Portside

In the last few years, California’s political landscape has set itself apart from national trends. We’ve increased spending on education, innovated the way funding works for K-12 public education, ended deep cuts to critical services, and begun reforming the justice system to provide second chances instead of lifelong disenfranchisement. November 2016 California's electorate will have new opportunities to unify and vote for policies that expand justice and equity.

Tools and solutions to stop gentrification and rising rents!

Warren Buffet owns the company that makes the most mobile home loans to Black borrowers in the country. And he’s stripping them of their hard-earned money.

The biotechnology giant continues attempts to build its GMO seeds plant in Argentina, despite three years of unflinching popular opposition.

When President Obama appointed Dollie Gee to the U.S. District Court in 2010, he undoubtedly didn't expect her to mount a frontal challenge to his administration's detention and deportation policies. But five years after her elevation as the first Chinese American woman on the federal bench, Gee ruled last summer that holding Central American women and children in private detention lockups was illegal.

People now fighting economic injustice have no right to decide how future people should live. But we do have a responsibility to provide an institutional setting that facilitates future people deciding for themselves their own conditions of life and work. To this end, participatory economics, or parecon, describes the core institutions required to generate solidarity, equity, self-management, and an ecologically sound and classless economy.

On an increasingly grim globe that seems to have failure stamped all over it, the surprises embedded in the years to come, the unexpected course changes, inventions, rebellions, and interventions offer, at least until they arrive, grounds for hope. On the other hand, in that same grim world, there's an aspect of the future that couldn’t be more depressing: the repetitiveness of so much that you might think no one would want to repeat.

Climate change; glacial melting: Northern California poet Kirk Glaser depicts what's already happening, forecasts where we're all heading.

The Algerian regime is unsparing in the tactics used to discourage workers from organising and fighting for their rights, including wilful disregard for the decisions of its justice system.

I wanted to see Elizabeth Warren run for president. Institutional support was thin. They said that Warren didn't have a chance of winning. I found the argument that Elizabeth can do more in the Senate (but not in the Senate leadership!) than the presidency to be condescending - another manifestation of the glass ceiling. Yet the same people who were making those arguments against Elizabeth running are now Clintonsplaining that I'm a self-hating woman and a bad feminist.