Portside

A loss of income causes more than financial distress. It severs, as the sociologist Émile Durkheim pointed out, the vital social bonds that give us meaning.

The impact of this political decision is significant: 800,000 young immigrants—many of whom have never known another country except when they were small children—will become instantly deportable and lose the ability to work legally and contribute to the United States, and will be effectively left without labor rights and employment law protections in the workplace.

In shorthand: this essay is an argument for the left to interact with the post-Charlottesville surge of resistance by pursuing a strategy that is anti-right, anti-racist, gender-inclusive, grounded in the interests of the working class and oriented toward working both inside and outside of the Democratic Party.

Trump terminates Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects migrants from deportation, a move that Obama called ‘cruel’ and ‘wrong’

Net neutrality? FCC No/People Yes; Harvey breaks local news; Googlegate; Berkeley reports bend the story; Modest proposal

A new documentary by Rewire chronicles the rising tide of harassment and violence against abortion providers and clinics under the Trump administration. Called "Care in Chaos," it features Calla Hales, director of A Preferred Women’s Health Center, one of the busiest abortion clinics in North Carolina. She faces a gauntlet of harassment, threats and physical violence just to do her job.

We cannot fight for worker rights and honor labor without fighting for climate justice.

It ain't about negotiating union collective bargaining agreements and resolving grievances any more (Actually, militant unions never were about such goals!)! Conservative campaign aims to strike ‘mortal blow’ on government unions. This is ‘A once-in-a-lifetime chance to reverse the failed policies of the American left’.

'Jane Austen and tea' is after all, a comely capitalist hustle that has spawned a cottage industry of crockery, tea towels, tea bags, tea rooms and boutique brews. What we get from Austen's novels is the role of this extremely popular national beverage in upper class Regency society. Austen lived at a time when tea, which had become popular in England in the late 1600s, was drunk by everyone, from the elite to the working classes.

What would a truly just, equal and ecologically sustainable future look like? Why would it require a change in our economic system, namely the end of capitalism? Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams answer these questions in Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation, showing the immense levels of waste created by capitalism today, including by the prison-industrial complex, food system and housing in the United States and wasteful US military.