Portside

So far 3,800 workers are off the job. Non-striking refinery locals are getting 24-hour contract extensions each day. But the unions says, if need be, it will bring more sites out. It's the first national refinery strike since 1980. Back then workers at all represented refineries went out together, and stayed out for three months before they got a deal.

A long-term alternative to war can only be built by popular movements in Iraq and Syria. These movements still matter, and they deserve our solidarity — not our bombs.The expanding U.S.-led war on the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, has largely fallen off the radar of U.S. social movements. The answer to complexity is not to do nothing. With the great crimes and historic blunders — from Palestine to South Africa to Afghanistan — the task is to figure out what to do.

In an escalating dispute with President Obama, Republican in the United States House of Representatives passed a bill to cut any funding to the Department of Homeland Security for suspending the deportation of undocumented people. This bill rescinds Obama's 2014 orders for DHS to defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants with US-born children (who are US citizens) as well as suspend the deportation of undocumented young people brought to US as children.

To combat violence you must look at the concrete inequities and practices that breed it. To protect expression that's endangered you have to engage with the substance of what was said, not deny it. That means attempting dialogue with those who peacefully condemn or disagree, not trying to shame them into silence. Nothing is quick, nothing is easy. I support free speech. I oppose all censors. I abhor the killings. I mourn the dead. I am not Charlie.

Today Portside is publishing two different perspectives on the response to the horrific murders at Charlie Hebdo. The first from India takes on the factual mistakes and subsequent gross distortions that were published in English after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. It shows who were the assassinated cartoonists and what was Charlie Hebdo.

'The Internet must be fast, fair, and open.' The biggest revelation from the proposal is the decision to lump wireless networks in with wired broadband, something the FCC has avoided doing for years thanks to enormous pressure from Verizon and AT&T.

The film Selma and the murders in Ferguson and New York have re-focused much discussion on civil rights and equality or lack of. Affirmative action programs - a victory from the civil rights movement - have largely been dismantled by judicial rulings. Today there is the attempt to de-fund the historically Black Colleges. In Brooklyn, the largest African American community in the country, there are new reports of 'vanishing African American professors' at Brooklyn College

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