Portside

Why the World Cup should not be Brazil's priority. Flashmob Carmina Burana. John Oliver, immigration and pro wrestling. Gandolfini's other work: Wartorn. Movie: How to Make Money Selling Drugs. Dance-off at the office.

UAW President Bob King, seeking to extend the union's base into auto plants across the South, has endorsed a German-style labor structure for a range of U.S. factories -- not just ones owned by German automakers such as Volkswagen AG but also Detroit Big 3 plants with existing UAW contracts and nonunion assembly plants in the South.

When 10 Nobel Laureates call on President Obama to reject once and for all the Keystone XL oil pipeline, perhaps it's time he do that.

Gar Alperovitz and Staughton Lynd have blueprints for an `America beyond capitalism.' Both imagine a new America that would evolve through painstaking process in which the virtues of democratic socialism would be prefigured. They offer a component of the answer to what a new New Left must do. Democracy and egalitarianism animates both visions, but neither fully imagines how the Left might gain and use state power or how to change the national or global economic rules.

Bertolt Brecht on whistle-blowers, those who oppose their own governments immoral activities; Reader Comments on NSA Spying; Civil Liberties Suit; Edward Snowden; Angela Davis; Undercounting the Poor; Syria; The Rosenberg Case ; Paleo Diet; Announcements - Meeropol, granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; Manifesto and Petition in Support of the Monument to the International Brigades in Madrid - Help by signing.

The Pentagon Papers that Ellsberg exposed were not military secrets. They were historical secrets - a history of U.S. intervention and deceit that Ellsberg believed, if widely known, would undermine the U.S. pretexts in defense of the war's prosecution. Like today's whistle-blowers Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg knew the consequences for his act of defiance. He was indicted on 11 counts of theft and violation of the Espionage Act.

The Civitas Institute is publicizing the names, residence, political registration, employers, and other details of those arrested at the ongoing NAACP-organized protests at the legislature. The project calls to mind how Southern Dixiecrats and opponents of civil rights once published the names of NAACP supporters in newspapers to encourage retaliation against them.