Portside

ICE enslaves; Muslims aid Jews; DOJ has cops’ backs; Black college heads played; Burning Zinn; Muffling Murray; Popular assemblies

There are important questions facing all those seeking the best way to protest President Trump, the GOP-led Congress, and the immigration, health care, and environmental polices the new administration seeks to impose upon a reluctant populace: what is the meaning of a strike, demonstration, or protest march? The brilliance of strikes and stoppages like the Day Without Immigrants and the Women’s Strike lies in organizers’ willingness to halt business as usual.

What is Cuba like? Since visiting there recently, I have been asked this question hundreds of times and learned that every third person harbors a desire to visit there.

On March 8 women from every part of the country and the economy will rise together to participate in #DayWithoutAWoman, also known as the Women’s Strike. A follow-up to the historic Women’s March on January 21, #DayWithoutAWoman will fall on International Women’s Day, which honors the social, political, and economic contributions of women globally.

It’s time that we take a few minutes to think about how we want to proceed, because there is no way that I can see us sustaining this level of mobilization. We have to think strategically about what we want to do.

As many community members start to plan out emergency response teams and community defense, there is a need to think out short and long term organizing strategies that we can use so that we do not fall into patterns of solely doing individual deportation cases, press and mobilizing work, but are also thinking about long-term power building.

The power of black rage was what was so amazing about the Charlotte Uprising. The destruction occurred in an area of concentrated wealth accumulation, the kind of accumulation that drives inequality and necessitates a brutal policing force to maintain that inequality—a policing enacted on black bodies that oftentimes leads to our death.

This story is the first in a new Truthout series, Severed Ties: The Human Toll of Prisons. This series will dive deeply into the impact of incarceration on families, loved ones and communities, demonstrating how the United States' incarceration of more than 2 million people also harms many millions more -- including 2.7 million children.

Almost two years ago, Kalief Browder died after suffering abuse and torture at Rikers Island for three years - all while he was waiting for a court date. This gross injustice happened because many of our towns still rely on money bail, a broken system that keeps Black people in jail even before they are ever convicted of anything.

The capability upgrade has happened outside the attention of most government officials, who have been preoccupied with reducing nuclear warhead numbers. The result is a nuclear arsenal that is being transformed into a force that has the unambiguous characteristics of being optimized for surprise attacks against Russia and for fighting and winning nuclear wars.