Portside

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.

All constitutions in modern countries begin with stressing the principle of equality amongst their citizens. Even undemocratic countries adopt this principle legally, considering it a cornerstone for any modern political system, including democracy, which seems impossible and meaningless without equality. The Israeli Knesset rejected such legislation last week.

Rosa Parks was a lifelong activist who had been challenging white supremacy for decades before she became the famous catalyst for the Montgomery bus boycott. We see a woman who, from her youth, didn't hesitate to indict the system of oppression around her. As she once wrote, "I talked and talked of everything I know about the white man's inhuman treatment of the Negro." Today we honor her, as part of African American History Month.

"I left India more convinced than ever before that nonviolent resistance was the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom." - "The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.," edited by Clayborne Carson. In this decade - in which more people are using nonviolent resistance than ever before - scholars and practitioners alike would do well to consult the pragmatic and principled wisdom of Gandhi and King in building a way forward.

Reader Comments: The Bernie Generation, and Bernie and After, and Hillary; Clinton's Attack on Reconstruction; Backlash to Corbyn and Sanders; Flint, Racism, African Americans and the Criminal Governor Snyder; The Syrian Peace Talks; Announcements: Building on Bernie: What Comes Next; Migrant Labor in China: A Post-Socialist Transformation; #BlackLivesMatter - Books on Black Liberation