Portside

In the November, 2014, special issue of Socialism and Democracy, "The Roots of Mass Incarceration in the US: Locking Up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor," provides a penetrating analysis of a range of the issues involved and points toward the steps that are needed to turn around these horrors. This publication couldn't be more timely and relevant, as the mighty river of the Black Lives Matter movement flows across and brings new life into the country.

What value would be added by viewing the war from outside the nation? How does it change our understanding of the war to situate it within a larger international context? One simple answer is that the war mattered greatly to the world. In newspapers and magazines, in meeting halls, churches, taverns, lecture halls, workers unions, and at posh dinner parties, foreigners followed the war with great interest and they debated what it meant for their future.

US President Obama supports Chancellor Merkel's efforts at finding a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis. But hawks in Washington seem determined to torpedo Berlin's approach. And NATO's top commander in Europe hasn't been helping either.

In an executive order issued by Barack Obama, the White House said the situation in Venezuela posed an “extraordinary threat” to US national security. Maduro, the Venezuelan president, reacted with anger in a televised address on Tuesday night, calling on his country’s Congress to grant him additional decree powers to “fight imperialism”.

There are some new things on Portside that we are pleased to be able to call your attention to.

LeftRoots, an organization of Leftists engaged in mass organizing in the USA, is committed to developing individual and collective skills necessary to formulate, evaluate and carry out strategy to build 21st century socialism. Points of unity, organizing and study are integrated to strengthen efforts to challenge capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy hetero-patriarchy and create strategies for cultivating democratic, protagonist-lead and transform social movements.

“It’s ugly, it’s vicious, it’s brutal” describes Israel in Palestine — and why Gaza is “the hood on steroids” says Cornel West speaking with Stanford Professor David Palumbo-Liu about the divestment effort and Palestinian activism. The interview ranges from how the issue of Israel-Palestine is registering not only with young people, but also with older progressives and intellectuals, and about the linkages between civil rights struggles in the US and abroad.

In January 2015, the International Campaign for Responsible Technology (ICRT), the GoodElectronics Network plus more than 60 expert allies from 15 countries met, discussed and drafted a CALL concerning the hazards of chemicals used in the global electronics supply chain. "A Challenge to the Global Electronics Industry to Adopt Safer and More Sustainable Products and Practices, and Eliminate Hazardous Chemicals, Exposures and Discharges" is organizing for endorsements.

Seniors at Albuquerque's Cottonwood Classical Preparatory School voted online to hold a Communist-themed prom they quickly dubbed “prom-munism.” Meanwhile, caught between a rock and a Marxist place, school officials seem for now to be hedging their bourgeois bets.

This weekend, thousands of people -- including one-fifth of the U.S. Congress and President Obama -- are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the famous Selma to Montgomery march. The irony is rich: The 1965 Selma march -- and the violent "Bloody Sunday" caused by Alabama troopers -- is credited with speeding passage of the Voting Rights Act, Yet voting rights in the South and the Voting Rights Act itself are in their most precarious position in half a century.