Portside

Unlike most other countries, the United States doesn’t control drug prices. It leaves pricing up to the market, which enables drug companies to charge as much as the market will bear. So what, exactly, did Martin Shkreli do wrong, by the standards of today’s capitalism? It’s easy to go after bad guys, much harder to go after bad systems.

There’s no getting around the fact that climate change is a bummer. The planet is warming, ice is melting, oceans are acidifying and, well, you get the point. While the bad news is important — it lets us know what we’re getting into with this whole climate change thing — it’s also worth remembering there’s reason for hope.

After World War II, the Red Scare built the careers of redbaiters like Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon while undermining the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and stifling prospects for progressive politics in America, a tale touched on by the movie, “Trumbo.”

A nasty and incurable fungus has spread through the banana-producing countries around the world, and it could be making its way straight toward banana heartland: Latin America, which produces 80 percent of the world's exports, threatening to drive the most popular variety of banana to extinction. So scientists are focusing on building a better banana to withstand the fungal assault.

New Zealand poet John Sweden describes life as "seamless," meaning that the human-made divisions of nationality, ethnicity, even bodily labels and ego, are part of seamless flow that transcends one's life. .

This year's annual report from the US Conference of Mayors details just how prevalent hunger and homelessness are in our cities.

Conservative arguments make it seem like poverty is a puzzle. But, according to Philip N. Cohen, we've already figured out ways of reducing poverty among large sections of the population. We should just use what works to reduce poverty.

A new party of the Left in Spain has surprised pundits by winning big in last Sunday's elections by running on an an-austerity program. Mark Weisbrot offers some background and an analysis of how these developments fit within the overall "post-recession" Eurozone crisis.

The 40th anniversary of the demise of baseball's oppressive reserve clause is cause for celebration for those who care about labor rights in sports and society as a whole. But we should also realize the ways that the trajectory of the new baseball labor structure resembles some of the most pressing political economic problems facing Americans today.