Portside

The punditry is already rushing to crown Clinton the Democratic winner. However, the growing divide among Democrats between the older and the younger deserves more attention. The Clinton campaign people are certain that the threat posed by Trump or Cruz will help mobilize Democratic turnout. But a party whose leaders are selling more of the same may well find it hard to inspire young voters and independents who are looking for a very new deal.

Some progressives joined with the racist, reactionary right in opposing Evo Morales' bid for another term in office. They forgot that a ‘Yes’ for Evo was a yes for the longer history of struggle and hope for its future. As the gas bonanza enters difficult days, we can hope that the progressive ‘No’ of the NGOs and the bookish classes can return to the popular ‘Yes’ of the movements. For those on the edges of society, Evo had come to mean hope and possibility.

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner's slate of labor-busting measures has touched off a lengthy budget impasse in Springfield.

"This is incredible news for our beaches, for our family vacations, and for sea turtles and whales," said Maggie Alt, executive director of Environment America. "Atlantic coastal communities spoke up loudly and clearly against drilling and spilling, and today the president is standing with them."

How the people of Chicago silenced Donald Trump. Faced, not with the threat of violence but lack of control of the message or the montage, Trump retreated.

As it has migrated from social scientists, with their “operational definitions” and facility with math, to the pundit world, however, loose stereotypes and class-prejudiced assumptions have been growing exponentially. It’s becoming a low-level one-sided cultural class war where what Nadine Hubbs calls “the narrating class” blithely assumes that working-class whites are “America’s perpetual bigot class.”

-30- for Bagdikian; The candidates take the tech test; Trump press-bashing too much for Breitbart scribe; Missing the sick elephant in the room; Hacking the NY Fed; New NYT editorial page head

What was the purpose of the 2011 US intervention against Qaddafi? Was it for humanitarian purposes alone? Qaddafi's greatest infrastructure project, the Great Man-made River, was turning arid regions into a breadbasket for Libya; and the $33 billion project was being funded interest-free without foreign debt, through Libya’s own state-owned bank. This project was destroyed by NATO. Ellen Brown finds the motivation to be money, oil and banking.

Racial and ethnic differences in wealth show extreme vulnerability of some nonwhite households in Los Angeles. The authors estimate that the typical U.S.-born black or Mexican family has just 1 percent of the wealth of a typical white family in Los Angeles -- or one cent for every dollar of wealth held by the average white family in the metro area. Koreans hold 7 cents and Vietnamese possess 17 cents for every dollar of wealth owned by comparable white families.

I turned off onto a long dirt road about 15 miles outside of Montevideo, Uruguay and drove towards a wooden guard shack that stood across from a small farmhouse hidden by a long row of trees. Usually, if you want to meet a country’s president – or even ex-president – you have to fight through layers of bureaucracy, confirm that you are not a threat and have a very good rationale for being considered worthy to talk to.