Portside

Author and professor of political science at the University of Chicago and founder of the Black Youth Project, Cathy Cohen explains the growing role of hashtags in political discussion and what digital media can and can't do for activists.

August 6 and 9 mark the 70th anniversary of the United States dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This mass destruction of civilians (not military targets, as President Truman alleged) has reverberated perversely across 7 decades, with the spread of nuclear weapons and the persistent pressure on Japan by the United States to abandon its post-war Peace Constitution.

The “plan” will also toss the Kurds, one of Washington’s most reliable allies in the fight against the Islamic State, under a bus. “The Americans are not very clever in calculating this sort of thing,” Kamran Karadaghi, former chief of staff to Iraqi President and Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, told the Independent’s Patrick Cockburn. “Maybe they calculate that with Turkey on their side, they don’t need the Kurds.”

Why Are Urban Teachers Being Trained to be Robots? As my students entered the room, I was supposed to say: "In seats, zero talking, page 6, questions, 1-4." But I don't even talk to my dog like that. Constant narration of what the students are doing is also key to the NNN teaching style. "Noel is is finishing question 3. Marjorie is sitting silently. Alfredo is on page 6."

WashPost disgraces itself; LAT disgraces itself; NYT disgraces itself; Google tax; Yay Jon

Any country that would challenge neoliberalism inevitably will face the assorted weapons of international capital. The central question, then, is whether a government is “willing to mobilize its people on behalf of the policies that meet the needs of people.” And this was the question I posed about Syriza in 2013: “do the stances taken by the Syriza leadership foster or weaken the movements from below?

The UAW is back in bargaining with the Big 3 Automakers. Will they end the two-tier wage and benefit system they agreed to 8 years ago? And if they do, can they end it by raising up the bottom tier, rather than taking cuts for the top tier?

As his admirer James Dean probably knew all too well, Brando was a true rebel, partly because he thought being a star was absurd and partly because, as clip after clip in 'Listen to Me Marlon' shows, he always had a cause, whether it was civil rights, black power, Native American sovereignty or his own independence.

Phyllis Bennis' new book — the latest in her Middle East primer series — is on both ISIS and the new global war on terror. Like the earlier primers on Palestine and Afghanistan, the new book is written in a Frequently Asked Questions format -- great for use as an organizing tool..

The housing crisis is not over. Millions of families today face unjust eviction and foreclosure.