Portside

Net neutrality deadline; Big Data World; Donahue spills; Facebook messes with your mind; Changing narrative on Israel-Palestine

These corporate tax scofflaws are so bad that even a top journalistic cheerleader for the corporate class can’t bring itself to defend them.

A deep dive into a single issue: network neutrality and the current debate at the Federal Communications Commission around protecting the future of our open Internet.

John Oliver riffs and rants on America's growing wealth gap

The dominant neoliberal consensus today is that class, race, and gender are just issues of identity. The dominant narrative claims that none of them are structural forces worth bemoaning. None of them have the power to determine our life chances if we don’t want them to. To the contrary, it is the invisibility of the structural dimensions of class, race, and gender that defines current social relations of power

Sanders is the only member of Congress who calls himself a socialist. And if you're wondering how a Democratic socialist differs from a Democrat, he'll point to the time he took to the Senate floor for 8 1/2 hours in 2010, railing against President Obama for supporting Bush-era tax cuts. That's drawn him few fans in corporate America. But in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, a rural dairy farming region, Bernie does really well.

Historians cannot understand the behavior of the American people past and present without paying serious attention to nationalism and religion--or, more precisely, religions, since religion is a weak category. The relationship between religions and foreign relations is more problematic. Thus my text for this sermon is an old American adage, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: For someone with a hammer everything looks like a nail.

The act of illegally crossing the border into the United States used to be treated as a civil offence resulting in deportation. But the decision of the federal government several years ago to treat illegal crossings as a criminal offence has led a mass incarceration of immigrants in segregated facilities.

Jazz is by nature a contradiction. No other music is so dependent upon individuality, but it hinges on an interplay with others in a giving, attentive way that emphasizes communication and communion. The single voice is key, but it takes on a rare power within the ensemble. Charlie Haden embodied that duality with a vital and beautiful grace.