Portside

Progressive Senators who have already criticized the administration on other economic issues — Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Tom Harkin — wrote a letter last spring to Obama, applauding his decision to revisit overtime pay. But in their letter, the liberal Senators also set forth their desired threshold: Around $54,000 per year, rather than $42,000, the amount the Obama administration is supposedly eying.

Naomi Klein disses dystopia; Mexican-American Naomi Klein disses dystopia; Mexican-American studies showdown; The cost of free speech; Philanthropreneurship; Cosby, himself; She's Beautiful

Cologne Cathedral provost Norbert Feldhoff told N-TV that the move was meant to send the message to Pegida's anti-Muslim protesters that "You’re taking part in an action that, from its roots and also from speeches, one can see is Nazi-ist, racist and extremist. And you’re supporting people you really don’t want to support."

On Friday, on the eve of the annual meeting of The American Economic Association in Boston, attended by many of the top economists in the United States, the agents of the heterodoxy had come to declare war on the profession. The small group threw their messages onto the side of the Sheraton Boston in glowing, six-foot tall letters: “BEFORE ECONOMICS CAN PROGRESS, IT MUST ABANDON ITS SUICIDAL FORMALISM.”

While protestors in Mexico have amplified their demands, multiple protests have been organized abroad in more than fifty countries. One of the largest and most notable is in United States, known by the hashtag #USTired2. The protests were organized in November to coordinate nationwide protests on Dec. 3 in support of the Ayotzinapa families. The #USTired2 protests are geared toward pressuring the U.S. government to end Plan Mexico, the bilateral security aid package...

With our banking system in private hands, the simple truth is that as the debt levels accelerate, so does runaway inequality. Therefore key to controlling runaway inequality is to dramatically curtail the power of high finance.

Examining actual weapons would be a breach of confidentiality: how they’re made and put together is secret, and the fewer people that know what’s inside a nuclear bomb, the better. Luckily, a group of scientists have devised a way to use math, and neutrons, to figure out if something’s actually a nuclear weapon, without learning anything about what’s inside it.

Developing a democratically oriented alternative to capitalism can’t be done overnight. This work requires a different sense of time and a deep sense of commitment—the bargaining chips are decades of our lives. But the shifts are already happening in places like Cleveland and Boulder. What we’re seeing is the prehistory, possibly, of the next great change, in which a movement is built from the grassroots that becomes the foundation of a new era.

Not only has Japan failed to compensate the surviving comfort women, but Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has led a nationalist campaign to adamantly deny Japan’s shameful criminal past, has revised history textbooks that previously contained information about Japan’s military sex slaves and is also threatening to revise the Kono Statement.

Systematic undercounting of sexual assaults in the US disguises a hidden rape crisis.