Portside

Anti-immigrant organizations like FAIR, CIS, NumbersUSA, and IRLI, all of which have ties to white nationalists, have long taken a hardline stance that the federal government should dramatically restrict immigration and make life as difficult as possible for undocumented immigrants already living here. Their harsh viewpoints make no exception for young undocumented individuals who have been living in the U.S. since childhood.

Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, is being blackballed — itself a revealing phrase — from the National Football League with the collusion of the all-white owners. He is ostracized because a year ago he exercised his First Amendment right to free speech by taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem, as a symbol of protest against police shootings of unarmed African-American men.

The extreme violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar (Burma) is closer to extermination than religious persecution. One key factor insufficiently recognized is the massive land grabbing that is happening in Burma and has now reached into the poorest state, Rakhine. Land grabbing has become a major factor in multiple displacements, including in Central America. Too many explanations stop short from seeing a larger economic vortex of land grabbing.

The war hawks are wrong when they say that past negotiations, like the 1994 Agreed Framework, didn’t make a difference. August 2017 was a reminder of the scariest, and riskiest, days of the Cold War. All month long, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un engaged in a bitter war of words that escalated into tit-for-tat displays of military might and ended with mutual threats of mass destruction.

Although Rep. Bobby Rush's name appears on the list of co-sponsors of anti-BDS legislation, he is opposed to the legislation which would criminalize support for the boycott of Israel. Promoted by Israel advocacy groups to undermine the movement for Palestinian rights in the United States, it poses a civil liberties threat thaqt has led the ACLU to call for its defeat.

It may surprise some to know that the origins of the kind of deliberative, representative, majority-rule democracy that characterizes modern legislatures in societies governed by representative democracy is actually a working class invention. Yet that is the claim, says Geoffrey Kurtz, that Andy Blunden is making in this study about how collective decisions are made.

Since the early 1900s and before, Black workers have not viewed labor unions and labor organizing as separate from the rest of their lives and have fought for union politics that reflect that understanding.

If we want to get to a new world, we must face the truth about what we do every day to support white supremacy and what we must do to destroy these practices. If this is a defining moment, we must insist that we define ourselves and refuse to release that power to our enemies. In this spirit of resilience, we offer the following recommendations as we prepare for white supremacists, Neo Nazis, and alt-right supporters to march in communities across the country.

Our concern at this moment is with our moderate brothers and sisters who voice support for the cause of racial justice but simultaneously cling to paralyzingly unrealistic standards when it comes to what protest should look like.

Gonzalez, in his book Reclaiming Gotham: Bill De Blasio and the Movement to End America's Tale of Two Cities argues that de Blasio has presided over the “most left-leaning government in the history of America’s greatest city." He "reports that, under de Blasio, poor and working class New Yorkers have received a $21 billion “infusion of income and economic benefits” which also includes long deferred wage increases.