Portside

The Olympics are coming back to Los Angeles. But the games are notoriously bad news for poor people in host cities.

A UN report on the death of Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld in a 1961 plane crash has found a “significant amount of evidence” it was caused by another aircraft, renewing questions of Western involvement. Hammarskjold led a UN peacekeeping force at the request of the newly liberated Congo, which, after the CIA-backed assassination of its President Patrice Lumumba, faced the secession of its mineral rich Katanga province, backed by Belgian troops and mercenaries.

Art dealer, M.Lee Stone has put together an incredible exhibit of 1930's prints that deal with the reality of lynchings of African Americans. "The lynchings of the past are still with us today only in a different form. Black communities across the country are the scenes of mass incarcerations and the disproportionate sentencing of people of color as well the indiscriminate shooting by the police of black persons that we see and hear about too frequently.

Over the past year, the scholar and activist Vijay Prashad taught a series of nonfiction writing workshops to students, activists, workers, and journalists across India. The workshops sought to develop an ethics and practice of socialist writing to foreground what Prashad calls “the small voices of history.”

The DOJ’s new anti-gay legal posture just got shut down in federal court.

What has remained is the National Labor Relation Board’s (NLRB) position that Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) protects workers’ substantive rights to join together in class actions.

The plan would also raise taxes for many middle class families, a fact Americans for Tax Fairness denounced as "absolutely outrageous"

Rosie Flores, a young Latina poet from Los Angeles, speaks to the cultural differences that surround daily life. “Roses are red and we are brown,” she writes, “…we didn’t cross the border the border crossed us.”

The difference between truth and falsehood, Arendt wrote, may become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition

Film actor Jeff Corey’s memoir, completed, edited and prepared for publication by his daughter, Emily Corey, is a tribute to what a left generation accomplished, and not only in front of the camera.