Portside

Authoritarianism vs public media, and other fights for the right to know

Iranian American screen polymath Payman Maadi (who made such an impact in films such as Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) is Samad, a cop waging an apparently unwinnable war on drugs in the Iranian capital. Having rounded up a vast community of addicts living and dying within a hellscape of giant concrete pipes, Samad and his deputy, Hamid (Houman Kiai), treat their captives like cattle, stripping and humiliating them, herding them from one overcrowded prison space to the next.

Activists known as “salts” have been a key to recent successful organizing campaigns. And they say they’re just getting started.

Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated 55 years ago today while in Memphis standing in solidarity with striking sanitation workers. His life and radical words stand as a beacon of hope, urging us to keep fighting for economic and racial justice.

That so many states have been passing such legislation that forbids considering environment, society, and governance implications of financial investments is anything but a fluke.

Mel King, the longtime political activist and former state representative from the South End who in 1983 became the first Black person to reach a Boston mayoral general election, died Tuesday morning in his South End home. He was 94.

Lexi Rizzo, Starbucks Buffalo shift supervisor for seven years at one of the first stores to unionize, says company claims she was fired for tardiness.

Said Zeedani, who was part of the 1976 strike by Palestinian citizens in which Israel killed six protesters, recalls the build-up to 'a political earthquake.'

Socialists from many organizations took jobs in NYC transit in the 1980s. A new paper examines: What were the strategies that guided them? What did they accomplish? What caused the collapse of their union reform project? What are lessons for today?

After World War II, the Indonesian Communist Party threw itself into democratic politics and outreach to broad segments of society. Western intelligence agencies were worried because they knew that the PKI was not coercing people into giving them power — they were simply growing in popularity.