Portside

The Chicago Teachers Union’s strike today is a challenge to the rest of labor to break anti-union rules.

Martin Espada, “The Pablo Neruda of North American poets," according to Sandra Cisneros, turns his critical eye to the persistence of racist murders in our times.

The poet Martin Espada, called the North American Pablo Neruda, turns his eye to the continuing murders of non-white peoples and asks how people in the future will look back at our times, wondering "how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them."

Why is Europe disintegrating? And what can be done about it? What we should do now is what democrats should have done in 1930 to prevent a catastrophe that is now becoming imaginable once again. We should establish a pan-European coalition of radical, social, green, and liberal democrats to put the “demos” back into democracy.

The Democratic Party's special class of entitled and unelected VIP delegates helps explain what's wrong with the way we choose our presidential candidates.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” asked Watergate conspirator Ehrlichman. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”

If the Sanders generation can speak to America as boldly as Roosevelt did, and build their power once Bernie’s campaign is done, they may just make their revolution yet.