Portside

A focus on violence and looting reduces the people of Watts to “rioters” rather than residents confronting social and economic catastrophe. What they burned is less important than what they built, both before and after the insurrection.

Released during an international symposium taking place in Istanbul, the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change is signed by 60 Muslim scholars and leaders of the faith who acknowledge that—despite the short-term economic benefits of oil, coal, and gas—humanity's use of fossil fuels is the main cause of global warming which increasingly threatens "a functioning climate, healthy air to breathe, regular seasons, and living oceans."

Worker co-ops are businesses owned and operated by the people who work at the company. Instead of squeezing and draining the company, workers, customers and surrounding communities to provide an increasing return for investors, worker-owned companies have an incentive to be responsible, obviously to pay good wages, to respect surrounding communities and the environment (where the workers/owners live) and to make the business a viable long-term operation.

The case for a new, open-source party of unified progressive movements. From Black Lives Matter to Occupy Wall Street, from the DREAMer movement to that for divestment from fossil fuels, young people and people of color have been at the forefront of a new generation of popular movements rising to fill the democracy deficit left by an unresponsive political system.

Sesame Street gentrified; Busting journos in Ferguson; Technocapitalism sucks (blood); Trump stomps puny Fox; Cops take to the net

Eric Foner on the abolitionists, Reconstruction, and winning “freedom” from the Right.

The Black Labor Collaborative argues that to confront our foes "in the political Right and global capitalism, demands a transformed and energized labor movement that can fight back with more than slogans of solidarity. No tinkering around the edges! A transformed movement must be authentically inclusive because diversity carries the strongest seeds of change, of untapped creativity.”

it's possible that Pixar’s obsessiveness about work and employment has somehow been effaced in the public eye by the imaginative diversity of their films’ settings: ant colonies, space, the ocean, a bizarre alternate-world inhabited by sentient vehicles, and so on. But in Inside Out, for the first time, the ground beneath Pixar’s ideological feet comes into view, and it’s the Bay Area, California.

Teachers at Chicago’s Urban Prep Academies voted to form a union—then a whole bunch of them got fired…

July 23, 2015, a formal Mediation Committee established by Samsung and civil society groups issued ground breaking recommendations to compensate hundreds of workers who became ill while working at Samsung and to implement innovative prevention policies to protect their workers in the future. Samsung has agreed to the Committee’s recommendation to provide 100 billion won ($85.8 million), but rejected the core recommendation — funding an independent non-profit foundation.