Portside

We in civil society must sharpen our demands. We must stand with those struggling for equality, dignity and human rights for all Syrians, and on the principle that there is no military solution to the conflict. Further military action will increase the violence and instability, not only inside Syria but within the region and even globally - and will not improve the lives of Syria's beleaguered civilians.

This new populism is not something we have to invent. It is already stirring. It is Occupy Wall Street putting Gilded Age inequality at the center of our political debate. It’s exploited low-wage workers protesting fast-food restaurants in over 150 cities. Moral Monday protests against the assault on voting rights and the vulnerable mobilizing thousands in North Carolina and are spreading to Georgia and South Carolina.

Should we care that our college experiences are being funded by borrowed money? In recent years, financial markets have become increasingly entangled in budget decisions, and often those decisions have little to do with educating students. In many cases, schools are just borrowing for huge capital investments that help the college market itself, such as gleaming new football stadiums and shiny dorm buildings.

Gay marriage might just become the law of the land without ever heading back to Justice Kennedy.

Don't blame farming. Inequality got its start among resource-rich hunter-gatherers

Sen. Elizabeth Warren's keynote at the New Populism Conference. John Lennon: Instant Karma. Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs. Just Say No ... to the War on Drugs. Drug Tests Must Now Include Females.

Reader Comments - Boko Haram; Portside articles on the Ukraine; Brown v. Board-what still needs to be done; Redistributing Income; NRA, Second Amendment; John Oliver; Jon Favreau - a correction; Whiteness of Liberal Media; Was the American Revolution Really Just A Counter-Revolution; THE REAL WORLD - a graduation address never given; Announcements - DIE LINKE, SYRIZA, Future of the European Left - New York - May 28; New Book -- Torture is still an urgent moral issue

And though I am still young, and still searching for answers, I have started down a path where dignity is derived from the law of love, and though it has been said that this trial is personal and not political, I maintain that the personal cannot be divorced from the political.Whereas nonviolent civil disobedience is the manifestation of my ideology, it is rooted in a love ethic that is central to my identity.

The new film, Cesar Chavez: History is Made One Step at a Time, doesn't capture the diversity of the farmworkers' movement. "When I was a farmworker, before the strike, we lived in different worlds - the Latino world, the Filipino world, the African-American world and the Caucasian world," Eliseo Medina as interviewed by David Bacon for In These Times.

Dr. Vincent G. Harding, Civil Rights pioneer, colleague, advisor and speechwriter for Dr. Martin Luther King, died this week at age 82. He drafted King's anti-Vietnam War speech, "Breaking the Silence". As people like King and Rosa Parks became icons, Harding insisted that America could not celebrate their lives without continuing to devote ourselves to the work they and many others had done.