Portside

Robin D.G. Kelley makes the case that the university is not an engine of social transformation, activism is. He opens a debate published by the Boston Review. Respondents include: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Barbara Ransby, Charlene Carruthers, Michael Eric Dyson and others.

Black youth-led groups organizing for justice played a key role in Kim Foxx’s win in the Cook County state’s attorney’s race Tuesday night. And they’re showing no signs of slowing down.

The fact that many children can get breakfast at public school may well be thanks to a revolutionary act that brought down the fury of Hoover’s FBI. To dig deeper into this history, and ask about the lessons it holds for modern food activists, Nathaneal Johnson spoke with Murch, a professor at Rutgers University and the author of Living for the City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.

CSPG's Poster of the Week honors Internatio­­­­­nal Women's Day by commemorating Berta Cáceres, a well-known indigenous environmental leader in Honduras who was assassinated in her home recently.

Here's a unique piece on twenty-first century American war -- and war-gaming. This is a new-style “war game” that Tom calls “Do-Over” and that anyone, 12 to 75, can play in their home or workplace based on the latest war headlines. Consider this a different way of looking at and taking in the global war on terror (and other American conflicts) in these years. Check it out and then play a round of Do-Over yourself!

While our economy is rebounding from the Great Recession, hardworking Americans are being left behind. Our economic and political system has lost sight of what matters most: We the People.

I turned off onto a long dirt road about 15 miles outside of Montevideo, Uruguay and drove towards a wooden guard shack that stood across from a small farmhouse hidden by a long row of trees. Usually, if you want to meet a country’s president – or even ex-president – you have to fight through layers of bureaucracy, confirm that you are not a threat and have a very good rationale for being considered worthy to talk to.

Racial and ethnic differences in wealth show extreme vulnerability of some nonwhite households in Los Angeles. The authors estimate that the typical U.S.-born black or Mexican family has just 1 percent of the wealth of a typical white family in Los Angeles -- or one cent for every dollar of wealth held by the average white family in the metro area. Koreans hold 7 cents and Vietnamese possess 17 cents for every dollar of wealth owned by comparable white families.

What was the purpose of the 2011 US intervention against Qaddafi? Was it for humanitarian purposes alone? Qaddafi's greatest infrastructure project, the Great Man-made River, was turning arid regions into a breadbasket for Libya; and the $33 billion project was being funded interest-free without foreign debt, through Libya’s own state-owned bank. This project was destroyed by NATO. Ellen Brown finds the motivation to be money, oil and banking.

-30- for Bagdikian; The candidates take the tech test; Trump press-bashing too much for Breitbart scribe; Missing the sick elephant in the room; Hacking the NY Fed; New NYT editorial page head