Portside

After completing a 3-month, 5 nights a week, Metalworkers’ Union Education Program—the “Integrated Program”—Ana received an elementary school certification, vocational training, along with critical thinking. Ana told me after graduation, “Now I am somebody. Now my son talks to me.“ Pride and self-confidence lit up her eyes.

On February 22, Capital & Main launched a week-long series on California’s increasingly severe affordable housing crisis. “No Direction Home” explores how escalating housing prices are undermining the state’s already embattled middle class and exerting intense economic pressure on millions of poor and working-class residents.

From Haiti to Michigan and across the world, millions - especially poor and marginalized populations - are being denied the human right to clean water and sanitation. These water crises, though distinct in important ways, can both be traced back to longstanding human-made systems that have simultaneously neglected and exploited low-income communities of color.

The uproar over #OscarsSoWhite made me curious. What does the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences value in black performance? Black artists have been nominated for best actress or actor on 30 occasions, for work spanning 28 films. Over the last few weeks, I watched all of them.

We must resist those voices who urge us to settle for the world as it is.

In 1989 five young black men were wrongfully convicted of raping a woman jogging in New York City. Leading the charge against them was a real estate mogul whose divisive rhetoric can be found in his presidential campaign today.

Some 85% of African American eighth graders cannot read at grade level, yet only seven percent of teachers are black and less than two percent of all teachers in our country's schools are black men. Former teacher Alvin Irby started Barbershop Books, a nonprofit, in response to this crisis. It brings books to barbershops in black communities, in a fight to raise literacy levels among black boys. The information below comes from the group's website.

Socialism can mean what we citizens wish for it to mean, by exercising our People Power! Hooray for Bernie Sanders! His vision and his rousing passion for the plight of the people is the greatest remedy for the painful ills of humankind that fear and greed have brought us. I warily approve of Hillary Clinton and would want for her "negotiating experience" to prevail. I've been joking for some time now about him teaching her, and teaming up. This would be powerful.

Last week, the Republican-controlled legislature in West Virginia overrode a veto by Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, making the measure officially law. The story of how West Virginia got to that point is a boiled-down version of the changes America has undergone over the past half-century — the pain of de-industrialization, the shift in political power, the casting about for anything that might create jobs.

The conclusion that the world's dominant economic model—a globalized form of neoliberal capitalism, largely based on international trade and fueled by extracting and consuming natural resources—is the driving force behind planetary destruction will not come as a shock, but the model's detailed description of how this has worked since the middle of the 20th century makes a more substantial case than many previous attempts.