse of an author that sometimes you change your mind after your book is in type -- I’ve come to like the idea of capital L leaders less and less. It seems to me to miss the particular promise of this moment: that we could conceive of, and pursue, movements in new ways.

Scores of communities worldwide have been building these roll-your-own networks—often because a mesh can also be used as a cheap way to access the regular internet. But along the way people are discovering an intriguing upside: Their new digital spaces are autonomous and relatively safe from outside meddling.

The Supreme Court’s decision gutting the Voting Rights Act in late June and the acquittal of George Zimmerman less than three weeks later make this year’s march “exponentially more urgent” with respect to pressuring Congress and arousing the conscience of the nation, says Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP, a co-sponsor of the march.

The conservative justices’ decision this past June in Shelby County v. Holder, striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, has already unleashed in North Carolina the most restrictive voting law we’ve seen since the 1965 enactment of the VRA. Texas is restoring its voter ID law which had been blocked (pursuant to the VRA) by the federal government. And more is to come in other states dominated by Republican legislatures.

The Right’s policy nostrums are failing across the board – from free-market extremism to austerity as a cure for recession to continuing the old health-care dysfunction – leaving only an ideological faith that this is what the Framers wanted. But that right-wing “history” is just one more illusion, writes Robert Parry.

Other People's Money: Inside the Housing Crisis and the Demise of the Greatest Real Estate Deal Ever Made was what the trade calls OPM, or other's people's money, that was lost, mostly in investments from pension funds that were then bundled and sold as mortgage-linked securities. With many mortgages shaky, these securities made for a toxic stew, and that practice nationwide fed the housing collapse and the onset of the Great Recession in late 2007.

The myth: Darwin's friends cooked up a scheme to rob the working-class Wallace of his priority and instead put their friend Darwin first. The fact: every substantive claim in the popular narrative about Wallace turns out to be incorrect. As Wallace himself wrote: "this vast, this totally unprecedented change in public opinion has been the result of the work of one man, and was brought about in the short space of twenty years!"

How did our 1 percent get so darn rich? And what would happen if we took some of their money away?

Kelly, the district’s largest school, also took the biggest budget hit for what CPS called a projected enrollment drop of 200-250 students, though CPS still considers it overcrowded as well. The school has laid off 23 teachers, 10 support staff and will also lose seven security guards, as well.“Our enrollment is supposedly down, which is why they explained the $4 million in cuts, but apparently we need new schools,” said Carolyn Brown, one of the teacher representatives.