Portside

Although advances for the South African people have been made under ANC leadership, continuing poverty and unemployment made worse by the recession and decline in the value of the Rand. The solution to our frustrations with the ANC will not be solved if the reasons that have led to the failure to assert working class hegemony within the tripartite alliance of ANC, COSATU and SACP is not accurately diagnosed. This was the question before the SACP Convention.

Mumia Abu-Jamal speaks about some of the issues he engages with in his new book Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?, including police violence and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

Doubling down on the drug war is likely to result in increased violence, not increased public safety. The damage these policies have done to black communities has been well documented. But less attention has been paid to the ways that women of color specifically are targeted in drug cases and are subject to abuse or assault by police officers.

The powerful image of Bree Newsome climbing the 30-foot flagpole in front of the South Carolina State House in the aftermath of the the Charleston Massacre to remove the Confederate flag is now ingrained in my memory and the collective memory of America. To see city and state governments following suit has brought about a bitter feeling of approval for me. It shouldn’t have taken a massacre to get to this point.

This new book highlights the technology at the heart of what reviewer Jill Leovy calls "surveillance-driven policing," and the heightened dangers this new set of law enforcement tools pose to democracy.

For the credibility of the left, we have to mark out our own turf in this upheaval. We have to independently offer our own priorities on what’s wrong with Trump.

"Several American labor unions reacted angrily to the Senate’s vote July 25 to take yet another crack at dismantling Obamacare. AFSCME President Lee Saunders called the vote “morally indefensible,” while Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers said it was “cruel and heartless.”

Dumbing down; Jews divide; Kochs’ revenge; From red states to red tide?; New time of the toad; Southern Baptist: “Basta!”

“Trump came in there to the factory last December and blew smoke up our asses. He wasn’t gonna save those jobs. And, if that’s the case, he would have saved us and Rexnord, a company around the corner from us that makes parts.

"Massachusetts law provides no authority for Massachusetts court officers to arrest and hold an individual solely on the basis of a Federal civil immigration detainer beyond the time that individual would otherwise be entitled to a release from State custody,” the unanimous Supreme Judicial Court ruling states.