Portside

Reader Comments- Netanyahu Doesn't Speak for All American Jews; SYRIZA, Greece; George Washington and Slavery; Lesley Gore; Needed-Populist Challenger; Tax Top Incomes; Militarized Future; Mississippi's Racial Murders; Ai-jen Poo, Aging; Walmart; West VA Coal; Bad Cops; Chapel Hill Murders; Water Privatization; Teachers and Education Today; Medical Volunteers Needed: Rojava Announcements: Film "Made in Dagenham", Identity Politics-Foundation for Coalition Building

Private U.S. corporations, taking advantage of lucrative opportunities created by the intentionally crippled tax base of local governments, are grabbing public assets and resources, particularly water. But water is not a commodity; it is a human right. And in the U.S., as around the world, the onslaught of corporate privatization is being countered by a powerful backlash to reclaim that precious resource for the public sphere.

California State University Northridge Professor Rudy Acuna relates current campus privatization plans to past and on-going struggles to build and learn from "community" with a challenge to all who resist capital and work for alternatives to institutionalized racism, genocide, Manifest Destiny, urban renewal and privatization.

Reader Comments - Darren Wilson Acquittal - Reader Responses; Black Friday Protests; Election Lessons for the Left; Immigration Reform; Ursula K. Le Guin, Pension Reform(?); Water Grab; Facebook Drivers Vote Union; Berlin Wall's Fall - Reflections from the GDR; Israel Lobby and Ukrainian Fascists; Mexico - 43 students murdered; Israel, Palestine and Rasmeah Odeh; The Selfless Gene; Announcement - New Politics Forum on the Environmental Crisis - New York - Dec. 9

The Value of Water Coalition was formed by large, well-resourced water and wastewater organizations to change the way we think about water. The rest of us need to know that we may not like the way they think of us and our rights to water.

First they privatized the toll roads, then the highways, then the prisons, then public transportation, then parking garages and street parking meters. Now the water...Now Detroit. he newly enacted Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act holds promise for life in a world shaped by climate change. However, privatization proponents are working hard to privatize ownership and control our water infrastructure.

Outsourcing government not only leads to poor services -- it's killing the middle class, an expert tells Salon

Today’s hostile takeover of three of our neighborhood school communities by the mayor’s handpicked Board of Education makes it quite clear that there is a war on older, African-American teachers and administrators, as well as the school communities in which they serve. … CTU president Karen Lewis