Portside

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.

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.

Hotepism; When democracy was in Vogue; Boars' revenge; Cruz has a cross for you; Erasing the wall; Intersectionalizing the rich

"If a hugely profitable corporation like Verizon can destroy the good family-supporting jobs of highly skilled workers, then no worker in America will be safe from this corporate race to the bottom," Trainor said last week in a statement that announced the strike.

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.

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”

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.

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.

Let’s offer thanks for small favors when someone -- in this case, ex-Army Ranger and TomDispatch regular Rory Fanning (author of Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger’s Journey Out of the Military and Across America) -- feels the urge to do something about the massive, militarized propaganda effort in our schools. In my book, Fanning is the equivalent of any 12 of our generals and we need more like him both in those schools and in our country. Tom Engelhardt

For Palestinians, Honduras and Guatemala might seem too distant, too irrelevant for our struggle. And while there are some apparent stark differences in our lived realities and in the faces of our oppressors, there are commonalities as well. In Palestine as well as in many parts of Central and Latin America, the oppression is directly sponsored by US military and financial aid. And in all these places our collective survival rests upon defending and preserving our land.