Portside

Colbert out on a Limbaugh; IKEA goes windy; The CEO myth; Normcore: threat or menace; Where's the grief?; Class war with a smiley face

Gregg Shotwell is a retired UAW member who frequently contributes poems to the Blue Collar Review, and is the author of Autoworkers Under the Gun (Haymarket Press, 2012).

Despite being given the largest state tax break in U.S. history, Boeing is shipping jobs out of the state. One guy that nobody listened to predicted it.

The UN's IPCC report on climate change calls for immediate action to deal with a crisis which supersedes and includes all other questions. Meredith Tax says that international pressure on the US government to deal with the crisis is essential, for soon it will be too late.

These are the first two parts of a four-part interview with Costas Lapavitsas focusing on the Era of Financialization and the transformations at the “molecular” level of capitalism that are driving changes in economic performance and policy in both high-income and developing countries. Lapavitsas is a professor of economics at SOAS, University of London, and the author of Financialised Capitalism: Expansion and Crisis (Maia Ediciones, 2009)

Guardian and Washington Post each honored with Pulitzer for Public Service. The Guardian team broke the first report on the NSA's collection of Verizon phone records and Gellman, with help from Poitras, reported on the wide-ranging surveillance program known as "PRISM." In addition to Greenwald, Poitras, MacAskill and Gellman—who are primarily credited for the NSA revelations—a number of other reporters working at the publications also contributed to the reporting

Municipalities contact out an estimated 35 percent of services. The federal government has doubled the amount it spends on contracts since 2000, with most of the spending on services. Yet it is clear that contracting out public services has major negative consequences.

University of California unionized grad-student instructors lead higher-ed fight for fair treatment.

Heck, the LA Times said authorities are cautioning that it is too soon even to call the shootings a “hate crime.” Since the shooter is said to have shouted “Heil Hitler,” I’m going to go out on a limb and say it was a hate crime. And I’m also pretty sure it was a form of terrorism.

Everyone deserves a great public education, but better schools alone can’t fight inequality.