Portside

The path to laser weapons is littered with dead lasers. The December 2014 tests on the US Navy's laser weapon were underwhelming. They reminded me of an old cartoon in which someone shot an arrow at the side of a barn, then painted a bulls-eye around the spot where the arrow landed. To add to the questionability of the December tests, they look like they were conjured up in a hurry—perhaps to impress those in charge of the purse strings.

Despite our growing economy and the fact that poor workers are now more educated than ever, rising inequality has worked to keep low-income people in poverty. This increase in inequality was driven by stagnating wages for low- and middle-income households. Since 1979 increasing inequality has been the largest poverty-boosting factor, outweighing racial identity and family structure and completely eclipsing the effects of overall economic growth and educational attainment

The tension between religiosity and secular government goes back to the nation’s founding.

Medicalizing normal human behavior or common symptoms, and renaming subsets or combinations of symptoms, are common strategies to sell drugs.

Trying to explain rising inequality without talking about unions is like explaining why the train is late – the tracks are worn, the weather is bad – without noting that one of its engines has been sabotaged.

RAD is a second cousin to everything from privatized highways to the Affordable Care Act, which keeps the public provision and modest expansion of health insurance mostly private. It could be more cost-effective to just appropriate more direct funds to the program and keep it in the public sector, but Congress is not about to do so.

American kids are getting ready to head back to school. But the schools they’re heading back to differ dramatically by family income. Which helps explain the growing achievement gap between lower and higher-income children. Thirty years ago, the average gap on SAT-type tests between children of families in the richest 10 percent and bottom 10 percent was about 90 points on an 800-point scale. Today it’s 125 points.

People had trouble trying to wrap their minds around how the Passenger Pigeon could disappear,. They came up with all kinds of theories to explain why it wasn’t human’s fault, like that the birds moved to South America and changed their appearance. There is a similar reaction now. There is a common human reaction that when confronted with an inconvenient truth to deny it, You can see it today with climate change.

Countries do need to be able to buy foreign products that they cannot acquire or produce domestically, and for that they need a form of currency or an international credit line that other nations will accept. But countries are increasingly breaking away from the oil- and weapons-backed US dollar as global reserve currency. To resolve the mutually-destructive currency wars will probably take a new Bretton Woods Accord.

Virtually all labor organizations face the expanded challenge of recruiting and maintaining members in already unionized workplaces where the decision to provide financial support for the union has, for better or worse, become voluntary.