Portside

California Domestic Workers Coalition launches statewide organizing drive.

Artist Unknown, Offset, Circa 2003, Venezuela

What might a global Black Lives Matter movement look like? We may soon find out. Flanders had a chance to sit down with Opal Tometi, who cofounded Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors. Never simply a reaction to police violence against African Americans in the U.S., Black Lives Matter was always conceived of as a strategic response to white supremacy. It's not just an organizing network, but also a strategic concept broad enough to go beyond borders.

This month, the nation acknowledges two political milestones. On Aug. 9, we mark the one-year anniversary of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. Two days later, we mark the 50th anniversary of the uprising in Watts. A third civil disturbance offers lessons learned from failures of 1965. It provides a blueprint for how we might begin to rebuild Ferguson and the many American communities that look like Ferguson. The third milestone is the 1992 unrest in South Los Angeles.

At the recent meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), delegates barely glanced at exhibitors of right-wing groups. One booth promoted what may be the most extreme ALEC initiative yet — an attempt to trigger Article V of the U.S. Constitution in a historically unprecedented call for a national convention of states to amend the supreme law of the USA. Labor economist and veteran ALEC-watcher Jane Carter calls it “terrifying."

In the wake of the Charleston massacre and 70 years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a scholar argues it is important the textbooks reflect the historic role of African American civil rights leaders as advocates for peace and strong opponents of nuclear weapons. The scarring of war, poverty, and racism that Malcolm X spoke of continues to this day, and the history books should reflect how Black activism has challenged these deadly triplets.

“Every society has its radical fringes. But today we need to ask ourselves: What is it in the public atmosphere that allows extremism and extremists to walk freely in broad daylight?” asked Israeli President Reuven Rivlin at an Aug. 1 protest rally in Jerusalem, following the July 30 stabbing murder of a teenage girl, Shira Banki, at the Gay Pride parade, and the July 31 torching of the Dawabsheh family’s West Bank home and the murder of their toddler son, Ali.

President Obama’s Clean Power Plan puts the responsibility on states to develop the strategies for reducing climate pollution. But states are already charged with monitoring and mitigating their air pollution, which hasn’t boded well for communities close to pollution-heavy facilities. And despite the plan’s emphasis on “community involvement and environmental justice,” the agency responsible for its implementation has a very poor environmental justice record.

Increasingly technology companies are aggressively gathering information on their unsuspecting customers even when they are not using a company’s app or software. The ride-hailing company Uber, for example, has changed its privacy policy to track its users through a “unique identifier,” even after they have arrived at their Uber destination. Yet these same tech execs are taking byzantine steps to keep their personal information out of the public domain.

While most of Latin America has been reducing poverty, Mexico is moving in the other direction: new official figures reflect an increase in the number of poor in the last two years. The negative impact of the 2014 fiscal austerity program, poorly-designed and mismanaged public policies, sluggish economic growth, and frozen family incomes are all factors underlying the rise in the number of people living in poverty in the region’s second-most populous country.