Portside

"Moments come and moment pass. But you cannot freeze them if you do not seize them," is the theme of Gene Bruskin's musical exploration of Reconstruction when this nation had the chance to do the right thing. Like then, the moment is still now.

Protests against government corruption and austerity programs in Haiti and Iraq, are directed at corrupt neoliberal governments imposed on them by the use of U.S. military force.

The US territorial march has stopped, but its energies live on at the militarized, brutal US-Mexico border. As US capital finds new frontiers, its government puts clamps on the border, just the latest twist on a hundreds years old American motif.

Last month, Puerto Rico’s federally imposed Fiscal Oversight and Management Board announced its debt-restructuring plan that predictably will expand draconian austerity measures while ignoring policies that would promote economic sustainability.

Rojava: Millions of civilians in northern Syria threatened as US green-lights Turkey’s invasion

“He does not represent us,” writes poet Marge Piercy about the misogynist Senator, but knows the “clichés that light up brains.”

Technology and ride-hailing workers embrace lessons from a book based on ideas associated with a labor group, the IWW, from the early 20th century. The book has provided a blueprint for organizing collective power without a formal union.

The good news is that we can fix tax injustice, right now. There is nothing inherent in modern technology or globalization that destroys our ability to institute a highly progressive tax system. The choice is ours.

Brilliant at what they do, taken into unfamiliar terrain Deep Neural Networks are fundamentally brittle. AI researchers say they are making progress in fixing the flaws, but acknowledge that they’re still groping for new techniques.

Maybe the specter of a lawless president and the example of an insider legal whistleblower who called him out will prod Congress to start creating more protections for those who want to speak truth to power. We need more of those protections.