Portside

The fight against systemic racism and police brutality is alive, and we feel it’s critical for us as a publication to participate by elevating a diverse group of voices across our platforms.

Police foundations across the country are partnering with corporations to raise money to supplement police budgets by funding programs and purchasing tech and weaponry for law enforcement with little public oversight.

Global South communities affected by mining face multiple pandemics — not just of disease, but of violence, exploitation, and corporate capture.

The struggle to work with the people to protect everyone from the coronavirus cannot be done without linking it to the political struggle to get rid of the government and to work to change the country,

The rights of women to terminate their pregnancies and to receive free contraceptives under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are on the chopping block.

Morgan Simon interviews Dr. Manuel Pastor, a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, about the two pandemics: coronavirus and racism.

Despite a crackdown on labor activists there, Chinese workers continue to strike. The strike wave continues to grow, and strikes are not only in the private sector or in companies that manufacture for export. Last year saw a large wave of teacher strikes, and as this article shows, nurses in public hospitals are also striking.

A farmland mapping project by a UC Merced professor indicates that most areas of the country could feed between 80 percent and 100 percent of their populations with food grown or raised within 50 miles. The study immediately generated comment, including positive accolades from author and influencer Michael Pollan (also a UC professor). Many have noted the importance of the study in filling a research gap about local food.

An evolutionary burst 540 million years ago filled the seas with an astonishing diversity of animals. The trigger behind that revolution is finally coming into focus.

While some communities are currently enjoying the fruits of the recovery, others have sunk further into poverty. According to the authors, this pattern of distress vs. prosperity not only “diverges between cities and states but even more starkly within cities at the neighborhood level." In the period of recovery following the Great Recession, the authors find, jobs in the median U.S. ZIP code grew at less than half the national rate.