Information is power. Our mission at Portside is to seek out and to provide information that empowers you -- that empowers the left. Every day we search hundreds of sources to connect you with the most interesting, striking and useful material. Just once a year we appeal to you to contribute to make it possible to continue this work. Please help.

 

Dollar Meals and Diabetes

The world’s healthiest societies are those with the lowest inequality—societies where leftwing forces are strong.

Death And Texas

Race Looms Ever Larger as Death Sentences Decline

Jobs, Jobs Everywhere, But Most of Them Kind of Suck

Gallup asked 6,600 U.S. workers what they saw as the defining characteristics of a “good” job, then used their answers to construct a “job-quality index.” As measured by the index only 40 percent of Americans currently have “good” jobs.

Rap Brown Law Today

The Rap Brown Law is based on the idea that one person, crossing a state line with the intent to participate in mischief, ought to be prosecuted based on his or her writings or speech, duly intercepted, or by the compelled testimony of his comrades.

Criminal Justice Fees and Fines Don’t Work

Courts have grown more dependent on fees and fines for revenue. But enforcing them is expensive — and we don’t even know the true costs.

Dreamers With Shovels

How the first New Deal remade America

Labour, Corbyn and the Future of Britain

No matter what the court jesters of post-political analysis say, the British elections have right and left as the clear contenders. A victory for Labour would show that the voice of class cannot be silenced.

Canadian Mining Company Escalates Culture War in Oaxaca

Protest against Fortuna Silver Mines.
Local Oaxacan representatives accuse Fortuna Silver Mines, a Canadian corporation, of appropriating their culture to whitewash a record of environmental crimes and incitement to violence that has killed local activists and divided their communities.

Iraqis Rise Up Against 'Made in the USA' Corruption

An Iraqi anti-government protest.
With massive protests embroiling Iraq, Western media casts Iran as the chief foreign player in Iraq today. While Iran is one of the targets of the protests, most of those ruling Iraq now remain former exiles the US flew in with its occupation forces.

Homelessness and Gun Violence

"Wherever there is homelessness and housing insecurity, there is violence. So I think anybody who is concerned about crime in a city like Chicago should look at homelessness as a contributing factor."
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Culture

Mark Zuckerberg and I

Brendan Walsh Rattle
“I’ve become obsessed,” writes the poet Branden Walsh, “with trying to understand the compulsions and sickness of a society that believes billionaires are a healthy/natural component of civilization.” He tries here to humanize just one.

books

Monopoly and Its Discontents

Gerald Berk The American Prospect
It's no Marxist critique of class power--would that it were--but Matt Stoller's Goliath, aimed at moving the Democratic Party off dead center, slams all the right enemies in urging the resuscitating of the anti-monopoly tradition of the 20th century

books

Racial Terror & Totalitarianism

Mary Helen Washington Solidarity
African American anti-fascist intellectuals sought to link colonialism and U.S.-style racism with European fascism using a variety of rhetorical and artistic means. This book offers a portrait of those efforts.

Labor

labor

In Wisconsin, the Teamsters Faced a Revolt from Below

Alice Herman In These Times
Sampson and her colleagues ran a campaign to elect a new slate of officials to head the Teamsters local. The slate, which called itself Rebuild 695 and was comprised mostly of Madison Metro Transit employees, came 96 votes short.

labor

Harvard’s Graduate Student Union Begins Strike

James S. Bikales and Ruoqi Zhang The Harvard Crimson
Harvard’s graduate student union began its strike Tuesday at midnight after more than a year of contract negotiations with the University.

labor

Almost Half of All Americans Work in Low-Wage Jobs

BY Aimeea Picchi CBS News
Even though the economy is adding more jobs, there's increasing evidence that many of those new positions don't offer the kind of wages and benefits required to get ahead. Americans are working but aren't earning enough to gain economic stability.

Friday nite video

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Why Billionaires Won’t Save Us

Hasan Minhaj dissects how the ultra-rich use philanthropy to get richer, distract from the injustices on which they built their fortunes, and dictate politics and policy

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Who Is Worse: Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell?

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich discusses the most dangerous politician of his lifetime, who has damaged our country in ways that will take a generation to undo...Mitch McConnell

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The Report | Movie

The plot follows staffer Daniel J. Jones and the Senate Intelligence Committee as they investigate the CIA's use of torture following the September 11 attacks. It covers more than a decade's worth of real-life political intrigue. Starring Adam Driver and Annette Bening. Streaming on Amazon.

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Dark Waters | Movie

Mark Ruffalo stars as an attorney who goes after DuPont for dumping toxic wastes in West Virginia. But more than a simple "superhero triumphs" docudrama, Dark Waters is a dark tale of the human consequences of corporate power for everyone it touches.