Portside

Refugees; Exxon is Exxon; VW & business ethics; Bye bye centerfold; WalMart sucks eggs

The nationalists say, “An agreement will never be possible with those bloodthirsty people.” The center-left says, “There’s no way to live together.” The common denominator is racism, and the assumption that the hatred will last forever. To this we must add the arguments over the Jewish state’s sanctity and the end of the Zionist project. In short, one state means the end of the world. And now to the facts. One state already exists here, and has done so for 48 years.

Meet the families funding our elections. Aside from a few candid primitives like the Koch brothers and casino-rich Sheldon Adelson, the new donor elite do bookkeeping mystery magic to hide where their money is coming from. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision made it so easy for them to secretly dump cash on candidates via post office boxes or anonymous trusts, anything to obscure the source.

Guardian lawsuit exposes fullest scale yet of detentions at off-the-books interrogation warehouse.

While the international media focused on the official meetings, no news outlets outside of Latin America have mentioned the Plataforma Alternativa conference — a parallel three-day meeting organized under the theme “Belying the ‘Peruvian Miracle.’” More than 1,200 people attended Plataforma Alternativa’s conference. Participants represented dozens of organizations and diverse countries.

Outsourcing distribution has been an effective way for grocers to dump their relatively expensive unionized workforces.

The government’s 2015 dietary guidelines currently in preparation by the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services have triggered a ferocious food industry backlash.

Tipping creates a two-tier wage system in the restaurant industry. The practice should be stopped everywhere.

July 2015 Paul Castaway was shot and killed by Denver police while holding a knife to his own throat. Police initially claimed that Castaway, a mentally ill Indigenous man, had charged them with a knife after stabbing his own mother. Surveillance footage would later contradict those claims and support the accounts of Castaway's family and other witnesses, who have maintained that Castaway menaced no one but himself with the knife in his hand.

Tea Party rebels are exposing the deep rifts between country-club elites and social-issue hard-liners.