Portside

A skeptic looks at the human side of game theory.

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 battle is raging in eastern North Carolina as health and environmental justice groups pressure the state, the second leading pork producing state behind Iowa, to more strictly regulate large pig farms. Researchers say fecal waste from the large industrial pig farms is seeping into waterways, and particularly threatening low-income and minority residents. But, the state and the pig industry continue to resist demands for increased regulation.

The issue is violence against children, particularly low income and minority children. But all violence doesn’t come at the end of a gun. Keeping public schools defunded and dysfunctional is also a form of violence. Promoting privatization and competition when kids really need resources is also cruelty. And when society’s evils are visited upon innocent children, teachers alone can’t protect them.

Last week the U.S. paid tribute to former Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. And while Lincoln’s role in ending slavery is now understood to have been more nuanced than his reputation as the great emancipator would suggest, it has taken longer for us to replace stories about cherry trees with truer narratives about George Washington, president and slaveholder. Perhaps we can also honor Ona Judge, one of Washington's slaves that got away.

When President Obama came into office, in what may be the single exception to the rule of the era, he walked back one crucial set of Bush administration policies, ending torture and closing the “black sites” where it occurred. Since then, however, the CIA has expanded. It and the national security state within which it is lodged, has grown, and the process of expanding that shadow government and freeing it from supervision has been unending.

Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma was arrested February 19th for his role in the failed coup attempt against the elected government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Ledezma, who has a long history of right-wing extremist activity in Venezuela, was one of three opposition leaders to have signed a "National Transition Agreement," calling for, among other things, the removal of President Maduro a day before the coup was to have taken place.

In this article Kristof acknowledges he was wrong about unions - As unions wane in American life, it’s also increasingly clear that they were doing a lot of good in sustaining middle class life — especially the private-sector unions that are now dwindling. "To understand the rising inequality, you have to understand the devastation in the labor movement,” says Jake Rosenfeld, a labor expert at the University of Washington and the author of “What Unions No Longer Do.”

The Fox News host has said he was in a "war zone" that apparently no American correspondent reached.

The long-standing bipartisan support for Israel even as it continues to flout international law and undermine the possibility for peace has long been an anomaly in U.S. politics. That’s why those of us who have long advocated change in U.S. policy towards Israel see the growing backlash against the speech as a hopeful sign.