Portside

The sharing economy is growing. AirBNB is now more valuable than Hyatt. But is this an economy built on social justice values and a more sustainable, lower consumption model? Or is it a new way for Big Business to creep further into our lives and exploit our relationships with one another? One professor says about crowdsourcing: "This is a total affront to what the labor movement has struggled for for centuries."

An exhibition, "The Left Front: Radical Art in the 'Red Decade,' 1929-1940," currently running at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, offers a visual history of radical pictorial art during the Depression era. The "Left Front" is meant to initiate a dialogue about the nature of radical art through the exploration of a crucial historical period in the United States when capitalism was potentially on the ropes.

The financial infrastructure of the new economy is under-developed. Waiting for Wall Street to deliver the financial instruments we need for a sustainable economy is like waiting for Exxon to build the renewable energy system we need to avert climate catastrophe. It is not going to happen. The movement needs to be equally focused on moving capital out of fossil fuels and into the new economy as it is readying the economy to absorb this new flow of capital.

In this interview, Bernd Riexinger talks about strategic challenges facing DIE LINKE. Citing Rosa Luxemburg's idea of "revolutionary Realpolitik," he examines the current situation and lays out strategic ideas for the future. The interviewer, Luigi Wolf, starts by going back to the legacy of the "united front strategy," which was established by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in the 1920s, and then shifts to the challenges DIE LINKE currently faces.

For the first time since 1984, a single party–the rightist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Narendra Modi–achieved an outright majority. Modi’s party garnered 282 seats in the Lok Sabha, while the outgoing Congress Party managed to retain a mere 44 seats. Jadaliyya asked Vijay Prashad, professor of International Studies at Trinity College and the outgoing Edward W. Said Chair in American Studies at the American University of Beirut, to comment on this election...

Inspired by business groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, they [the Republicans] proceeded to rewrite the rules of work, passing legislation designed to enhance the position of employers at the expense of employees.

Cory Booker, Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools. They got an education.

In an exhaustive and devastating opinion, Judge Lynn Adleman writes that the facts don't justify restrictions that unduly burden minorities.

The United States has tried to develop thorium as an energy source for some 50 years and is still struggling to deal with the legacy of those attempts. In addition to the billions of dollars spent, mostly fruitlessly, the government will have to spend billions more to deal with the wastes produced by those efforts. America’s energy-from-thorium quest now faces an ignominious conclusion: the Energy Department appears to have lost track of 96 kilograms of uranium 233.

But what if we’ve confused cause and effect? What if it’s not overeating that causes us to get fat, but the process of getting fatter that causes us to overeat? Science may slowly be coming to an understanding of the complex feedback loops which control our metabolism.