books

Parking the Big Money: Tax Havens and Capital Flight

Cass R. Sunstein The New York Review of Books
"The proletariat of each country must, of course, first settle matters with its own bourgeoisie," Marx wrote, but the corporate class formatively battles internationally, including locating fake corporate headquarters to low-tax nations, in effect bleeding their home sovereign nations of tax dollars, starving state services and aiding in turning both governing and opposition parties into austerity regimes. This book and film chart the practice and ways to combat it.

labor

The Military: An Alternative to the Brutalities of the Modern Economy

SCOTT BEAUCHAMP The Atlantic
The millions of service members who live on military bases around the world experience a kind of economic and social security that is foreign to most of America’s middle class. In the military, clothing, food, shelter, and medical care are guaranteed. And although it offers less choice about what to wear or where to live than the private sector, there’s a baseline of care for service members that doesn’t exist in the civilian world.

Martin Shkreli, Rotten Apples and Rotten Systems

Robert Reich Robert Reich
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.

Why Capitalism is Addicted to Oil and Coal

Martin Empson Climate & Capitalism
"FOSSIL CAPITAL" The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, Verso Books, 2016 By Andreas Malm. Reviewed by Martin Empson

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Portside's moderators every day contribute our best at finding and sharing the most interesting and useful material we can for the modest task of remaking the world into a fairer and more peaceful place. We expect no pay -- seeing the material on Portside read and forwarded and acted on is reward enough. Once a year, we appeal to readers to contribute some cash to sustain the Portside infrastructure that makes our work possible. Here's why...

The Shame of Tax Havens

Reuven Avi-Yonah The American Prospect
Tax havens cost the world’s governments hundreds of billions of dollars a year, promote corruption, and undermine the rule of law. They are part of a larger worrisome pattern in which the world’s corporations outrun the governing capacity of states.

books

A Democratically Run Economy Can Replace the Oligarchy

Ron Reosti Harper Collins
Portside is proud to bring our readers a full chapter from the book Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA. Periodically Portside will be sharing with our readers chapters and excerpts from books we feel are noteworthy. What better way to launch, than a book about socialism-in the USA. Ron Reosti's chapter - A Democratically Run Economy Can Replace the Oligarchy - argues we can democratically design and control an economy that satisfies the needs and desires of the people.

F*** a Wage, Take Over the Business: A How-To with Economist Richard Wolff

Andrew Smolski / Richard D. Wolff CounterPunch
This interview discusses wages, the struggle for $15/hr, stagnating worker incomes, and TPP’s attack on wages in the US and develops into a much broader critique of the current system’s political economy, a way to fundamentally alter the way we produce, distribute, and consume. It is not enough to bargain with capitalists. We must instead look to how workers can take over the means of production and employ them for the benefit and wellbeing of all.

Socialism with an American Face

Gar Alperovitz Al Jazeera
Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist, but the US needs its own version, not Denmark's. Socialism, on the other hand, historically has gone far beyond progressive welfare state measures by asserting that a democratic society can be achieved only if it includes democratic ownership of the economy. The steadily evolving localist forms of democratic ownership confront the traditional socialist questions and begin to answer them in novel ways.
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