Portside

I wrote this paper originally in 1996—for a magazine called Sojourner: The Women’s Forum. As a clinic defender, I witnessed people yelling violently and acting aggressively towards women going into clinics in Boston and Brookline, Mass. to get abortions. I wanted people to know what it was like at the clinics on Saturday mornings. And I also wanted to honor the two women who were killed at a Massachusetts clinic in 1994 and others murdered over abortion rights.

Seven years ago local officials in Marin County, California organized to form a nonprofit electricity company with the noblest intentions. Buying and selling electricity allowed the group, Marin Clean Energy (MCE), to route around the local utility giant, Pacific Gas & Electric, which for years had resisted its customers’ pleas for cleaner, more reliable power, all the while “greenwashing” its image with marketing campaigns.

U.S. schools provide a great deal of useful information, but also leave out a great deal. Please see whether you can answer the following questions before scrolling down and clicking a link at the bottom for the answers. How many can your kids answer? Can your kids' teachers answer them? Can your parents answer them? Can your uncle who tells you whom to vote for and what to think answer them?

This essays calls attention to two crucial developments. First, the far right has taken dangerous steps further to the right, legitimizing the public expression of blatant racism and authoritarian policies toward Muslims and immigrants. And second, not for the first time, how crucial it is for a social justice strategy with intimate interconnections of war, terrorism, racism and inequality, and between peace and justice at home and abroad.

Changes are happening and the Cubans are trying to figure out how to accommodate them within a socialist framework.

Fracking is a relatively expensive process—about ten times more costly than the $5 to $6 per barrel cost of drilling oil from conventional wells in Saudi Arabia. By letting the price of oil drop, OPEC, in which Saudi Arabia is the key partner, has been applying financial pressure on the fracking industry.

Beginning with the lunch counter sit-ins in early 1961 and continuing on through 1969 and beyond, college students around the country rallied to the cause of justice and freedom. The two best known student organizations of that time were the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Another important group, though less well known, was the Northern Student Movement (NSM) and it was founded on the Yale campus in New Haven

Global developments in finance and geopolitics are prompting a rethinking of the structure of banking and of the nature of money itself. Russia, Iceland, Ireland and Equador.

 While the government remains mum on the detentions, the police sweep seems an unusually harsh crackdown on community-based groups that have long struggled to balance mutual aid and advocacy without courting controversy. Working outside the international spotlight and concentrated in China’s gritty southern manufacturing belt, organizers toil thanklessly each day on behalf of local workers: filing complaints, winning back wages, fostering collective bargaining, ...

Times tells tales I; Times tells tales II; Cable coup in Philly; Work 2.0; Sports bubble