Portside

The Bernie Sanders campaign has reached millions of people for whom it was easier to engage politics through the prism of a presidential campaign. The underlying issue of our time, is how to remake the U.S. political and economic system into something that works for everybody in our country and does more to help than to harm the rest of the world. Bernie is doing everything he can to keep us focused on this big issue, always clear that it cannot be solved by him alone.

The assault at Spring Valley runs deeper than one bad cop - it's the latest product of the school-to-prison pipeline. Over the last 20 years there has been an explosion in the number of police officers stationed in schools. This has been one of the most dramatic and clearly counterproductive expansions of police scope and power in postwar America.

Reader Comments: Black Futures, #BlackLivesMatter - Not More Cops; Harry Belafonte on Activism; Socialism - Making a Comeback; Building a Left Movement and the Sanders campaign; Mideast War Escalation - Syria; Wealth Data and U.S. Economic Inequality; China Pivot; Okinawa Missiles, Cuba and Nuclear War; Israel; 2016 elections, primaries and the military budget; satirical articles on Portside

If the state says you go to bed by 10 o'clock, then you should make sure that by 11, the streets of our cities are filled with human protest and bodies! The fact that some might have a restless night with the noise downstairs or find it inconvenient because people blocked traffic, well that's the point - to snap you out of your indifference! So those who are turned off by radical thinking, or radical behavior, well, as a matter of fact, in many ways, you are our target.

In the last 10 days, five black churches have been set on fire in the St. Louis area. And unlike the last wave of black church fires this summer in which weather played a role in some of the fires, these all appear to be the work of arsonists. The lack of media coverage about these fires is highly-noticeable, given the media’s hyper-intensive coverage of rioters in Baltimore setting fire to a CVS earlier this year.

Answer: When the child is Black and the shooter is a police officer. You're not likely to find any law enforcement person within a 100-mile radius who would dare speak out and say what we all know: this went down badly (not just "tragically," as one of the experts put it) and the officers should be held accountable. Law enforcement culture doesn't allow for people to break ranks without consequences. So please, let's not call these hired consultants independent.

Reader Comments: Ethel Rosenberg Celebrated in New York City; Elizabeth Warren and #BlackLivesMatter; The Obama Presidency - Afghanistan; Arne Duncan and 'Educational Reform' - Not; Racist Violence-Kansas; Syriza and its 'Left' Critics;

Senator Warren's speech clearly and powerfully calls into question America's commitment to black lives by highlighting the role that structural racism played and continues to play with regard to housing discrimination and voting rights, said DeRay Mckesson, a prominent #BLM activist. Warren understands the protests as a matter of life or death - the American dream has been sustained by an intentional violence...the uprisings have been the result of years of lived trauma

Movement activists discuss strategy and tactics in #BlackLivesMatter.