Portside

The latest sanctions, like the ones approved in December . . . represent a victory for a political faction that wants to prevent the normalization of diplomatic relations with Venezuela. It was not a result of pressure from the right in Congress, but came from deep within the Obama administration.

Due, in part, to the environmental concerns posed by unsafe refineries, strikers quickly gained the support of green groups.

With AMC's Halt and Catch Fire's second season arriving soon, a reflection on the first. Halt and Catch Fire's finale reveals it was anti-capitalist all along. For all the early technical bells and whistles, Halt has a straightforward, pleasing story arc—a ragtag team that against long odds and many obstacles does the near impossible—that toward the season’s end ran into a genuinely thought-provoking hurdle: capitalism.

Wall Street banks handed out $28.5 billion in bonuses last year, on top of base salaries, which averaged $190,970 in 2013. Those bonuses are double the annual pay for all 1,007,000 Americans who work full-time at the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour; enough to lift all 2.9 million restaurant servers and bartenders, all 1.5 million home health and personal care aides, or all 2.2 million fast food preparation and serving workers up to $15 per hour.

The Republic majorities in both chambers of Congress have crafted their 2016 budget proposals. In the near term, the proposed cuts would hurt millions of poor people, a large share of them veterans, children and the elderly. Two other factors guarantee the pain could get much worse over the next five years: the sequester caps on spending and a plan to convert Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP or food stamps) into state block grants.

In the Western lexicon of human migration there are still lot of remnants of a white supremacist ideology, with hierarchical classes of words created to differentiate white people from the rest of humanity, with the purpose of putting white people above everyone else. One of those remnants is the word “expat.” What is an expat? And who is an expat? Expat is a term reserved exclusively for western white people who go to work abroad.

With 14 seats, the Arab Joint List became the third-largest party in the next Israeli Knesset. But Israel’s Jewish majority, disdaining the outstretched hand of the Arab minority, soundly rejected the Joint List’s message against racism and division and for equality and democracy. Consequently, in the election aftermath the Israeli Left must prioritize the Jewish-Arab partnership as it confronts a wave of racist legislation and policies.

In a recent speech, noted retired U.S. diplomat, Charles Freeman Jr., offers a frank assessment of the “remarkably rich menu of U.S. foreign-policy failures” in the Middle East. Most, he says, are due to America’s noisy but strategy-free approach, adding, “don’t just sit there, bomb something” isn’t much of a strategy. But, to cure the dysfunction in U.S. Middle East policy, Freeman says, we must cure the dysfunction and venality of our politics.

Where Right Wing Conspiracies Come From. Burned at McDonald's. Documentary: Peace Officer. Buffett's $1B March Madness Bet. LBJ & the Voting Rights Act.