Portside

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.

The rise of fascism shaped Schrödinger’s cat fable.

In a historic step toward lifting the blockade on Cuba, the United States abstained in the United Nations General Assembly vote calling for the end of the Cold War practice. On Wednesday, 191 of the 193 member states in the Assembly voted for the resolution. Only the United States and Israel abstained. The U.S. abstention is significant, but only the U.S. Congress, where Republicans have rebuffed normalized relations with Cuba, has the power to lift the blockade.