Portside

Reader Comments - Baltimore, other cities as "Occupied Territory"; Drop the Charges against those arrested; Government-Sponsored Segregation; Bernie Sanders - a Long Tradition of American Socialism; Alberta NDP Victory; $15 per Hour or Bust; Israeli Soldiers Speak Out-Gaza Atrocities Were Orders; Labor Union Membership Now Just 11%; Feliks Tych - R.I.P.; Announcements - New York, Boston

Speech by Laurel Krause from the 45th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre on May 4, 2015. My sister Allison Beth Krause was one of four Kent State students killed by the Ohio National Guard. She was peacefully protesting the Vietnam war on that day and for this she was killed by the US government national guard. I was shocked when the American leadership blamed my sister and other Kent State students for the violence, the bloodshed and the massacre.

April 30 is the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. The end of that war - a time of devastating defeat for the United States and relief for the Vietnamese - has been rebranded and offers a hint of what may come when our crash-and-burn policy in the Middle East ends. That war had a lasting impact on American foreign policy, culture, and national identity and draws attention to the lessons it offers for today and the many tomorrows to come.

Reader Comments - Fast Food Strike, Low-Wage Workers Struggle for More than Wages; TPP - LAtest Leak; Hillary Clinton, Fracking and 2016; Eduardo Galeano; CIA Infiltration at Home; Anne Braden; Sundown Towns; 'Driving While White'; Cuba Coops; NYT and Russian Wages; Charter Schools; Walton Wealth; Announcements: Walden Bello in New York; Vietnam - The Power of Protest and In Defense of the Public Square - Washington

Call to action for a truthful accounting of American War in Vietnam as 2015 marks 50th anniversary of this war.

U.S. Vietnam policy was built on twenty-five years of lies. The Vietnamese fought Japanese occupation during World War II and sought a free Vietnam after the war free of colonial control. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon lied about their escalation of the United States involvement. The only way America can avoid becoming "waist deep in the big muddy" again and again is to clearly understand its history. The Power of Protest. Telling the Truth - May 1 - 2.

Dr. Vincent G. Harding, Civil Rights pioneer, colleague, advisor and speechwriter for Dr. Martin Luther King, died this week at age 82. He drafted King's anti-Vietnam War speech, "Breaking the Silence". As people like King and Rosa Parks became icons, Harding insisted that America could not celebrate their lives without continuing to devote ourselves to the work they and many others had done.

It is exactly 39 years since the Vietnam war ended, with the seizure of Saigon by the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and the People's Army of Vietnam - time to consider the legacy of this long US war.

Book Review: Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory. Author Penny Lewis demolishes the mythology, and shows that working-class people were at least as opposed to the war as the middle and upper classes and that they played an indispensable role in the movement to end it, and that the black and Chicano movements were among the most militant antiwar voices.