Portside

In this new book, Thomas Frank offers an analysis of today's Democratic Party that should serve as a cautionary tale for its supporters in this election year. Writing from the United Kingdom, Adam Barnett offers an appraisal of Frank's findings.

Brilliant, tedious and irredeemably evil, Leni Riefenstahl’s "Triumph of the Will" (1935) is one of the great conundrums of cinema history. Now released on DVD.

CSPG's Poster of the Week honors Internatio­­­­­nal Women's Day by commemorating Berta Cáceres, a well-known indigenous environmental leader in Honduras who was assassinated in her home recently.

Here's a unique piece on twenty-first century American war -- and war-gaming. This is a new-style “war game” that Tom calls “Do-Over” and that anyone, 12 to 75, can play in their home or workplace based on the latest war headlines. Consider this a different way of looking at and taking in the global war on terror (and other American conflicts) in these years. Check it out and then play a round of Do-Over yourself!

While our economy is rebounding from the Great Recession, hardworking Americans are being left behind. Our economic and political system has lost sight of what matters most: We the People.

I turned off onto a long dirt road about 15 miles outside of Montevideo, Uruguay and drove towards a wooden guard shack that stood across from a small farmhouse hidden by a long row of trees. Usually, if you want to meet a country’s president – or even ex-president – you have to fight through layers of bureaucracy, confirm that you are not a threat and have a very good rationale for being considered worthy to talk to.

Racial and ethnic differences in wealth show extreme vulnerability of some nonwhite households in Los Angeles. The authors estimate that the typical U.S.-born black or Mexican family has just 1 percent of the wealth of a typical white family in Los Angeles -- or one cent for every dollar of wealth held by the average white family in the metro area. Koreans hold 7 cents and Vietnamese possess 17 cents for every dollar of wealth owned by comparable white families.

What was the purpose of the 2011 US intervention against Qaddafi? Was it for humanitarian purposes alone? Qaddafi's greatest infrastructure project, the Great Man-made River, was turning arid regions into a breadbasket for Libya; and the $33 billion project was being funded interest-free without foreign debt, through Libya’s own state-owned bank. This project was destroyed by NATO. Ellen Brown finds the motivation to be money, oil and banking.

-30- for Bagdikian; The candidates take the tech test; Trump press-bashing too much for Breitbart scribe; Missing the sick elephant in the room; Hacking the NY Fed; New NYT editorial page head

As it has migrated from social scientists, with their “operational definitions” and facility with math, to the pundit world, however, loose stereotypes and class-prejudiced assumptions have been growing exponentially. It’s becoming a low-level one-sided cultural class war where what Nadine Hubbs calls “the narrating class” blithely assumes that working-class whites are “America’s perpetual bigot class.”