Portside

Thomas Paine is America’s one great revolutionary theorist. Paine’s brilliance as a writer—his essay “Common Sense” is one of the finest pieces of rhetorical writing in the English language—is matched by his clear and unsentimental understanding of British imperial power. No revolutionist can challenge power if he or she does not grasp how power works.

The State Department’s handling of the Ukraine crisis may go down as a textbook diplomatic fiasco, doing nothing to advance genuine U.S. interests while disrupting cooperation with Moscow and pushing Russia and China back together, reports Robert Parry.

Millennials and racism; Gap hoax; Koch vs Detroit; Indigenous women missing; Swedes and Pop; M.I.A. won't let you miss her new video

Fast food workers earn 1,200 times less than CEOs, the widest disparity of any U.S. economic sector. McDonald’s employees make about $8.25 per hour on average before taxes, and the corporation tacitly acknowledges it pays poverty wages. The company drew flak last year for a website that advised its employees to budget by spending nothing on keeping their homes warm, finding a place to live that costs less than $600 a month and spending $20 a month on health insurance.

12 pt text. 16 pt headings. double spacing.

We need to critically evaluate the concept of waged work. Due to problems associated with underwork, overwork, and non-work, the system of waged labor fails us in many ways.

America's student loan debt crisis is a massive, devastating, trillion dollar morally criminal conspiracy, committed by Wall Street banksters, libertarian billionaires and Reaganomics devotees.

To puncture official indifference, Latin American indigenous women are staging a tribunal on the sidelines of a U.N. permanent forum "to push back the invisibility" about what they suffer. "The justice system really doesn't work for us," says one.

Despite occasional media laments that "protest music is dead," a new generation of performers has been revitalizing music's links to movements, often self-consciously modeled on the folk singers of the past.

Electric chair, firing squad and gas chambers are among execution alternatives amid US lethal injection controversy.