Portside

In Chicago, many have used the energy and opening created by these ongoing protests to re-animate existing long-term anti-police violence campaigns. On Saturday afternoon, hundreds of people gathered at the Chicago Temple to show our love for police torture survivors on the day after Jon Burge was released from house arrest. The gathering was billed as a people’s hearing and rally in support of a reparations ordinance currently stalled in the Chicago City Council.

There is nothing new about Republican opposition to teachers unions, but in recent years, it has become increasingly clear that some Democrats have turned against them as well. In the following post we hear from a union leader, Bob Peterson, the president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, about how he thinks teachers union must change to keep alive public education. This post first appeared in Rethinking Schools. Reprinted with permission of the author.

[I wish those who complain about 'Muslim silence' would go see this film,] both because “Timbuktu” vividly depicts the courageous resistance of ordinary Muslims, especially Muslim women, to fundamentalist tyranny and because it makes the crucial but heretical point that Islamic militants are also human beings, and more likely to be driven by human motivations like greed or lust or power than by apocalyptic zealotry.

There are two compelling reasons for a challenge in the Democratic primaries: We need a big debate about the direction of the country, and a growing populist movement would benefit from a populist challenge to Hillary. In fact, there are deep divides between the party establishment and the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. All affirm, finally, that this economy works only for the few and not the many. But after that, the differences are immense.

"Of all the people to hurt with sanctions, punishing students and undermining educational exchanges is a particularly damaging act," said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian-American Council.

Black history museums struggle to survive; The history of lynchings revealed and mapped; Blacks in the Holocaust; David Cole on Bryan Stevenson; Resurrecting Lucy Parsons

At a time when police departments around the country are being criticized for a lack of a transparency, the arrival of Legal Aid’s "cop accountability" database represents a bold attempt to systematically track officers with a history of civil rights violations and other kinds of misbehavior, and thereby force judges, prosecutors, and juries to take the officers’ past actions into consideration when adjudicating cases.

Living Peace: Connecting Your Spirituality with Your Work for Justice, by Victor Narro 2014, a new book on the spiritual side of organizing, is just over 100 pages long. This little volume is broaching a topic that might raise cynical eyebrows in certain quarters in our labor movement. Narro's thesis intrigued me and in the spirit of self-mindedness I read the book and reflected on my own recent experience with ILWU Local 6 and the Campaign for Sustainable Recycling.

With funding on the line for President Obama's deferred action programs for immigrants, recent trends in immigration are affecting the current national debates. While the immigrant population is relatively smaller in the South, changes are rapidly re-shaping communities in the region, fueling new opportunities for growth as well as anxiety and backlash over the changing complexion of towns and cities that is evident in the response from many Southern leaders.

Fifty years ago, Los Angeles erupted in a week long riot leaving dozens dead, 3,000 arrested and $40 million in property damage -- the 1965 Watts rebellion. This year also marks 40 years since the revelations of "official" investigations of US intelligence covert activity against US dissidents throughout the 1960s -- 1970s. Both events have something to teach us about the growth of the national security state and the criminalization of US dissent.