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Portside aims to provide material of interest to people on the left that will help them to interpret the world and to change it.

Slave-built Infrastructure and Reparations

Joshua F.J. Inwood and Anna Livia Brand The Conversation
Recognizing that enslaved men, women and children built many of the cities, rail lines and ports that fuel the American economy is a necessary part of any accounting for the legacy of slavery.

California’s Essential Workers Get Bumped Down Vaccination Line

Mark Kreidler Capital & Main
A pharmacist fills a syringe to prepare a dose of vaccine for front-line health care workers in Torrance, CA. Critics of California’s new age-based vaccination scheme say it defies the evidence that workplace transmission is a major source of the virus’s spread, and fear largely minority essential workers will fall even further back in the vaccine queue.

Why India’s Farmers’ Protests Have Sikhs Fearing Violent Attacks

Sunny Hundal OpenDemocracy
In December, Indian farmers march to Delhi to protest recent legislation. Since India’s farmers protests began last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s far-right Hindu nationalist government has tried to violently suppress them, revealing how close “the world’s largest democracy” is to becoming an authoritarian state.

What Trump’s Prosecution Omits

Jules Bernstein The American Prospect
House prosecutors should make clear that Trump’s conduct wasn’t merely ‘dastardly,’ but specifically criminal.

Coop Naysayers as “Religious” Thinkers Who Keep the System Going

Jonathan Michael Feldman The Global Teach-In
Cooperatives historically have provided an option when few alternatives to exploitation were available. In contrast, today some leftists would deny women and others these options because of a promise of what social movement activity could bring.

Epidemic of Despair Could Haunt America Long After COVID

Lynn Parramore Institute for New Economic Thinking
Researchers worry the pandemic may have severe after-effects, with deaths of despair impacting more distressed and newly-vulnerable populations. Only a serious reform of American capitalism can address the kind of distress and insecurity that kills.
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