Portside

A retrospective, of the life's work of Peggy Lipshutz, an amazing artist, political activist and a truly incredible human being.

Last week, the Florida-based Dream Defenders, founded in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s 2012 murder, announced a six-week “social media sabbatical” from their personal and organizational Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts. They promised to digitally resurface in November “with a fresh voice; one that emanates from the grassroots and is a complement to movement work, not just characters.” Two leading Dream Defenders discuss their organization’s decision.

On Wednesday, John Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore quietly announced it had discontinued its program that focuses on Black Lung Disease. The controversial program had been suspended in 2013, two days after a joint investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and ABC News revealed how physicians at the nationally recognized university hospital had routinely helped the coal companies reject the legitimate disability claims of more than 1,000 sick miners.

Ronan Burtenshaw is vice-chair of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions Youth Committee and coordinator of Ireland’s Greek Solidarity Committee. He warns it isn’t only Greece that is being forced to choose between staying in the European Union, with austerity, and leaving to face international capital alone. And that neither is a viable alternative. Europe’s Left must learn from Latin America and seek alternative political and economic unions for Europe.

Human rights experts charged the U.S. with sabotaging an independent UN inquiry into human rights violations in Yemen. The Netherlands put forward the resolution authorizing the inquiry, which the Saudis and their Gulf allies vigorously opposed. In what was termed “a shameful capitulation to Saudi Arabia” that “denied Yemeni victims their first real opportunity for justice,” the U.S. pressured the Dutch to modify and ultimately withdraw their resolution.

Alabama passed a strict voter-ID law and then closed 31 DMV offices in the state.

Before launching The Next System Project, we sat down with historian and economic activist Jessica Gordon Nembhard to learn what the tradition of Black cooperative economic development and the long struggle for civil rights could teach us about system change and system models. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.

We've become inured to civilian bombing, collateral damage, refugees on the road--the consequences of warfare--but it wasn't always so. As poet Cintia Santana depicts the World War II bombing of a scholarly library, she leads us to "the shock of light."

A trial of shorter days for nurses at a Gothenburg care home is inspiring others across Scandinavia to cut back, but the cost of improving staff well being is high.

David Simon’s HBO TV series Show Me a Hero follows the racist fight against public housing in 1980s Yonkers, New York but, as author Kevin Baker reveals, it’s just one instance in the sordid American history of kicking Black people out of their neighborhoods. The issue is not only the refusal of white people to live with people of color, but their conviction that Black space is not legitimate, and that whatever Black people own can be expropriated.