Portside

Pension Funds, Egypt, Inequality, Torture Crimes and more...

A team of economists at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at UMass Amherst broke a huge story this week that was promptly picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, and newspapers around the globe. The economists proved that the essential underpinning "of the intellectual edifice of austerity economics," as Paul Krugman put it, is based on sloppy methodology and spreadsheet coding errors.

Thousands take to streets to highlight pro-reform demands skirmish with security forces ahead of Formula One car race.

I am delighted to announce the launch of a new website www.strategiccorporateresearch.org. This is a comprehensive set of resources for conducting corporate research and strategic campaigns in the U.S. and Canada. Tom Juravich Professor of Labor Studies and Sociology University of Massachusetts Amherst

At least 27 human species have walked the Earth, but only our lineage survived. Our ancestors may have crossed a cerebral Rubicon that led to babies being born “early”

Daniel McGowan is now serving the last six months of his seven-year sentence for an environmentally motivated arson at a halfway house in Brooklyn. The Bureau of Prisons has retaliated against McGowan for writing constitutionally protected political blogs by placing him in a special prison unit and then after he was released, re-imprisoned him when he exercised his free speech rights by writing an article complaining about it. Kafka is twirling in his grave.

Henry Kissinger's quote recently released by Wikileaks, "the illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer," likely brought a smile to his legions of elite media, government, corporate and high society admirers. Oh that Henry! That rapier wit! That trademark insouciance! That naughtiness! It is unlikely, however, that the descendants of his more than 6 million victims in Indochina share in the amusement.

The fact that journalists assigned to cover this story could fail to remember that political violence has been part of the United States landscape for the past decade and more is testament to a narrow definition that dismisses right-wing domestic violence as not really terrorism–and to a will to believe, for partisan or psychological reasons, that George W. Bush "kept us safe" after 9/11. The reality is not so comforting.