Portside

A Post-Coronavirus economy can no longer afford to put the Pentagon first. As it turns out, creating jobs through Pentagon spending is among the least effective ways to rebuild the economy.

Fire in the Anthropocene has become the physical equivalent of endless nuclear war. A new, profoundly sinister nature is rapidly emerging from our fire rubble at the expense of landscapes we once considered sacred.

As fewer people remain able to afford rent in big cities, more leave those cities for cheaper regions, or simply fall out of the housing market and into homelessness. Think tanks and activist groups are thinking outside the box with solutions.

It's exacerbating hot, dry conditions allowing wildfires to spread farther and faster. Demographic and forest management factors alone are insufficient to explain the magnitude of the observed increase in wildfire extent over the past half-century.

Trump and his supporters are defending an America where white men can rule and brutalize without consequence.

The fight for housing security has already become a part of the general struggle against inequality made possible by the epochal rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

In 1970 Chicanos protested how US casualties in Vietnam disproportionately consisted of young men from their communities in the Southwest. Now, they protest the killings of Latina and Latino soldiers.

According to a recent poll at least half of people in the four largest US cities have experienced job loss, and/or reduced wages and hours due to COVID19. The greatest problems are found in Black and Latino households. And it's going to get worse.

We should focus on racism as the problem the nation needs to tackle, because working on that problem is the key to working on all others. We are justified in taking this approach by the millions that are now building a movement in the streets.

Perhaps the only thing that will force Trump to back down from an attempted overthrow of the election results is an overwhelming popular vote against him on Election Day, notwithstanding how many mail ballots have yet to be counted.