Portside

Alex Riccio argues Joe Burns’ latest book is powerfully inspiring but short on details.

About six-in-ten Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

The intensity of the jazz legend’s music has always inspired passion, but in the 1960s, one group of devotees was so stirred they founded a church in his name.

Over 1.5 million workers, women, students and peasants from across Bolivia joined the rally in the capital and expressed their approval of the national government of the ruling Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party.

A recent global poll, which came to my attention via the Liberal Patriot, framed the political choice facing the public in an interesting way. It asked which position comes closest to the poll taker’s own belief.

Aren't museums the rich donate to bringing art to the people? In fact, these days, the rich aren’t taking art to the people. They’re taking art from the people and plopping it into storage vaults that the world’s wealthy use to dodge sales taxes.

Voter suppression is not new. We've seen grandfather clauses, poll taxes, and literacy tests as historical barriers to the vote. Now, we see a reduction in voter flexibility, with more ID requirements, fewer early voting days, and stricter rules about voter registration.

Rahm Emanuel is vulnerable. True, he cleared the snow in the winter, the Chicago equivalent of making the trains run on time. But beyond that, his neoliberal policies have made him a lot of enemies. The ramifications of an Emanuel defeat go beyond Chicago. He has been central to the Democratic Party's rightward swing since the Clinton years. The potential for a Lewis victory is as yet unclear. The election is just five months away - she has yet to declare her candidacy.

BRICS and the SCO are the two largest independent international organizations to develop over the past decade. What role these new organizations will play internationally is not clear. Certainly sanction regimens will be harder to maintain because the SCO and the BRICS create alternatives. South Africa, for instance, announced that it would begin buying Iran oil in the next few months, an important breach in the sanctions against Iran.

Herein lay the difference between my son's black childhood and my own. Not only was I assaulted by the n-word so much earlier in life - at age 7, while visiting relatives in Memphis - but I also had many other experiences that differentiated my life from the lives of my white childhood friends. There was no way that they would "forget" that I was different. The times, in fact, dictated that they should not forget; our situation would be unavoidably "racial."