Portside

Wall Street really, really wanted Marina Silva to win. Too bad for Wall Street.

"There can be no question that just a handful of clinics left to offer safe, legal abortion care to all women across the vast state of Texas is a dire emergency in need of an immediate response," said Nancy Northrup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), which is representing the health care facilities.

Inside the American Terrordome, the chorus of hysteria-purveyors, Republican and Democrat alike, nattered on, as had been true for weeks, about the "direct," not to say apocalyptic, threat the Islamic State and its caliph posed to the American way of life. The media, of course, continued to report it all with a kind of eyeball-gluing glee. The result by the time I met that woman: 71% of Americans believed ISIS had nothing short of sleeper cells in the U.S.

Philadelphia teachers and their union were surprised today when they learned that the School Reform Commission had decided to unilaterally cancel their contract.

The wealthiest Americans—those who earned $200,000 or more—reduced the share of income they gave to charity by 4.6 percent from 2006 to 2012. Meanwhile, Americans who earned less than $100,000 chipped in 4.5 percent more of their income during the same time period.

The dramatic changes in the economic and social landscape of San Francisco has not gone unnoticed by some city officials, especially when confronted with continuing community pressure such as a the very lively and youthful Oct. 4 march through the Mission demanding an end to evictions.

The Philadelphia School Reform Commission voted Monday to unilaterally cancel its teachers' contract. The Teachers Union has been in negotiations with the SRC since January 2013.

Ilan Pappe on Israel's 'post-Zionist moment' and the triumph of 'neo-Zionism'. A book review of Pappe's latest book, "The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge".

This year Bolivia is chairing the G77+China group of what are now 133 countries of the global South. The Morales government has used its position to feature the issues of climate change, sustainable development and “Living Well in harmony with Mother Earth.” These were prominent themes of Evo’s opening speech to the G77 summit in Santa Cruz in mid-June, which directly attributed climate crisis to “the anarchy of capitalist production.”

Investment of public money needs transparency and accountability. The CalPERS decision to end hedge fund investments should be a clarion call for pensions to re-examine their relationship with these and other nontraditional investment instruments. Trillions of dollars of public money as well as the retirement security of millions of workers are at stake.