Portside

Austerity and corruption – and disgust at the style of the presidency – have created profound disillusionment on the left

For 40 years, many economists' have promoted increasing cost sharing through higher copayments and deductibles, the replacement of fee-for-service payment systems with capitation as in Health Maintenance Organizations, and competition where multiple insurers offer a variety of plans catered to individual consumer's interests and in competition with each other. These practices have produced the worst of all worlds, rising costs along with restrictions on access.

Guantánamo is not an anomaly. Prisoners — who are on U.S. soil and not an inaccessible island military base — are routinely and systematically force-fed every day.

Following a five-day organizing training and strategy summit in Birmingham, members of the labor group OUR Walmart, a non-union organization backed by the United Food & Commercial Workers union, will announce a plan to send civil rights movement–style caravans of workers from around country to converge at the retail giant’s June 7 annual shareholder meeting.

The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed after the attacks of 11 September 2001, and provides the legal cornerstone for the so-called US "war on terror". It allows the US government to wage war at anytime, any place and on anyone deemed a threat to national security – with remarkably little evidence needed.

Port workers at billionaire Li Ka- shing’s Hongkong International Terminals Ltd. ended the longest strike at Hong Kong’s container terminal as they accepted a 9.8 percent wage increase, resolving a dispute that damaged the city’s reputation as a trade hub.

Port workers at billionaire Li Ka- shing’s Hongkong International Terminals Ltd. ended the longest strike at Hong Kong’s container terminal as they accepted a 9.8 percent wage increase, resolving a dispute that damaged the city’s reputation as a trade hub.

That $9.2 billion tax bill that Apple dodged in cooking up a scheme this week to finance a $55 billion stock buyback for its shareholders would have been enough to make unnecessary all of the major budget cuts in the sequester. That's not counting the tax dodges of Bank of America, Citigroup, ExxonMobil, FedEx, General Electric, Honeywell, Merck, Microsoft, Pfizer, and Verizon.