Portside

Defining a social justice agenda primarily in reaction to Clinton (oppose her, back her), or Trump (fight him, ignore him), allows the dominant two-party system to set the tone, reduces independent politics to slogans without substance. Failure to look at the whole political environment rather than any one aspect of it, has led to lost opportunities in the past.

In Brooklyn, a new study shows that women face an underground labor market fraught with hidden risks.

A system based on the fair distribution of use values, decent work, and production and consumption levels that remain within nature’s biophysical limits cannot occur without the abandonment of a social order based on profit and accumulation.

Lobbyists for America’s grandest fortunes may want to raise their rates. Capitol Hill is getting a gadfly who can really sting.

Climate change can result in unanticipated release into the environment of toxic and radioactive wastes that were optimistically presumed at the time to be stably isolated

South Africa’s ruling African National Congress party conceded defeat in Nelson Mandela Bay and could lose political control of Johannesburg and Pretoria in the greatest electoral defeat for the ANC since the fall of apartheid. Widespread unemployment and poverty, rampant corruption, and political infighting were deemed the main contributors to the ANC’s political setback, particularly in the urban centers. Never before had the ANC received less than 60% of the vote.

This week, activists from Jewish Voice for Peace and other groups stood behind Black Lives Matter while more conservative parts of the American Jewish community condemned the movement after it criticized Israeli policies towards Palestinians, which it characterized as “genocide,” ...It’s the latest example of how the growing Palestinian rights movement has driven a wedge in the American Jewish community.

We live in a state of widespread public ignorance and public passivity because of government secrecy and denial about the “raging, insatiable beast” of nuclear weapons and because of the immense insider power of the defense industry.

At the People's Assembly, Alicia Garza said that her decision about who to vote for would be based on choosing “the battlefield that is most advantageous for us to move the vision that we want,” backing the candidate that allows us “to embrace our biggest vision of what’s possible” while insisting “that we deserve a whole lot more.”“I am not voting for candidates,” she said. “I am voting for terrain." See the video at https://youtu.be/p13WBHQrxpE

Some people think the Court is the most important issue, but maybe it is not.