Portside

"The big banks took our homes away through predatory lending. Now, we're taking them back." - signs held by protesters in BlackRock's lobby.

"Too often, when workers raise concerns about health and safety hazards on the job, employers retaliate with reduced hours or dismissal, even though doing so is clearly illegal," says Katie Weatherford, regulatory policy analyst at the Center for Effective Government.

Five Terrifying Truths About the Telecom Giants; One-Stop Shopping for FOIA; Adbusters Creepy Ideology; Hackers for Immigrant Rights; Suarez Gets Pushed Out of PBS

Mondragón has been justly cited as a leading example of what can be done through cooperative organization. But it recently announced that its most important unit, Fagor, was filing for bankruptcy. This raises important larger questions about the market, and longer-term strategies for moving beyond the failings of corporate capitalism and traditional socialism.

Today, Ireland is under a different sort of tyranny, one imposed by the banks and the troika--the EU, ECB and IMF. The oppressors have demanded austerity and more austerity, forcing the public to pick up the tab for bills incurred by profligate private bankers.

The objective of the ideological project of the economics profession in the current era is to provide a theoretical foundation for unregulated financial markets and unregulated capitalism. The fact that the project has succeeded in the face of logic and history is admittedly a fantastic conjurers’ trick, but it is ridiculous to award Nobel Prizes to the conjurers.

There are various things that conservatives and liberals disagree over, and for some insane reason, whether or not the Civil War was about slavery is one of them. Sure, the war ended with the abolition of slavery, but many individuals still claim that the entire war was over states’ rights as opposed to the tradition of owning another human being.

“As someone studying the economics of this, I can say that a financial transactions tax is a policy no-brainer,” Lynn Stout, a professor of corporate law at Cornell Law School, said at a Wednesday briefing on Capitol Hill. “It’s all upside, there’s virtually no downside, and it’s astonishing we don’t have one.”