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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.

The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning

Claudia Rankine The New York Times
The murder of three men and six women at a church in Charleston is a national tragedy, but in America, the killing of black people is an unending spectacle.

Are We on the Verge of a Nuclear Breakdown?

Nina Burleigh Rolling Stone
Air Force officers at America's nuke sites work 24-hour-shifts in antique underground capsules launching fake attacks straight out of 'Strangelove' — and they're ready to blow

New Rule Speeds Unionization Votes, Say Organizers

Dan DiMaggio Labor Notes
“Delay hurts,” says Kate Bronfenbrenner of the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations, “because they can fire one more worker, or engage in five more captive-audience meetings or three more supervisor one-on-ones per person.” Because of these aggressive tactics, there are far fewer NLRB elections today than in the past.

Who Has Your Back?

Electronic Frontier Foundation Electronic Frontier Foundation
We live digital lives—from the videos shared on social networks, to location-aware apps on mobile phones, to log-in data for connecting to our email, to our stored documents, to our search history. The personal, the profound, and even the absurd are all transcribed into data packets, whizzing through the fiber-optic arteries of the network. Our daily lives have upgraded to the 21st century, but law and the practice of the private sector don't offer adequate protections.

Against All Odds: Voices of Popular Struggle In Iraq

US Labor Against the War
Collected from dozens of interviews and reports from Iraqi feminists, labor organizers, environmentalists, and protest movement leaders, Against All Odds presents unique voices of progressive Iraqi organizing on the ground. Dating back to 2003, with emphasis on the 2011 upsurge in mobilization and hope as well as the subsequent embattled years, these voices belong to Iraqis asserting themselves as agents against multiple local, regional, and global forces of oppression.

Veterans Urge Drone Operators to Refuse Orders to Fly

David Swanson World Beyond War
An increasing number of United States military veterans are counseling United States military drone operators to refuse to fly drone surveillance/attack missions – the veterans are even helping sponsor prime time television commercials urging drone operators to “refuse to fly.”

L.A. Tackles the Infrastructure Crisis

Marc Haefele Capital and Main
Former CA Governor Schwarzenegger once called it “stuff [I] used to blow up in the movies.” America’s infrastructure—highways, railways, bridges and thruways—now face a doom worse than the Terminator ever imagined: destruction from the rust, decay and corrosion of trillions of dollars worth of old tracks, canals, ports, structures and causeways that carry our trade and traffic all over the United States. Every $1 billion of federal investment creates about 13,000 jobs.

For Mother Emanuel and In Solidarity with the Black Living and the Dead

Tamura A. Lomax The Feminist Wire
Today I mourn with the families and community of the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Charleston, S.C. I mourn for the living and the dead. I mourn for Black life. But simultaneously, I rage. I rage against the executions, beatings, dispersals, and assassinations of Black people everywhere. I am calling out the current manifestation of Black genocide, racial cleansing, and white terrorism happening in the U.S.
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