Portside

Facing a Scottish referendum on independence September 18th that suddenly appears to close to call, the not so united United Kingdom and its pro-unionist partners in Scotland are panicking and resorting to desperate measures. If, after 307 years as a part of the United Kingdom, Scotland votes to secede, the UK loses one-third of its land mass and 10 percent of its Gross National Product.

Cuba's Minister of Public Health announced September 12th that Cuba would be sending a medical team of 165 experienced medical professionals to Sierra Leone to help combat the Ebola crisis there. The announcement, which came at the World Health Organization's headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, represents "the largest offer of a foreign medical team from a single country during this outbreak," according to WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan.

A damning report released last week by the Sentencing Project lays bare how racial bias, and the interconnecting systemic structures that reinforce it, disproportionately affect African-Americans. The report, a powerful condemnation of the "perversity" of racial oppression, reveals how "the overassociation" of blacks with criminality has a devastating impact on society in general and Black and other people of color in particular.

In yet another example of a corporation using international laws to prevent countries from restricting their profits, an obscure tribunal housed at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. will soon decide the fate of millions of people in El Salvador. At issue is whether the government of El Salvador will be punished for refusing to let a Canadian mining company operate on its territory because it wants to protect its main source of water.

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