Portside

Washington's clumsy efforts to de-legitimise Venezuela's election mark a escalation of its push for regime change.

Book Review - In Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, by Ira Katznelson. Was the mid-century dominance of southern Democrats essential to the defeat of Hitler and the triumph of American democracy?

The capture of bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev presents an opportunity to show that fighting terrorism doesn't require abandoning the Constitution.

Editorial touting potential vulnerabilities for Portland Teachers to win community support for their demands.

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.

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.

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?

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.