Portside

When the polls close, a new battle will begin – to resist a racist climate denier, or to force a centrist Democrat to deliver genuinely progressive change

As the Mosul offensive continues, it has become clear that it is the Americans who decide whether assaults continue, troops advance or tactical pauses are made.

Organizers predict the “sleeping giant” will finally wake up, and say this year will be nothing compared to 2020.

Unions are still fighting for several key policies that have yet to be achieved. The next president could determine where labor regulations and the economy go from here. Labor unions hope the next president will focus on the minimum wage, healthcare, immigration and trade, among other important policies.

When we talk about the problem of oil industry accidents, we tend to focus on dramatic events like the deadly 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon explosion off the coast of Louisiana, or the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil tanker crash in Alaska's Prince William Sound. But the industry is far more accident-prone than such relatively rare high-profile disasters suggest.

The North won the Civil War, but the South won the Reconstruction. The victorious Northern armies preserved the Union and the slaves were emancipated but the Confederates won the historical interpretation of those events by perpetrating the myths that became the accepted story over the next one hundred years.

Pseudoscience is perpetuated by self-declared experts with no scientific background or understanding of food science, or even scientists with credentials but who conduct poor, unscientifically sound research and spread unreliable, false or even debunked results. The trend has hit the pet food industry.

Did you know that some of the fruits and veggies out on supermarket shelves are grown using wastewater from oil and gas operations? For the past several years, many drought-stricken farms in California’s Central Valley, which produces 40 percent of the nation’s fruits and vegetables, have been increasingly irrigating their crops with wastewater. Chemicals present include 16 the state classifies as carcinogens or reproductive toxicants, says EWG report.

If anyone were looking for further evidence that the AFL-CIO remains unprepared to accept the science of climate change, and unwilling to join with the effort being made by all of the major labour federations of the world to address the crisis, the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) provides only the most recent case in point. Progressive labour must, however, develop its own vision of an energy future.

The best show on TV right now is about working-class African-Americans in the Southern suburbs, and it highlights one of the country’s biggest, least-appreciated problems: living without a car in the midst of sprawl. The show demonstrates the suburbanization of poverty, including how hard it is for people in low-income neighborhoods to get to their jobs.