Portside

"The people at the bottom are going to be continually squeezed, and I don't see this ending anytime soon," said Harvard economist Richard Freeman. "If the economy were growing enough or unions were stronger, it would be possible for the less educated to do better and for the lower income to improve. But in our current world, where we are still adjusting to globalization, that is not very likely to happen."

The wave of Occupy protests in 2011 was forcibly suppressed. But it changed public debate, inspiring a generation of activists.

Eugenie C. Scott fights the teaching of creationism in schools.

There was lots of excitement about the AFL-CIO Convention last week, but were the proposals enough to rebuild the labor movement? Steve Early argues,"Given the extreme attacks both union and non-union workers are suffering, the convention’s heavy emphasis on conventional political strategies and growth through diluted forms of membership was not “transformative” enough to meet the challenges of the day."

Dimitris Psarras, a writer who has chronicled Golden Dawn's rise over almost four decades since the collapse of military rule, said: "Their agenda, clearly, is to create a climate of civil war, a divide where people have to choose between leftists and rightists."

It’s easy to see that the crisis has wounded the country in ways big and small, and that the damage isn’t done even now. Here are five charts that capture the scope and struggles of the Great Recession, five years after it began:

Recently Richmond CA a majority "minority" city has been in the news with an innovative plan to take on the banks and fight blight and the banks have declared war on the city. Richmond is also the community that has taken on Chevron, and the soda industry, has passed "Ban the Box" and municipal IDs. This article describes the organizing that was critical to making all of this possible.

Readers response to the portside post - Labels for GMO Foods Are a Bad Idea; http://portside.org/2013-09-14/labels-gmo-foods-are-bad-idea ; from Judy Atkins, Ivan Handler, C. T. Weber, Sarah Carlson, James Patrick Jordan, Nancy Shinn, Richard Gibson, Germaine Cook, Karen Bednarek, Gregory Wonderwheel, Richard Curtis, Laurel MacDowell, Mark R. Elsis (with links to alternative sources)