Portside

It’s not so much that Obama “sold us out” to a powerful constituency as that he picked the wrong powerful constituency. A quick look at the financial details reveals that health insurance nationalization was always the real “path of least resistance.”

Education reform must be in the public interest—on behalf of public schools and the children who attend them—rather than private interests. This coalition has set itself the task of nothing less than reclaiming “the promise of public education as our nation’s gateway to democracy and racial and economic justice.”

We have working examples of the kinds of cooperative banking and financial institutions we need in order to scale up our vision of a New Economy beyond corporate control: from cooperative banks to credit unions, to federal loans and the community’s own investment. By enriching this sector, we can nurture the power of workers over capital, an age-old struggle that the most recent financial crisis makes only more urgent. But there are real constraints.

American over-policing involves far more than the widely reported up-armoring of your local precinct. It’s also the way police power has entered the DNA of social policy, turning just about every sphere of American life into a police matter.

Unlike so many leaders who rise of power with the support of organized labor but then distance themselves from the movement, Mandela never broke the bond.

It has cost the United States $8 trillion to provide military security in the Gulf since 1976. The supreme tragedy is that the US has bankrupted itself ensuring military security for the oil-producing nations of the Gulf when oil production is destroying the world.

President Obama has pardoned two birds each Thanksgiving for the past five years. In both 2009 and 2012, he pardoned more turkeys than people. Overall, Obama has granted clemency to just 39 people.

The sad reality is that the only households with any 401(k) savings to speak of are white non-Hispanic, college-educated, married couples. Even within this narrow demographic, all but the wealthiest who use retirement accounts as tax shelters, would be better off under a more egalitarian and efficient system.

Teachers unions are facing tumultuous times, grappling with financial, legal and public-relations challenges as they fight to retain their clout and build alliances, and deal with declines in membership.