Portside

Readers Comments on CBC Alternative Budget; Social Security; NY Police Arrest Quotas; Iraq War Ten Years After - Declassified Documents Released; Union Dues Check-Off?; Open Letter to Tony Kushner; Music video against gun violence; Wither the Socialist Left?; James O'Keefe and the Acorn Deception; Unions and Co-ops; Obamacare's Other Benefit; Dolores Huerta in the California Hall of Fame; Neoliberalism & Working Class Resistance in Greece - March 22 forum in New York;...

Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency, announced that the government is forming 13 teams to conduct an international "cyber offensive" to pre-empt or answer "Internet attacks" on this country.

On March 18, a historic case against the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program will commenced in a Manhattan federal courtroom. Floyd v. City of New York is part of a citywide movement to end this shameful, massive violation of rights and to help bring about the day when all New Yorkers will be treated by their government as equally entitled to walk the streets of their city without harassment.

Closing 50 of our neighborhood schools is outrageous and no society that claims to care anything about its children can sit back and allow this to happen to them. There is no way people of conscience will stand by and allow these people to shut down nearly a third of our school district without putting up a fight. Most of these campuses are in the Black community. Since 2001 88% of students impacted by CPS School Actions are African-American. And this is by design.

What can we do to help young men respect women, recognize consent, and have healthy sexual relationships? Teach them kindness to others and the courage to go against the crowd.

Every Friday afternoon since 2009, residents of the West Bank town Nabi Saleh have taken part in demonstrations against the Israeli occupation by marching to a spring that has been taken over by the settlers of Halamish but is on Palestinian-owned land.

Audio obtained by The Nation confirms an instance of New York City's police union cooperating with the NYPD in setting arrest quotas for the department's officers. Critics of quotas say the practice has played a direct role in increasing the number of stop-and-frisk encounters since Mayor Michael Bloomberg came to office. Patrolmen explained the pressure to meet quota goals has caused some officers to seek out or even manufacture arrests to avoid department retaliation.

The liberal establishment willfully played along with the preposterous claims that led to the Iraq War.

"You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans - my fellow veterans - whose future you stole."

Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with winners: Big Oil. It has been 10 years since Operation Iraqi Freedom's bombs first landed in Baghdad. And while most of the U.S.-led coalition forces have long since gone, Western oil companies are only getting started.