Portside

Recently, US airstrikes have claimed the lives of 200 civilians in Iraq, dozens were killed in separate strikes supposedly aimed at Islamic State in Syria and several more women and children died in a raid gone awry in Yemen. Those are just a few examples of the many attacks – launched under the pretext of defeating Isis – that wreaked havoc on civilian populations as the US military ramps up its bombing campaigns in multiple counties.

Through a very clever and subtle weaving together of archival footages, interviews, stereotypic images from racist advertizing from the thirties and forties, and from contemporary TV, we are provided with a historical context and an incredible graphic depiction of the momentous civil rights movement that swept the American south in those years, the lunch-counter sit-ins, the courageous fight to integrate the educational system, the voter registration drives, ...

Mélenchon’s election campaign has galvanized the Left by doing what Hamon couldn’t — making a clean break with the political center. In France, history is back. Here as elsewhere, the social tectonics of the great economic crisis of 2008 are doing their work. The routine presidential stables are recomposing at great speed. They are realigning political forces around the three options (Three Monsters) nestled within the infra-world of our political modernity.

War whoops; Killing O’Reilly; Neutering net neutrality; Hacker power; Chipped; Net on the bubble

Director Larraín has stated that the way Latin Americans think is shaped by poetry, by metaphor, and that his film is partly concerned with the power of poetry to move and influence. We are shown Neruda’s huge influence, as a communist poet, over his natural constituency: the ordinary working man... But what we do not see in the film is the immensely moving capacity of poetry to break down barriers between people of diametrically opposed political beliefs.

The attack on public sector unions intensifies. Public sector unions must now form audacious, coalitions and alliances with private sector unions, and those secular and spiritual organizations.

Scaffolding for an assessment of the correlation of forces after the battles from Trump's inauguration through the GOP's failure to repeal Obamacare, and what the next year may hold in store. Note added April 7: This piece was finalized just before Trump's air strike in Syria. For updates on that extremely dangerous escalation, see the links added to the paragraph terming this "an aggressively militarist, war presidency" below.

"It’s a hard struggle when a member of your family passes away. But this Day of Awareness can mean that her memory will live on forever.”

The U.S. military is a key climate polluter, likely the “largest organizational user of petroleum in the world,” according to a congressional report released in December 2012. Beyond its immediate carbon footprint—which is difficult to measure—the U.S. military has placed countless countries under the thumb of western oil giants. Social movements have long sounded the alarm over the link between U.S.-led militarism and climate change.

Although often not covered in the media, the African immigrant community is facing mass deportations in the era of Donald Trump.