Portside

Feminism provided me with the tools to work toward a new kind of socialism.

A budget approach cloaked in science and technical jargon became a tool to crush the people.

 On Monday, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office announced that Timothy Loehmann, the Cleveland police officer who killed Tamir Rice last year, would face no state criminal charges.

Since Obama took office in 2009, Pentagon officials have been throwing up bureaucratic obstacles to thwart the president's plan to close Guantanamo. Negotiating prisoner releases with the Pentagon was like "punching a pillow," said James Dobbins, the State Department special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2013 to 2014. Defense Department officials "would come to a meeting, they would not make a counter-argument," he said. "And then nothing would happen.

Unhappy end; Lesson from Ukraine; Brass fears Trump; Mansplaining Lolita; I$I$; BSUs cut off private prisons; Suing the school system for science; NOLA dethrones the Confederacy; Yannis Behrakis

We deserve to know, and we are obligated to know, the cost of America’s love for football.

Koch Sisters; Art, art damned Koch; Whose booty? Our booty; White rage; The forsaken; Invisible money

Historical discrimination, demographics, and public funding have left home care workers at the very bottom of the American work hierarchy. The wages these workers earn are painfully low: the median salary for a personal care aide is $19,910 annually, or $9.57 an hour; a home health aide earns $20,820 or $10.01 per hour. On the Bureau of Labor Statistic's list of 30 fastest-growing jobs, personal and home care aides are the worst paid.

Working with the rebels in Syria will be a daunting task for the Obama administration. There are hundreds of anti-Assad militias, each with its own agenda. Neither the FSA nor the Syrian National Coalition, a political group representing the opposition, control or even coordinate all the various non-extremist fighters. And the dissolution of the Syrian Support Group in the United States could be a troubling sign.

Socialists effectively challenged capitalism, often took and held political power, and influenced many academics, intellectuals, popular organizations, artistic projects, and so on. But now socialism’s growth in many places has stalled or reversed. Yet socialists still have the accumulated history, experience, and theoretical means to define a socialism for the 21st century that can rally, mobilize, and unify capitalism’s diverse victims and critics.