Portside

This new survey of a 50-year arc of Latin America's recent history comes from the pen of one of our most esteemed Marxist historians. Reviewer Tony Wood offers this informative review.

They say gentrify. We say occupy!

Parliament cannot really play an important role because, since the coup, the government can make laws without parliament. We need a mobilization of civil society, its representatives and also of all MPs who believe that out of this crisis must come the restoration of democracy and peace.

The labor movement's agenda was on full display at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Union delegates numbered roughly one-quarter of the convention’s 4,000-plus delegates. Still, there were stark reminders that labor has struggled to keep at bay the party’s coziness with corporations, especially those of the Silicon Valley disruption variety. Ride-hailing giant Uber—not unionized taxi cabs—served as the DNC’s exclusive shuttle service.

The battle over public education is, in large part, a battle over labor, and there’s no better illustration of that than Philadelphia. In 2013, the city’s School Reform Commission (which is appointed, not elected) closed roughly 10 percent of the city's schools, laid off almost 4,000 teachers and other school staff and, in 2014, terminated the teachers' contract to save on health insurance costs. They remain without a contract to this day.

"By collecting a variety of documents and datasets about the surveillance industry into a single, comprehensive archive, the Surveillance Industry Index offers one of the most complete overviews of surveillance tech being sold around the world," said M.C. McGrath of Transparency Toolkit, who added that the SII "enables people to rapidly filter, find, and understand the surveillance technologies likely to effect their lives and work."

What we are experiencing today is the natural repercussion of the implosion of centrist politics, owing to a crisis of global capitalism in which a financial crash led to a Great Recession and then to today’s Great Deflation. The right is simply repeating its old trick of drawing upon the righteous anger and frustrated aspirations of the victims to advance its own repugnant agenda.

In a groundbreaking effort to close the wage gap between men and women, Massachusetts has become the first state to bar employers from asking about applicants’ salaries before making them job offers. In addition, companies will not be allowed to prohibit their workers from telling others how much they are paid, a move that advocates say can increase salary transparency and help employees uncover disparities.

Leaks; Hacks; Tweets; Shots; Encryptions

If “Captain Fantastic” doesn’t cram all of human experience into that box we like to call the dysfunctional family — a category that suggests that all anyone needs to get through Thanksgiving is therapy talk and a group hug — it’s partly because its characters have politics, not simply feelings. The Cash children stumble, but they’re supremely capable and self-aware. What makes them unusual isn’t their knife skills; it’s that they talk seriously about ideas.