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What We Learned In Chicago

Mark Dudzic Labor Campaign for Single Payer
October's national single payer strategy conference in Chicago was truly an historic event. For the first time in decades, national single payer advocacy organizations came together around a joint agenda and focused on building unity and strategic clarity as we work to finish the job and make healthcare a right for everyone in America.

Why Non-profits Can't Lead the 99%

Warren Mar The Stansbury Forum
Warren Mar has written a provocative piece on the role of Community Based Organizations and Worker Centers in the working class movement. He explores controversial issues of the funding and democratic control of these organizations which have filled a vacuum in organizing particularly among immigrant workers.

Isis Shouldn’t Dictate How We Address Refugees

Chelsea Manning The Guardian
We must not let Isis’s crimes dictate how we address the refugee crisis – or privacy. Some want to exploit the Paris attacks in order to justify seizures of power to meet their own political ends. We should not let that happen.

Review: 'Chi-Raq' - Spike Lee's Urgent, Angry Midlife Masterpiece

Jordan Hoffman The Guardian
Chi-Raq begins with a devastating overture, Pray 4 My City, with the lyrics printed directly on the screen, impossible to ignore. 'I don’t live in Chicago, I live in Chi-Raq,' it concludes, using the controversial nickname given to the city where gun deaths outnumber those in America’s foreign wars. Narrator Dolmedes, Samuel L Jackson, explains that communities under siege aren’t a new phenomenon, and explains how previous authors wrote about such tales.

Movie: Spike Lee's Chi-Raq

Chi-Raq is an angry midlife masterpiece that, like previous Spike Lee films, sucks the viewer into a cinematographic vortex that is as challenging as the mad realities is confronts. For a full review, click here

Annual Message from the Moderators of Portside to Our Readers

Portside
The service Portside provides is in greater demand than ever. Thousands are discovering that there is a Left in the US, and our daily posts help give a sense of its real scope, however diverse and organizationally diffuse. We turn for you to help because as we grow, so do our financial needs. We will continue, but to measure up to a re- charged and re-vitalized movement, your contributions will make all the difference.

Portugal: The Left Takes Charge

Conn Hallinan Foreign Policy in Focus
Even though the right-wing Forward Portugal lost the election—it garnered only 38 percent of the votes—Silva allowed its leader, former Prime Minister Passos Coelho, to form a government. That maneuver lasted just 11 days. Coelho introduced a budget loaded with austerity measures and privatization. In the face of growing outrage and a threatened general strike Silva finally asked Socialist Party leader Antonio Costa to form a government.

 How to Understand White Male Terrorism

Max Berger The Nation
 Since the civil-rights movement, the Republican establishment — the big bankers and CEOs that actually run the party — have danced with racists in the white grassroots by conflating racism and fear of the government. Instead of providing all Americans with decent healthcare, education, jobs, or housing, the racist white grassroots and rich establishment agreed that everyone should be on their own — so black people and immigrants don’t accidentally get anything good.