Portside

Brooklyn poet Ally Malinenko offers a sardonic/graphic expose of East Germany's nostalgia for the old days.

Because their traditional allies from the Democratic Party have obsessively embraced corporate-motivated innovations, teacher unions seem paralyzed, unable to respond with a new strategy. They criticize the overuse of standardized tests, but they keep electing Democrats to office who, once elected, more often than not join the corporate attack on education.

A skeptic looks at the human side of game theory.

If the top one percent were taxed at the same rate as the middle 20 percent, states and localities would raise $68 billion per year. Similarly, if the top 20 percent paid the same as the middle 20 percent, states and localities would generate $128 billion each year.

I don’t believe that we have confronted the legacy of our history in a meaningful way…Our interest is really in forcing the country to talk differently about this history,” -- Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative,

While ‘assigned’ to the US military base at Guantánamo Bay, detective Richard Zuley led one of the most brutal interrogations ever conducted at the prison. ‘I’ve never seen anyone stoop to these levels,’ a former Marine Corps prosecutor said. But Benita Johnson, Andre Griggs, Lathierial Boyd and Lee Harris describe Zuley using familiar techniques on them at Chicago police precincts.