Portside

Land is concentrated in the hands of landowners who use it for large-scale mono-crop farming. So our aspiration is to start democratizing land so the communities will be the owners of the life resources

In the wake of the brutal assault upon ... Charlie Hebdo we should be reflecting, not as ... world leaders advise us to, on the attack on free speech, but on .. which spaces and kinds of resistance have been foreclosed to a generation of young working class men and women facing a post 9/11 world of poverty, unemployment and repeated attacks of the West upon predominantly Muslim countries; and ... how the attack ... is being used to serve .. existing imperial narrative.

Franklin Fried, who devoted more than 70 years to supporting and fighting for freedom, justice, equality, and liberation for working and oppressed people in the U.S. and around the world, died Tuesday, Jan. 13, at his home in Alameda, California. He was 87.

The mayor of Chicago is now arguing that pension funds are not part of city government at all. How convenient!

Just a year after its founding, it’s the country’s leading party.

Cruz to oversee NASA, Rubio gets Oceans and Atmosphere.

Five years after the earthquake that killed an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people and rendered 1.9 million more homeless, the fraudulently elected administration of Michel Martelly has abandoned any pretense of democracy. In the first of a two-part series, veteran journalist Beverly Bell interviews Jackson Doliscar, organizer with the Haitian Force for Reflection and Action on Housing on the state of human rights in Haiti today.

Despite the fact that in 2013, Latinos, which only made up 17 percent of the US population, represented 32 percent of frequent moviegoers, the major film studios are planning just one film depicting Latinos in 2015. The continued paucity of U.S. films about Latinos and other minorities is due to the continued deep-seated bias against ethnic diversity and an industry-wide apathy towards change.

Ex-CIA official Jeffrey Sterling is going on trial for espionage because he allegedly told a reporter about a botched covert operation that sent flawed nuclear designs to Iran, but powerful people want to spare ex-CIA Director David Petraeus indictment for leaking secrets to his mistress, notes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern. Sterling, a whistleblower, and Petraeus, a retired four-star general, are being held to "cruelly different standards."

On January 21, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project. The case poses the question of whether the Fair Housing Act protects Americans from all housing policies that discriminate in practice, or only those where intentional bigotry can be proven. The decision to take up this case leads many to conclude the 1968 Fair Housing Act is in grave jeopardy.