Portside

The Bernie Sanders campaign has reached millions of people for whom it was easier to engage politics through the prism of a presidential campaign. The underlying issue of our time, is how to remake the U.S. political and economic system into something that works for everybody in our country and does more to help than to harm the rest of the world. Bernie is doing everything he can to keep us focused on this big issue, always clear that it cannot be solved by him alone.

This inability or unwillingness to hear black and other marginalized students is pervasive. The fact that 82 student-led remonstrations occurred in a month points to a system-wide crisis especially at Historically White Colleges and Universities (HWCUs), also called Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs).

Not until he was safely buried underground was a new, less threatening King birthed and branded. This state-sanctioned, sanitized version of King has since been manipulated to discredit, delegitimize and disinform subsequent organizers who wish to continue his legacy in the current work for Black liberation.

Donald Trump bears a striking resemblance to George Wallace and Ross Perot, two men who waged among the most successful and highest impact third party presidential candidacies in US history. Perot and Wallace waged their third party campaigns after failing to win the Republican (Perot) and Democratic (Wallace) nominations. What impact might Trump have on the Republican party and the political system if he wins -- or fails to win -- the Republican nomination?

As the history of Puerto Rican migration to the US indicates, the seemingly distinct campaigns for immigrant rights and those for racial justice ought to be viewed as interdependent and complementary struggles. This may prove the key to creating a more just and sustainable approach to migration policy.

Du Bois’s general strike thesis continues to cast a long shadow over contemporary historiography and black intellectuals alike. Eighty years later lessons still abound in Black Reconstruction.

Bitcoin goes the way of all capital; GOP SOTU message lost in translation; Al Jazeera America hits the wall; Surviving the Sony hack from the inside; Morozov muses

Once you are charged in America, whether you did the crime or not, you are almost always found guilty. Because of this, as many activists have discovered, the courts already are being used as a fundamental weapon of repression, and this abuse will explode in size should there be widespread unrest and dissent. Our civil liberties have been transformed into privileges...

Clinton, the favorite, made a calculated decision to wrap herself tightly to Barack Obama. She praised his health care reforms and pledged to “defend and build on the Affordable Care Act” and to “make it work,” and while Sanders praised President Obama, whom he supported in 2008 and 2012, he made it clear he had differences with him – and that this country needed transformative change.

Supporters of this revamped weapon of mass destruction argue that, by ensuring greater precision in bombing “enemy” targets, reducing the yield of a nuclear blast, and making a nuclear attack more “thinkable,” the B61 Model 12 is actually a more humanitarian and credible weapon than older, bigger versions. Other specialists, such as the Federation of Atomic Scientists, were far more critical. . .