Portside

The response to growing economic inequality must start with mass resistance within every country and maximum solidarity among all workers and peasants, in rich and poor countries alike. The details of such struggles have to be worked out in each place. The key is solidarity among all workers and peasants, within and between the states of the world.

After years of economic crisis and social protest, the cartel parties of the extreme centre now face a challenge to their dominance from outside-left forces in a number of Western countries. Contours of the emergent left oppositions, their platforms and figureheads, from Tsipras to Corbyn, Sanders to Mélenchon, Grillo to Iglesias.

The world is being split into two halves: the U.S. dollar orbit, and countries that the U.S. cannot control and whose officials are not on the U.S. payroll, so to speak.

Reader Comments: Straight Outta Compton; Bernie Sanders and Labor; GOP Racism & Immigration; China's Currency Devaluation; Artic Oil Drilling; NLRB and Faster Union Elections; Amnesty and the Sex Trade; Announcements: Film: Warrior, the Life of Leonard Peltier - New York - September 12; 60 Years of Rebels and Reformers - New York - October 3

New investigative reports from two prominent nonprofit news organizations and the International Campaign for Responsible Technology ICRT link the legacy of harm to electronics workers and communities in Silicon Valley to continuing harm to electronics workers globally, particularly in South Korea, Vietnam, and China. Two feature stories from this hard-hitting new series tell this compelling story and underscore urgency to create safe, sustainable electronics industry.

Backdrop to Turkey's elections: Turkish workers have seen their unions dismantled under the AKP government, and many have lost collective bargaining rights. The percentage of unionized workers fell from 57.5 in 2003 to just 9.68 percent today. The Syrian war is not popular with the average Turk. The Army opposes any involvement in Syria, because it sees nothing ahead but a quagmire that would ally Turkey with the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law ratifying the deal establishing the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB). It's hoped the new bank will stamp the growing influence of the BRICS. The NDB is expected to become one of the world's key institutions. The money will be used to finance development projects in the emerging economies.

Men now outnumber women on the planet by 60 million, the highest ever recorded. Preference for sons in India and China is driving the trend, but those two countries are not the only ones struggling with an imbalanced population.

These are the first two parts of a four-part interview with Costas Lapavitsas focusing on the Era of Financialization and the transformations at the “molecular” level of capitalism that are driving changes in economic performance and policy in both high-income and developing countries. Lapavitsas is a professor of economics at SOAS, University of London, and the author of Financialised Capitalism: Expansion and Crisis (Maia Ediciones, 2009)

I see us entering a world divided not just between the haves and have-nots, but also between those countries that do nothing about it, and those that do . . . I’ve visited societies that seem to have chosen this path. They are not places in which most of us would want to live, whether in their cloistered enclaves or their desperate shantytowns.