Portside

The blockade is still in place. Travel restrictions still exist. Guantánamo Bay is still illegally occupied by the U.S. military and used for imprisonment and torture. The U.S. government still funds USAID projects aimed at undermining the Cuban government. Today, it is still critical that the Venceremos Brigade, IFCO, and all friends of Cuba are persistent in defending Cuba's national sovereignty and right to self-determination.

Previously Portside published Michael Brie's, The Tragedy of Party Communism and responses from three socialist activists - what lessons there may be to draw on, and which to forget. Here are additional responses from Nina Udovicki, Gilberto de Leon, Dynamite Hallinan and Scott Tucker. Those responding see capitalism as a system that needs to be abolished and socialism as an alternative - A socialism that is different from the past, and democratic.

Successive High Court decisions have done more than enfranchise corporations at the expense of the rest of us. The same logic in the same cases now defines public corruption down: that a direct and palpable quid pro quo must be seen to operate. Absent that smoking gun, the financial elite has no limits on bankrolling campaigns whose candidates then vote their interests. To the nation's founders, that untrammeled influence was the essence of public corruption.

The Economic Institute reports "2014 Continues a 35-Year Trend of Broad-based Wage Stagnation." Those at the top are the only ones to have a real increase in pay.

Age hasn't dimmed the fire in Toni Morrison, 84. The unwavering voice of black America talks about her latest novel and what it will take for racism to be a thing of the past

No one in Russian-speaking Kharkiv wants to follow rebels into open revolt. But locals say Kiev has no idea how badly it's aggravating the region with its initiatives, including the 'Great Wall of Ukraine.'

"I think that the effort by these institutions and the German banks to resist Syriza’s demands for a larger haircut, a larger reduction of the debt, will be greater because the model of Syriza is so promising: They have taken this strong political initiative, standing with the country’s social movements, but also allowing them autonomy."

After months of frustration with an economy sagging under the weight of international sanctions and falling energy prices, workers across Russia are starting to protest unpaid wages and go on strike, in the first nationwide backlash against President Vladimir V. Putin’s economic policies.

In its “Earth statement”, the group said that three-quarters of known fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground if warming was not to breach a rise of 2C, the “safety limit.” Spelling out what a global deal at the UN climate summit in Paris should include, the group demanded governments adopt a goal of reducing economies’ carbon emissions to zero by mid-century, put a price on carbon and that the richest take the lead with the most aggressive cuts.

Last week, Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, made PEN/America Center's shortlist for the Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, for "an author of a distinguished book of general nonfiction" of "notable literary merit and critical perspective" that highlights "important contemporary issues." The book was published last year to a host of lively reviews. Here is one of the earliest, by Steven B. Smith. Also included below is a link to Allen's homepage.