Portside

Social justice activist Ruth Gilmore challenges four opportunist tendencies within the criminal justice movement - with lessons for ALL progressive movements.

Radical science fiction written by organizers, change makers and visionaries is collected and co-edited by Walidah Imarisha into an anthology Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Imarisha links her editing efforts to her work as a prison abolitionist and larger social movements' on-going need for envisioning our revolutionary futures.

As CAPITAL & MAIN's “State of Equality” series has documented, economic inequality poses a grave threat to California’s future. Conditions would be far worse if not for progress made by activists, community leaders and lawmakers. In the last several years, California has generated some of the nation’s most innovative and effective strategies to reverse inequality. Here Judith Lewis Mernit lists 10 landmark achievements worth celebrating,emulating and strengthening.

Five years in the ACA still primarily serves as a huge government marketing campaign for private insurance companies, funneling millions of new customers with few if any restrictions on ever-escalating prices. The ACA built upon the flaws of our market-based system and, quite predictably, is failing to contain costs and provide broad access to affordable, quality health care. Corporate interests still trump the common good in U.S.

The European debt crisis has little to do with poor budgeting and everything to do with crony capitalism.

An estimated 15,000 teachers and their supporters rallied in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday, threatening to strike should union and school district representatives fail to reach an agreement to reduce class sizes, raise teacher pay, and eliminate the existing system for evaluating educators.

What good is it to protect ourselves with nuclear weapons if we poison our people in the process? Unfortunately, this sentiment seems to be missing from the Obama administration and Congress, and one of professor Parkinson’s most important lessons—that “delay is the deadliest form of denial”—remains lost on US decision makers.

A Prison, Infamous for Bloodshed, Faces a Reckoning as Guards Go on Trial

He may be leading us toward economic catastrophe.

Fearing the federal government’s new recommendations against added sugars will embolden cities to adopt soda taxes, Big Soda is using tobacco industry tactics to stop cities like Seattle from regulating their products. Seattle was one of six cities awarded a grant from the American Beverage Association (ABA) and the U.S. Conference of Mayors to fight childhood obesity, which is like getting a grant from the tobacco industry to fight cancer.