Portside

Lumumba’s victory gives impetus for progressives to rededicate to the crucial importance of the battle for the South. The South is the historic home of racism, poverty and militarism and the base of the rightwing. The defeat of the personhood amendment and the election of Lumumba give renewed impulse and energy to recent motion of social justice forces throughout the country to make electoral work a key part of our struggle for freedom.

Government spying on millions of innocent Americans is undermining our democracy, destroying our privacy, and quite likely unconstitutional. It is also counterproductive and does not make us safer. But the seeming need for government to collect more and more information keeps on expanding.

Working women, Trans Pacific Partnership, Afghanistan, surveillance and more

In an example of "things getting worse quickly", the stunning Prism revelations actually eclipsed a story released Wednesday about the NSA collecting the phone records of tens of millions of Americans. Progressive movements have also been reluctant to take this privacy issue on as a priority. It's not clear what we've been waiting for but it's clear we can wait no longer. We need to take back what we've lost, before it becomes impossible to do so.

Springsteen, Fogarty: Fortunate Son. Landfill Harmonic Orchestra. Movie: We Steal Secrets. Michele Bachmann's Last Term. Ice Age Art. A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

As the war on terror becomes a war on our privacy, Salon's former CEO launches project to encourage whistle-blowers

We now live in a world where public servants informing the public about government behavior or wrongdoing must practice the tradecraft of drug dealers and spies. Otherwise, these informants could get caught in the web of administrations that view George Orwell’s 1984 as an operations manual.

Chris Kromm and Sue Sturgis at the Institute for Southern Studies argue in the latest issue of The American Prospect that a state can become both more progressive and more conservative at the same time, and that is actually happening in North Carolina -- creating an especially turbulent moment in the state's political history.