Portside

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October's national single payer strategy conference in Chicago was truly an historic event. For the first time in decades, national single payer advocacy organizations came together around a joint agenda and focused on building unity and strategic clarity as we work to finish the job and make healthcare a right for everyone in America.

Warren Mar has written a provocative piece on the role of Community Based Organizations and Worker Centers in the working class movement. He explores controversial issues of the funding and democratic control of these organizations which have filled a vacuum in organizing particularly among immigrant workers.

Put simply: War and militarism also fuel climate change.

We must not let Isis’s crimes dictate how we address the refugee crisis – or privacy. Some want to exploit the Paris attacks in order to justify seizures of power to meet their own political ends. We should not let that happen.

GOP tops cornered; Evangelicals choose love; ISIS in Brooklyn; White poverty; French apartheid

Even though the right-wing Forward Portugal lost the election—it garnered only 38 percent of the votes—Silva allowed its leader, former Prime Minister Passos Coelho, to form a government. That maneuver lasted just 11 days. Coelho introduced a budget loaded with austerity measures and privatization. In the face of growing outrage and a threatened general strike Silva finally asked Socialist Party leader Antonio Costa to form a government.

 Since the civil-rights movement, the Republican establishment — the big bankers and CEOs that actually run the party — have danced with racists in the white grassroots by conflating racism and fear of the government. Instead of providing all Americans with decent healthcare, education, jobs, or housing, the racist white grassroots and rich establishment agreed that everyone should be on their own — so black people and immigrants don’t accidentally get anything good.

"Exxon’s outrageous move to intimidate journalists and academics from doing their jobs is more of the same from a company that has been bullying the public and our elected officials for decades," David Turnbull, campaigns director for Oil Change International, told Common Dreams.

The consequences of the shooting of Laquan McDonald - Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said she wrote to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking the federal Justice Department to conduct a civil rights investigation into the Police Department's "use of force, including deadly force; "I write to you with urgency," Madigan writes in the letter to Lynch. "Trust in the Chicago Police Department is broken, especially in communities of color in the City of Chicago."