Portside

Puerto Rico is in a severe economic crisis. The Partido del Pueblo Trabajador (PPT) was founded in 2010 to build a movement to combat austerity and the fundamental roots of the crisis: Since 1898 when the United States took Puerto Rico from Spain, the movement and shape of Puerto Rico’s economy have been largely determined by the priorities and preferences of U.S. capital. The PPT unites electoral work with movement building with the goal of radical change.

Seattle teachers went on strike for a week this month with a list of goals for a new contract. By the time the strike officially ended this week, teachers had won some of the usual stuff of contract negotiations — for example, the first cost-of-living raises in six years — but also less standard objectives.

We are now at an important crossroad in the long term struggle for sustainable electronics. It is clear that Apple and Samsung are the global kingpins and both have been severely challenged by mismanagement and human tragedy in their manufacturing supply chains. The future of technology development hangs in the balance.

Movement activists discuss strategy and tactics in #BlackLivesMatter.

Both candidates have been mislabeled as populists. The movement of that name was a genuine people’s rebellion that reinvigorated democracy. We can do it again.

A new analysis supports the hypothesis that viruses are living entities that share a long evolutionary history with cells.

The ongoing and increasing revolving door phenomenon clearly suggests excess coziness between industry and government, now to the extent that industry and government leaders of health care are becoming interchangeable. true health care reform would cut the ties between government and corporate leaders.

The Thirteenth Amendment forbade slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

As commodity prices tumble, thousands of South African miners with HIV stand to lose access to treatment if the mining companies’ proposed 11,700 in job cuts go through. While HIV treatment is technically free in South Africa, according to the National Union of Mineworkers many of the workers who lose their jobs could lose access to antiretroviral therapy when they return to their rural communities that may not have adequate healthcare systems in place.

What is notable about the ‘Dieselgate’ scandal is not that corporate executives lie and cheat, but its environmental scope. By rigging the emissions tests, Volkswagen cars may have added nearly a million tons of air pollution to the atmosphere annually – roughly the same as combined annual emissions for all power stations, vehicles, industry and agriculture in England. And, according to the New York Times, VW executives might not face any U.S. criminal charges.