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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.

Trump Drones On: How Unpiloted Aircraft Expand the War on Terror

Rebecca Gordon TomDispatch
What are U.S. forces doing in Niger? Apart from the uranium that accounts for over 70% of Niger’s exports, there’s little of economic interest to the United States there. The real appeal is location, location, location.

North Carolina, May 16: Our Strength, Our Task, Our Future

North Carolina Association of Educators Organize 2020 Caucus Organizing Upgrade
outline of North Carolina with heart and 2020 This piece was developed by Organize 2020, the social and racial justice caucus of the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE), written in advance of the massive May 16th teachers mobilizations in North Carolina. Keep an eye out for future reflection pieces from local organizers.

At the Wage Floor: Covering Homecare and Early Care and Education Workers in the New Generation of Minimum Wage Laws

Sarah Thomason, Lea Austin, Annette Bernhardt, Laura Dresser, Ken Jacobs and Marcy Whitebook UC Berkeley Labor Center
woman teaching and woman in kitchen preparing food This paper focuses on an important subset of workers who provide homecare and early care and education services to the very young, people with disabilities, and those who are frail due to age or illness. We explain the need to raise these workers’ wages and the unique structure of their industries.

To Create True Sanctuary Cities, We Must End Racist Policing

Reyna Wences and Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz Truthout
man being frisked by police Cities across the US have enacted sanctuary measures to resist the Trump administration’s escalation of anti-immigrant policing, but most municipal measures have a central weakness: They only protect immigrants deemed as “law-abiding,” leaving those already ensnared in a racist system unprotected.

Study Links Breast Cancer Rates with Neighborhood Factors

Kristen Thometz WTTW - Public TV in Chicago
An increase in overall neighborhood socioeconomic status should result in better health for residents, not worse health. But because these neighborhoods were still low-income, they didn’t have as many resources such as health care facilities and access to mammography and follow-up care.

I, Sy: Seymour Hersh’s Memoir of a Life Making the Mighty Sweat

Michael M. Grynbaum The New York Times
The story of a working-class Jewish kid from the South Side of Chicago, who through serendipity and toil had exposed the horror of the My Lai massacre, revealed domestic and foreign abuses by the C.I.A. and harried Washington’s elite for a half-century — is not finished.

Civil Rights Unionism

Robert Korstad Convergence
In 1940s North Carolina, a Communist-led union of tobacco workers fought to bring democracy to the Jim Crow South.

Trump Supports Another Racist March

Kelly Hayes Truthout
While the country may be accustomed to Trump firing off falsehoods with abandon, some may be surprised to hear that the Chicago police, whose high-profile brutality has launched countless protests, have themselves become protesters. What was going on in Chicago? What was President Trump endorsing?
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