Portside

Empire enjoys watching the two sides battle like caged mice, weakening each other to its advantage.

Today’s American readers will find the arguments favoring Peña Nieto’s energy reform familiar. They center around the flaws of the state-run enterprise: its corruption and inefficiency, its coddling of unions, and its monopoly in the national market for consumer goods such as gasoline, which has kept prices high. But thus far, the debates have hardly touched upon the local consequences of this reform for regions that will be most affected.

The Chilean 9/11 created a community in California and around the world of Chileans that fled to escape the brutal military regimen. The Bay Area Chilean community commemorates September 11, every year with a cornucopia of cultural and art events. “This is part of our history as a community here in the Bay Area,” said Marci Valdivieso, one of the organizers.

A careful examination of the Obama administration's summary of the intelligence on which it is basing the case for military action to punish the Assad regime for alleged use of chemical weapons reveals misleading language evocative of the infamous 2002 Iraq WMD intelligence estimate.

While the media is packed with material about consumer rights, there is seldom mention of workers’ rights.

Insect swarms from warmer regions near the equator branching out to new locations they would have previously found too cold threaten global food security.

Women Finally Take the Podium at Washington March; Miley Cyrus Shows Off Her Minstrelsy; The Race Conversation We Are Already Having; Farmers Need to Grow More Cannon Fodder; Uruguayan Workers Make a Bid for a New TV Station

The administration is about to launch a ferocious propaganda blitz that will engulf a wide range of U.S. media. And as a fallback, the president is reserving the option of attacking Syria no matter what Congress does.

To reverse organized labor's decline and to rebuild the left requires either reviving the old New Deal coalition or forming a new comparably powerful alliance. That means confronting and outwitting the long demonization of unions and the left....More importantly, it requires a strategy to reposition labor unions and their allies as champions of broad social gains for the 99%.

In a press release after the end of the Congress, Alexis Tsipras stated: “The founding Congress of SYRIZA constitutes a big step, a historical landmark for the Greek Left and for democracy. Approximately 3500 delegates from all over Greece sealed the birth of the new political subject. With an open and lively democratic debate. ...To stop social destruction and rebuild Greece”.