Portside

For a decade and a half, small, dedicated, disparate, sometimes competing groups of political activists in the United States and around the world demonstrated, lobbied, lettered, conferenced, tribunaled, cajoled and hectored in a seemingly quixotic quest to win the release of five imprisoned Cuban men.

Pegida's so-called “extremism of the middle”: is an expression of the dominant capitalist ideology, with its legitimization of all forms of exclusion, being driven to its mostly extreme, racist form. The whole situation will get really dangerous when parts of the elites start to see this as a viable political option in order to preserve power.

King saw the goal of education as more than performance on high-stakes tests or the acquisition of job skills or career competencies. “To save man from the morass of propaganda,” King opined, “is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.” The notion that privatization can foster equality is fiction.

Cruz to oversee NASA, Rubio gets Oceans and Atmosphere.

Just a year after its founding, it’s the country’s leading party.

The mayor of Chicago is now arguing that pension funds are not part of city government at all. How convenient!

Franklin Fried, who devoted more than 70 years to supporting and fighting for freedom, justice, equality, and liberation for working and oppressed people in the U.S. and around the world, died Tuesday, Jan. 13, at his home in Alameda, California. He was 87.

In the wake of the brutal assault upon ... Charlie Hebdo we should be reflecting, not as ... world leaders advise us to, on the attack on free speech, but on .. which spaces and kinds of resistance have been foreclosed to a generation of young working class men and women facing a post 9/11 world of poverty, unemployment and repeated attacks of the West upon predominantly Muslim countries; and ... how the attack ... is being used to serve .. existing imperial narrative.

A planned strike this week by registered nurses at Kaiser hospitals was canceled after a tentative contract agreement was reached.

The NYPD police officers union's outrageous assertion that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio had “blood on his hands” in the murder of the two NYPD officers, is consistent with the reactionary role of police unions, which came to prominence in the wake of the civil rights movement. Police unions have played a powerful role in resisting all manner of police reforms, and in defending police officers, no matter how outrageous and racist their actions.