Portside

Tom Morello told Bloomberg Politics, “Well there a thing called the Republican National Convention in July and that’ll be a perfect place for a band like Prophets of Rage to cause a ruckus and we will be there on the streets in the fields and in the concert hall.”

In her recent address honoring the distinguished Palestinian intellectual and activist Edward Said, noted Canadian author and environmentalist Naomi Klein speaks to the urgent need for the environmental movement to understand Said and other anti-imperialist, postcolonial thinkers; or what we can learn from reading Said in a warming world. Klein says without that knowledge there is no way to understand how we ended up in this dangerous place or how we can get out of it.

Foreign workers are brought to the United States by outsourcing companies and copy how the employees of Toys "R" Us do their jobs. The jobs are then sent to India and the employees are given pink slips.

The history of racism in our country is sometimes best understood by looking at how that history unfolded locally, and in places outside the slaveholding South, as well as nationally. Fred Whitehead writes about his own experience growing up in Kansas in the 1950s and about what Brent M. S. Campney, in his new study of that state's bloody Civil War and Post-Civil War racial history, taught him.

Anti-Syrian sentiment, along with economic hardship and a growing sense that the civil war will rage on for years to come, helps explain why many refugees are willing to risk everything by leaving Turkey and heading for Europe.

The president of the NEA, the largest union in the US, is reportedly drumming up support for an endorsement of Hillary Clinton as early as next week. However, this has spurred protest from rank-and-file members who argue that a primary endorsement excludes the majority's input. Those who support Senator Bernie Sanders are planning a grassroots campaign in opposition to the what they expect will be a Clinton nod.

For years, schoolchildren in New York City have been subject to overly aggressive practices by police in their schools. There are more police personnel in New York City public schools than there are on the streets of almost every major city in the United States. Amendments to the Student Safety Act will increase transparency by closing loopholes and improve public disclosure of comprehensive data on school suspensions and law enforcement activity.

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.”