Portside

BRICS and the SCO are the two largest independent international organizations to develop over the past decade. What role these new organizations will play internationally is not clear. Certainly sanction regimens will be harder to maintain because the SCO and the BRICS create alternatives. South Africa, for instance, announced that it would begin buying Iran oil in the next few months, an important breach in the sanctions against Iran.

Wall Street really, really wanted Marina Silva to win. Too bad for Wall Street.

Reader Comments - Fast Food Workers; Ralph Fasanella; US-Africa Leaders Summit; School's Back and Growing Inequality; Twin Plagues of ISIS and Ebola; Diablo Canyon Nuke Plant; Brazil's Elections; Argentina; Victory for Market Basket Workers and Consumers; Fed-Ex Workers Can Organize; New Culture on the Left; Call for papers on Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital; Today in History - Paul Robeson Returns to Peekskill; Jewish Woman Among the Interned Japanese

Born into a poor, mixed-race Amazon family, Marina Silva is on the verge of a stunning election win after taking over her party

World Cup, world drama; Congress spooks IRS; Industries by race and gender; Lib/con breakdown; Immigration crisis transforms SC evangelicals; Sensitive men betray women, and themselves - again

Two middle-aged men, former residents of Favelo do Metro, sat around a plastic table between the sidewalk and a demolished home. We asked them why the city would hastily evict this community, only to leave wreckage behind: “They didn’t give us a reason why we had to leave. They just came, pushed us out, and knocked the buildings down. Brazil spends and spends on ‘the future.’ Meanwhile, there’s nothing for the people of today.”

Rightwing parties in Latin America give themselves populist names, keep the manifesto rhetoric modest and talk of appealing to the street. But they aren’t winning many votes. Meanwhile business is learning to work with governments of the left.

There is a climate of frustration and anger among workers that is very different from the initial enthusiastic reception of the 2009 announcement that Brazil would host the World Cup.

By criticizing the 2014 World Cup and the spending priorities of the Brazilian government, soccer legend Pelé has accomplished the rarest of feats in twenty-first-century sports media: he has shown the capacity to shock and surprise. The fact that he feels compelled to actually speak out about the carnival of injustice FIFA and the Worker's Party are creating with the 2014 World Cup only underscores just how deep the crisis remains throughout the country.

The presidents of the Latin American countries of Argentina, Brazil and Chile reflect the deep transformations in the political life of the continent since the days of military dictatorship.