Portside

Powerful truth-telling for every day: written and read by Chicago poet Kevin Coval as the Haftarah for Tzedek Chicago’s Yom Kippur service last week.

NEA state officials and rank-and-file members plan to protest upcoming vote to endorse Hillary Clinton.

The September election was a consequence of fundamentally undemocratic maneuvers by Tsipras designed (in the words of the DEA, a Popular Unity component) to “confirm the balance of political forces and reestablish the viability of the SYRIZA-led government before workers and popular classes realize through their own bitter experience the actual content of the agreement that was signed with the creditors on July 13.”

So Obama wants al-Assad to stand down as a prerequisite for effective US action against Daesh in Syria (a few air sorties and even fewer air strikes are ineffectual). Putin thinks al-Assad is key to defeating Daesh and that everyone should ally with Damascus. Putin is blind to the ways that al-Assad and his military brutality is prolonging the civil war. Backing his genocidal policies will just perpetuate that war.

“Strategic communications” or Stratcom, a propaganda/psy-op technique that treats information as a “soft power” weapon to wield against adversaries, is a new catch phrase in an Official Washington obsessed with the clout that comes from spinning false narratives, reports Robert Parry.

Modi Courts Silicon Valley; Offline; Suing for Net Neutrality; High Schoolers Produce Radio Docs; Phones vs. Out-of-Control Cops

After being evicted at the height of the recent foreclosure crisis, a construction worker tries to reclaim his family’s home by taking a new job with the evictor. Ramin Bahrani's '99 Homes', a relatively small, tough-minded drama about pitiless people doing unprincipled things, proves to be one of the most interesting, elegantly crafted and—paradoxically, given the dark subject matter—elating films to come along in recent memory.

Puerto Rico is in a severe economic crisis. The Partido del Pueblo Trabajador (PPT) was founded in 2010 to build a movement to combat austerity and the fundamental roots of the crisis: Since 1898 when the United States took Puerto Rico from Spain, the movement and shape of Puerto Rico’s economy have been largely determined by the priorities and preferences of U.S. capital. The PPT unites electoral work with movement building with the goal of radical change.

Many students have lunch periods that are 20 minutes or less, which can be an insufficient amount of time to eat.