Portside

Reader Comments: The Racial Divide; Take Down the Flag; Call It What It Is, Or Be Complicit; The Charleston Massacre - A Hate Crime; Racial Violence in America; Greek Debt Truth Committee - Debt Cannot and Should Not Be Paid; American Century has Plunged the World into Crisis; Rachel Dolezal; Israeli Nukes; BDS is costing Israel big money; Alexander Hamilton and Andrew Jackson; Announcement - Celebration of Danny Schechter's Life

Detroit's bankruptcy wasn't inevitable. Neither is Chicago's. But the austerity hawks don't want you to know that...When cities and states borrow money by issuing bonds, the lenders are typically high-wealth individuals, who purchase the bonds to get a tax break. It is a perverse system through which, rather than paying their fair share in taxes, the wealthy are instead able to lend that money to us, charge us interest for it, and then claim a further tax break on it.

Immediately following the posting June 20th of the article George Soros: Puppet Master Behind the Ukrainian Regime a number of moderators raised serious concerns about both its content and source. And it was unanimously decided that we would remove it from our website, which we did. Further inquiries and comments from our readers confirmed that decision. It should never have been posted.

Bryan Stevenson has spent most of his career challenging bias against minorities and the poor in the criminal justice system. He is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery, Ala., an advocacy group that opposes mass incarceration and racial injustice. Stevenson is a member of The Marshall Project’s advisory board. He spoke with Corey Johnson. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Congratulations to Columbia University student activists in the group, Columbia Prison Divest, who successfully launched a campaign protesting their school's investment in private prisons. Columbia University will sell its roughly 220,000 shares in G4S, the world's largest private security firm, as well as its shares in the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company in the U.S.

Strict gun laws with harsh penalties aimed at punishing violent criminals can ensnare law-abiding people who make mistakes. That these laws often affect people of color is not at all new. The history of gun control in this country is long and has usually been directly or indirectly tied to race.

Americans' confidence in the police is down to 52%, an all time low since 1993 in the wake of the the Rodney King police beating. Although this Gallup report concludes that the 52% figure means that the "majority of American remain confident in this institution and have more faith in it than in most other institutions," put another way, nearly half of all Americans do not have faith in most institutions including the police. The figures are nevertheless noteworthy.

The murder of three men and six women at a church in Charleston is a national tragedy, but in America, the killing of black people is an unending spectacle.

Air Force officers at America's nuke sites work 24-hour-shifts in antique underground capsules launching fake attacks straight out of 'Strangelove' — and they're ready to blow

“Delay hurts,” says Kate Bronfenbrenner of the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations, “because they can fire one more worker, or engage in five more captive-audience meetings or three more supervisor one-on-ones per person.” Because of these aggressive tactics, there are far fewer NLRB elections today than in the past.