Portside

After a year of earthshaking victories and devastating setbacks, Europe's new progressive parties are slowly learning how to balance governance with activism.

Alan Mills, executive director of Uptown People's Law Center (UPLC), shares the stories of several women incarcerated at Logan Prison in Illinois who are members of the plaintiff class in UPLC's recently-settled case challenging the way people with mental illness are treated in Illinois prisons (Rasho v. Baldwin). This essay was originally posted on UPLC's blog.

The idea that "everything and everybody everywhere should operate as if they were a business" has emerged a working definition of contemporary neoliberalism. Another way of putting it is that "everything and everybody everywhere" should actually be a business. Lester K. Spence shows how this philosophy pains most of us while focusing on neoliberalism's effects on black politics. Brandon Soderberg offers an introduction to Spence's argument.

For generations, the Extreme Right in India has sought to erase the Left. What is it about the Left that the Extreme Right fears? It fears that the Left has an alternative narrative of India’s history and of its possible future -- one rooted not in social exclusion and economic inequality, but in the very opposite of that.

While the US hasn’t publicly confirmed specifics – which are still being negotiated – an Israeli cabinet minister told Defense News that the Obama package would see US military aid jump to more than $40 billion over the 10-year period beginning in 2018, from the $30 billion in the program that began in 2008.

The Democratic Party rejected the New Deal and its stress on working-class Americans in favour of a technocratic elite – is it time for a political revolution?

Remember the age-old question, what do all those with power want? More power. As such, two monopolies have dominated American politics for over 150 years-the Democratic Party, founded in 1828, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Together, they form a political cartel, or an association of political parties with the purpose of maintaining concentrated power and restricting or repressing competition.

When the Supreme Court ties 4-4, no precedent is set. Anyone in labor worried about that outcome in Friedrichs can rest a bit easier remembering that no precedent is needed here. Abood created the precedent in 1977, and Friedrichs was a shameless ideological ploy to overturn that longstanding precedent.

Rewriting Bernie's history; Black community loses WWRL; Skills gap; Kids depart social media; Flint fail; Copyright crisis

The droll conceit of "Where to Invade Next" is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff “summon” Michael to the Pentagon and deploy him to “invade” countries around the world. But instead of looting them of their natural resources, such as oil, Moore brings their best ideas—including free university education, expanded leisure time, worker representation on boards of directors, school reform, punishment of bankers for recklessly wrecking economies, prison reform, back to the US.