Portside

ICE enslaves; Muslims aid Jews; DOJ has cops’ backs; Black college heads played; Burning Zinn; Muffling Murray; Popular assemblies

Raol Peck's attention to historical detail characterizes the film as a whole, and testifies to the clearly loving amount of research that went into making it. The result is an entertaining and surprisingly funny portrait of the young Karl Marx as the film follows Marx and Friedrich Engels and their joint struggle against various other contemporary socialist leaders, culminating in their collaboration on the Communist Manifesto.

We have to answer the cries of people who want elected leaders to do something different. They want to be treated fairly and they need a political party who represents them. It’s shameful that the elites have one-and-a-half political parties. Working class men and women have zero parties—or they have half a party. That’s what upset's progressives. I hope the DNC takes a different turn and restore the party’s integrity. I’m hopeful, but won't hold my breath.

Almost two years ago, Kalief Browder died after suffering abuse and torture at Rikers Island for three years - all while he was waiting for a court date. This gross injustice happened because many of our towns still rely on money bail, a broken system that keeps Black people in jail even before they are ever convicted of anything.

This story is the first in a new Truthout series, Severed Ties: The Human Toll of Prisons. This series will dive deeply into the impact of incarceration on families, loved ones and communities, demonstrating how the United States' incarceration of more than 2 million people also harms many millions more -- including 2.7 million children.

Scientists who cracked quinoa's gene code say it could solve the world's looming food shortage. Quinoa has never been fully domesticated or bred to its full potential even though it provides a more balanced source of nutrients for humans than cereals. Researchers say that quinoa could provide a healthy, nutritious food source for the world using land and water that currently cannot be used, and the new genome makes it one step closer to that goal.

The power of black rage was what was so amazing about the Charlotte Uprising. The destruction occurred in an area of concentrated wealth accumulation, the kind of accumulation that drives inequality and necessitates a brutal policing force to maintain that inequality—a policing enacted on black bodies that oftentimes leads to our death.

As many community members start to plan out emergency response teams and community defense, there is a need to think out short and long term organizing strategies that we can use so that we do not fall into patterns of solely doing individual deportation cases, press and mobilizing work, but are also thinking about long-term power building.

It’s time that we take a few minutes to think about how we want to proceed, because there is no way that I can see us sustaining this level of mobilization. We have to think strategically about what we want to do.

As Justice Kennedy writes: “Yet the law responds to proper evidence and valid inferences in ever-changing circumstances, as it learns more about ways in which its commands are circumvented.” This is a strong signal to lower courts not to apply prior cases formalistically or mechanically, but to ferret out unconstitutional racial gerrymanders that take ever-evolving form.