Portside

Prominent Jewish Americans, including former officials of AIPAC, in a full-page ad in the New York Times,urged Congress to support the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) -the agreement between Tehran and six world powers. Many of the signers have devoted decades to building and enhancing Israel's security and strengthening the US-Israel alliance, designed to counter claims by some on the American right that no supporter of Israel could endorse the agreement.

In Ferguson, the rallying cry - This is what democracy looks like - which echoes W.E.B. DuBois and the older generation's critique of capitalist civilization and imperialist power. And you also had people chanting -We gon' be alright - which is from rap artist Kendrick Lamar, who is concerned with the black body, decrepit schools, indecent housing. This chant is in many ways emerging as a kind of anthem of the movement for the younger generation.

Her life should have ended at 17, an African American college student and civil rights worker, gunned down under a Coca-Cola sign in the fight for freedom and justice. A white seminarian named Jonathan Myrick Daniels pushed her aside and died in her place.

Reader Comments: Remembering-Honoring Julian Bond; Immigrant Dreams Deferred; Bernie Sanders and #BlackLivesMatter; The Bomb, Hiroshima, Nagasaki; Black Activists and Palestine; Exonerate Ethel Rosenberg; An Urgent Request from May First/People Link

The Guardian is known for it's best of laundry lists. A recent list of the 100 best English-language novels came with a demurrer from culture columnist Rachel Cooke, saying in effect: The ladies not meant for spurning - and that just 20 books by female authors in a best-of-100 list covering a 300-year period--especially in a listing of authors of fiction--is incomplete bordering on bizarre. Cooke elaborates on what should be on, and what she says can surely be removed.

The Chamber of Commerce is basically a lobbyist for hire that reaches into other arenas of power to set the policy agenda for the nation in areas of central concern for its members. Major businesses hire the Chamber to carry out very particular legislative or other projects to change policies in ways that have big consequences for American consumers, American workers, international workers, the environment, and consumer regulations.

Media portrayals of the mass protests in response to the killing of 18 year-old Michael Brown obscure the serious human rights issue of police violence against African-Americans. Many press reports characterized the protests as a "mob reaction," instead of a "justifiable outpouring of community anger and grief." The media is "doing incalculable damage" by not placing the outpouring of community outrage in Ferguson and beyond in its "political and historical context."

The immigrant workers who helped rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina are the targets of systematic civil rights violations. The federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has launched a series of race-based immigration raids wherever Latinos in New Orleans gather. And those immigrant workers who are organizing to stop what they charge are "unconstitutional, race-based, stop-and-frisk style raids" are being targeted for deportation.

Market Basket workers don’t have a union. But they achieved in three weeks what few unions have accomplished in recent years: They stood up to their multibillion-dollar employer, won local and national sympathy for their struggle, and stayed united. Boston Globe 8/12/14

Almost 20 years after Europe’s worst genocide since World War II, a Dutch court ruled July 16th the Netherlands is liable for the murders of more than 300 Srebrenica victims, saying the Dutch peacekeeping force, the Dutchbat, "should have known" the Bosnian Muslim males it handed over to the Serbian forces of General Ratko Miadic would be massacred. However, the Dutch court cleared the Dutchbat of responsibility for the deaths of more than 7,000 others.