Portside

Grace Lee Boggs died yesterday at the age of 100. Boggs' love for humanity ran strong and deep, serving as a generative force for creating change. She was not a part of an elite intelligentsia. She lived in a modest little house on an even more modest income. She never held a tenured university job. She believed that ordinary people, not academics, had the power to understand their lives and to change the world with that understanding.

The decision to release 6,000 federal prisoners before the end of their sentence is a sign of the failure of the "war on drugs." But it’s no substitute for systemic reforms that cut off the cycle of mass incarceration. Congress still needs to pass comprehensive criminal justice reform," said Michael Collins, policy manager with the Drug Policy Alliance.

According to the Cult of the Second Amendment, opponents of gun measures have every right to fire back, literally. There’s no point in progressives seeking any “compromise” with them on gun issues. They can only be defeated by a true mass social movement supporting reasonable gun regulation.

In a speech challenging both national and global inequality, with a particular focus on France and South Africa, economist Thomas Piketty concluded with calls for taxes on wealth, and a public global registry of financial assets to make that possible. The speech evoked a frenzy of comment - from praise to denunciations of Piketty's analysis as Marxist or alternately, unrealistic, to those who criticized him for having a flawed analysis that disregarded Marxist insights.

The TPP is still secret and according to the terms in this year's fast-track legislation it will remain secret for 30 days after the president formally notifies Congress that he will sign it. That could be a while still, as the agreement's details need to be "ironed out." After that 30-day wait the full text has to be public for 60 days before Congress can vote. Expect a massive and massively funded corporate PR push. The biggest corporations very much want TPP.

School policy ripped out of time and history: In many ways that is Arne Duncan’s gift to us. School policy focused on disparities in test scores instead of disparities in opportunity; a Department of Education obsessed with data-driven accountability for teachers but preferring “game-changing” innovation for itself and paying inadequate attention to oversight; ...

Day; Rosenberg; Davis; Purple; Coates

The US Food Sovereignty Alliance upholds the right to food as a basic human right and works to connect our local and national struggles to the international movement for food sovereignty. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives, primarily African-American farmers across the deep South, shares the prize with the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras, Afro-indigenous farmers and fisher-people. The prize will be presented in Des Moines on October 14, 2015.

It's high time UN agencies and the mainstream media acknowledge the true scale of global poverty and engage in a long overdue public debate on how ambitious and transformative the international development agenda really is.

The 43. A group of 43 Jewish ex-services personnel attended the meeting and so the 43 Group was born with the unvarnished intent of, quite literally, beating British anti-semitic activists into submission. But as its participants dwindle in number, it was announced this week that the story of their campaign is to be re-told in a six-part television drama for the BBC and the American network NBC, written by the Emmy-winning creator of Band of Brothers.