Portside

In September 1965 a dozen or so members of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s southern field staff moved into the West Side Christian Parish’s Project House in the heart of Chicago’s Near West Side, joining other volunteers already living there. Black and white, male and female, most of them still in their early twenties, they had already been tested by civil rights struggles in the South.

There is a reason why Wall Street and all of corporate America likes immigration reform, and it is not, in my view, that they’re staying up nights worrying about undocumented workers in this country -- Bernie Sanders

French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira resigned January 27 to protest President Francois Hollande’s new anti-terrorism law that strips those with dual nationality of their French citizenship if convicted of terrorism. Taubira, who was born in French Guiana, says this divides French citizens into two categories with different rights. Taubira, the target of numerous racist and misogynist attacks, played a critical role in the passage of France’s same-sex marriage law.

In a letter submitted into the public record at the DPU, Deerfield states its Board of Health has forbidden within the town all activities of Kinder Morgan and will enforce this order. Anyone entering onto private properties, without permission from the property owners, for activities related to the proposed natural gas pipeline will be arrested for trespassing, the Select Board has warned.

In the 13 Southern states, the number of workers belonging to unions grew from 2.2 million in 2014, or 5.2 percent of the workforce, to 2.4 million by the end of 2015, or 5.5 percent of Southern workers.

I believe that my incarceration, the constitutional violations in my case, and the government misconduct in prosecuting my case are issues far more important than just my life or freedom. I feel that each of you who have fought for my freedom have been a part of the greater struggle of Native Peoples — for Treaty rights, sovereignty, and our very survival. If I should be called home, please don’t give up on our struggle.

On an increasingly grim globe that seems to have failure stamped all over it, the surprises embedded in the years to come, the unexpected course changes, inventions, rebellions, and interventions offer, at least until they arrive, grounds for hope. On the other hand, in that same grim world, there's an aspect of the future that couldn’t be more depressing: the repetitiveness of so much that you might think no one would want to repeat.

People now fighting economic injustice have no right to decide how future people should live. But we do have a responsibility to provide an institutional setting that facilitates future people deciding for themselves their own conditions of life and work. To this end, participatory economics, or parecon, describes the core institutions required to generate solidarity, equity, self-management, and an ecologically sound and classless economy.

When President Obama appointed Dollie Gee to the U.S. District Court in 2010, he undoubtedly didn't expect her to mount a frontal challenge to his administration's detention and deportation policies. But five years after her elevation as the first Chinese American woman on the federal bench, Gee ruled last summer that holding Central American women and children in private detention lockups was illegal.

The biotechnology giant continues attempts to build its GMO seeds plant in Argentina, despite three years of unflinching popular opposition.