Portside

Blame interest-rate swaps, not retirees, for the Motor City’s downfall.

• 500 signatories include five Nobel prize winners • Writers demand 'digital bill of rights' to curb abuses

Knesset passes revised law for detention of African asylum seekers - The previous law was struck down by the High Court, which ordered the state to begin releasing the asylum seekers it was indefinitely detaining. Instead, the Knesset passed a law to circumvent the ruling and indefinitely detain asylum seekers in `open prisons.'

Thailand Police Raptured Away in Solidarity; Big Food Portrays Itself As Anti-Big Food; A Plan to Save the Detroit Institute of Art Might Also Save Detroit's Pensions; JP Chase Morgan Reads Reverend Billy the Riot Act; The Phony Philanthropy of eBay's Billionaire Pierre Omidyar; Subtext of Super Heroes is Fascism.

American over-policing involves far more than the widely reported up-armoring of your local precinct. It’s also the way police power has entered the DNA of social policy, turning just about every sphere of American life into a police matter.

We have working examples of the kinds of cooperative banking and financial institutions we need in order to scale up our vision of a New Economy beyond corporate control: from cooperative banks to credit unions, to federal loans and the community’s own investment. By enriching this sector, we can nurture the power of workers over capital, an age-old struggle that the most recent financial crisis makes only more urgent. But there are real constraints.

Education reform must be in the public interest—on behalf of public schools and the children who attend them—rather than private interests. This coalition has set itself the task of nothing less than reclaiming “the promise of public education as our nation’s gateway to democracy and racial and economic justice.”

It’s not so much that Obama “sold us out” to a powerful constituency as that he picked the wrong powerful constituency. A quick look at the financial details reveals that health insurance nationalization was always the real “path of least resistance.”