Portside

Senator Elizabeth Warren and Mayor Martin Walsh of Boston have correctly noted that charter schools are draining off enormous sums of money from already-underfunded public schools. But an even greater loss may be the draining-off of parents who no longer have a stake in advocating for the schools from which they’ve chosen to depart. Who will stand up for the children at the schools they've left behind?

For millions of American workers across the country, the cool air of the fall season promises to bring relief from intense heat on the job. In California, however, the persistent autumn heat wave brings along with it dangerous wildfires and also dangerous working conditions.

Hurricane Matthew has devastated Haiti, but women are at the forefront of the recovery.

School districts are notoriously short of funding – so short that some California districts have succumbed to Capital Appreciation Bonds that will cost taxpayers as much is 10 to 15 times principal by the time they are paid off. By comparison, California’s Prop. 51, the school bond proposal currently on the ballot, looks like a good deal.

On World Food Day, teleSUR spoke to Professor Raj Patel, an award-winning writer and defender of food security and sustainable models of agriculture.

ROP organizers have shown great courage, educating about - and standing up to - right-wing militia groups in rural Oregon. This post suggests important actions that the rest of us can take.

Historians are so accustomed to viewing slaveholders at the top of a complex pyramid of class, racial, and gender hierarchies in Southern society that we forgot that they were also the nation’s most powerful political leaders, and the world’s most powerful slaveholding class. Only in the past fifteen years or so have historians begun to look more systematically at slaveholders as leading national and international actors, as well as Southern social elites.

Voting rights advocates have won a string of court battles, but state election officials have found ways to restrict early voting anyway—often at the behest of GOP leaders. ----- Rethinking about our two party system and our election system: Ranked-choice voting opens up elections to a broader, more diverse range of candidates and ideas. ----- Modernizing our voter registration system.

New details are emerging about how AT&T has been spying on Americans for profit with a secret plan called Project Hemisphere.

Gov. Bruce Rauner is on track to spend $50 million on legislative races this year. Even for a guy like Rauner, that’s a lot of money– nearly twice what he spent on his own campaign two years ago. Two Rauner allies, billionaires Ken Griffin and Richard Uihlein, are also spending tens of millions of dollars. The end game is taking down unions and squelching voting rights.