Skip to main content

Keep Harriet Tubman -- and All Women -- Off the $20 Bill

Feminista Jones Washington Post
There’s no place for women – especially women of color – on America’s currency today. Reprinting this Op-ed from last year in light of the US Treasury's announcement that abolitionist Harriet Tubman will appear on front of the $20 bill, replacing former President Andrew Jackson and becoming the first woman featured on U.S. paper currency in modern times.

Earth Day 2016: Retrospect and Realism

H Patricia Hynes portside
Capitalism wedded to delusional American manifest destiny–including our fatuous decades-long effort to control of the Middle East and recent militarized pivot to Asia–meets its limits in Nature. Either we heed those limits immediately and aggressively, or we face an ecocide from which not even those who own lifeboats will escape.

From Fight for $15 to the Verizon Strike: We Must Protect Workers' Right to Walk Outut

Alex Gourevitch The Guardian
Strikes can be legally threatening and socially disruptive. But in the absence of any serious, social efforts to change the economy, it is perfectly reasonable for workers to defend their interests. So long as the economy is as radically unequal and oppressive as it is, workers have a right to strike. They have that right just the way anyone facing oppression has a right to resist it.

Bernie Sanders Speech at the Vatican - Full Text

David Gibson Religion News Service
Here is the prepared text of the address that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders delivered on Friday (April 15) at a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. The conference is focused on “Centesimus Annus,” a landmark social justice encyclical by Saint John Paul II: “The Urgency of a Moral Economy: Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of Centesimus Annus”

The Most Dangerous Place on Earth: A Nuclear Armageddon in the Making in South Asia

Dilip Hiro TomDispatch
To use a term that has become commonplace in our world when discussing commerce, the prospect of nuclear conflict has globalized war and it’s a nightmare of the first order. In the post-Cold War world, Exhibit A in that process would certainly be the unnerving potential for a nuclear war to break out between India and Pakistan.

Debtors' Island: How Puerto Rico Became a Hedge Fund Playground

Jennifer Wolff New Labor Forum
You could call it a perfect storm: a fiscal crisis converging with a deep secular economic decline.[1] Once touted as the showcase of U.S.- led economic development, debt-strapped Puerto Rico is currently embroiled in a struggle for survival. During the mid-twentieth century, Puerto Rico grew at a rapid pace, betting on cheap labor, privileged duty-free access to the U.S. market, and tax incentives for U.S. companies.