Portside

Fighting to protect what remains of US environmental protections. Until 2020, or as long as is necessary.

"Two weeks after the November presidential election, a Texas judge put a hold on a sweeping reform of federal overtime standards that would have raised the wages of 4.2 million Americans. President Barack Obama’s administration appealed the ruling. But after Donald Trump took office in January, the appeal was delayed. Now California and a handful of other states are moving to enact the Obama proposal. Their reasoning: workers have seen their pay erode"

Low-income people have been dealing with the U.S. housing crisis for decades; now the problem is working its way up the income ladder. Many who thought themselves comfortably ensconced in the so-called middle class are now confronting the prohibitive cost of housing. Decent housing is out of the reach of so many. And we need comprehensive housing reform, real living wages, and a reinvestment in the social safety net because it has been a crisis for so very long.

While the politics concentrated on issues rather than identity approaches, it was noteworthy, if not necessarily important in terms of political direction, that women and people of color taken together outnumbered white guys. This was due in part to the heavy involvement of organized nurses, and to the conveners' efforts to ensure diversity. Anyone expecting a gaggle of young, arrogant Bernie Bros would be in for a surprise.

We have to build our organization and not just show up for rallies. DSA will have to “walk on two legs,” sustaining mass opposition to the Trump administration and its red-state equivalents while building social movements for economic, gender, and racial justice that can spur electoral challenges to pro-corporate Democratic incumbents.

Visitors will be invited to reflect on capitalism as if looking back at it from a world in which capitalism is dead.

“It’s time to ask millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share — the same share as the rest of us — to make those investments and generate equitable economic growth across Massachusetts.”

The union stresses that the decline of the taxi industry is a loss for the broader public. Unlike most rideshare vehicles, taxis serve people without bank accounts by accepting cash, and they also have more stringent requirements on providing access to people with disabilities.

What is war? Jill McDonough’s alphabetical poem evolves from World War I’s soldier-oriented them vs. us to the hidden terrors of today’s warfare: CIA, NSA, Black Ops, ETC.