Portside

Unions have looked to the US for ideas about how to fight back. They adopted "The Organizing Model," an approach to organizing first developed by the AFL-CIO in the 1980s that is now a core principle in virtually every major labor organization in the US, Europe, Australia, and parts of Asia. While the shift to an "organizing" orientation is more than necessary, it is also less than sufficient to revive the labor movement and it's shortcomings have also become apparent.

Since 1997, we have lived through the biggest real estate bubble in United States history — followed by the most calamitous decline in housing prices that the country has ever seen. Fundamental factors like inflation and construction costs affect home prices, of course. But the radical shifts in housing prices in recent years were caused mainly by investor-induced speculation. Previous events were fundamentally different from the recent housing bubble.

A recent “Spreadsheet Scandal” has rocked the economics world. It has eliminated the last remaining technical argument in support of the President’s “chained CPI” Social Security cut. Earlier this year the IMF admitted they had made errors in their modelling of expenditure multipliers. Now, the darlings of the austerity cultists – Rogoff and Reinhart – has been exposed for errors in spreadsheet coding. Who is ever going to take responsibility for these travesties?

Finding and vaccinating Nigerian nomads may be one of the last obstacles to the eradication of polio. Remote settlements in northern Nigeria remain a challenge for vaccine workers.

Rachel Boynton has created a film that takes an expansive, yet focused, look at how oil makes its way from deep in an ocean off the coast of Ghana to the U.S. stock exchange, and the ensuing complications. The film explores the connections between the Ghanaian company who finds the oil field, the small Texas oil company who drills, the Wall Street private equity partners who invest, and the Ghanaian government officials who manage the contracts.

The revelation that the family of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings was from Chechnya prompted new speculation about the attack as Islamic terrorism. Less discussed was the history of U.S. neocons supporting Chechen terrorists as a strategy to weaken Russia.

Nurses - 'critical new revenue for such critical needs as jobs, healthcare, education, and the international fight against HIV/AIDS and climate change.'

Pension Funds, Egypt, Inequality, Torture Crimes and more...

A team of economists at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at UMass Amherst broke a huge story this week that was promptly picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, and newspapers around the globe. The economists proved that the essential underpinning "of the intellectual edifice of austerity economics," as Paul Krugman put it, is based on sloppy methodology and spreadsheet coding errors.

Thousands take to streets to highlight pro-reform demands skirmish with security forces ahead of Formula One car race.