Portside

Today, to honor the Feb. 4 centennial of the birth of Rosa Parks, the United States Postal Service has issued a Rosa Parks stamp. Yet these tributes to Rosa Parks rest on a narrow and distorted vision of her legacy. A more thorough accounting of Parks' political life offers a different set of reasons for the nation to honor her. A lifetime of steadfastness and outrage, tenacity and bravery, is what deserves national veneration.

Many activists rely on fiction for inspiration, new perspectives, and, of course, entertainment. For some of us, novels even helped start us down our paths of activism. But—which novels? A survey of a handful of labor activists and educators revealed their favorite class-conscious novels.

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Equifax knows quite a lot about you and so do Netflix and Google and Facebook and all kinds of political campaigns not to mention technology and marketing services conglomerates and . . . well you get the idea. Houston, we have a problem. -- moderator

Jared Diamond’s new book, The World Until Yesterday, is completely wrong, writes Stephen Corry. According to Diamond, they need, and welcome, state intervention to stop their violent behavior. Corry argues that this is merely a political opinion, backed by questionable and spurious data. He sees Diamond’s position as one of supporting colonial ideas about ‘pacifying savages’ and says it is factually and morally wrong.

Italy’s general election on February 24-25 comes at a decisive moment for this country and for Europe. The neoliberal consensus that has powered Germany’s (and Europe’s) mean and miserly response to the 2008 depression seems to be faltering. Italians have a chance to make a real choice. To put it in a nutshell: Is the answer to our present economic and social ordeal more fiscal probity, or is it more social justice?

As long as the promise of riches await, more firms and governments will be looking to join the fray. "It's economics that drive things," says the University of Tasmania's Coffin. "Tech boundaries are being pushed, and science just comes along behind it and tries to understand what the consequences are. Ideally, it should be the other way around."