Portside

In January 2015, the International Campaign for Responsible Technology (ICRT), the GoodElectronics Network plus more than 60 expert allies from 15 countries met, discussed and drafted a CALL concerning the hazards of chemicals used in the global electronics supply chain. "A Challenge to the Global Electronics Industry to Adopt Safer and More Sustainable Products and Practices, and Eliminate Hazardous Chemicals, Exposures and Discharges" is organizing for endorsements.

Seniors at Albuquerque's Cottonwood Classical Preparatory School voted online to hold a Communist-themed prom they quickly dubbed “prom-munism.” Meanwhile, caught between a rock and a Marxist place, school officials seem for now to be hedging their bourgeois bets.

This weekend, thousands of people -- including one-fifth of the U.S. Congress and President Obama -- are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the famous Selma to Montgomery march. The irony is rich: The 1965 Selma march -- and the violent "Bloody Sunday" caused by Alabama troopers -- is credited with speeding passage of the Voting Rights Act, Yet voting rights in the South and the Voting Rights Act itself are in their most precarious position in half a century.

The attack on voting rights has spread to virtually every state in the country. From 2011 to 2015, 395 new voting restrictions have been introduced in forty-nine states (Idaho is the lone exception). Half the states in the country have adopted measures making it harder to vote. The Selma anniversary offers lawmakers a prime opportunity to move from symbolism to substance.

The following article was published in Pravda one week before the first celebration of the “Day of International Solidarity among the Female Proletariat” on March 8, 1913. In St Petersburg this day was marked by a call for a campaign against women workers’ lack of economic and political rights and for the unity of the working class, led by the self-emancipation of women workers.

Over the past decade, state after state has been dismantling America’s workers’ comp system with disastrous consequences for many of the hundreds of thousands of people who suffer serious injuries at work each year, a ProPublica and NPR investigation has found. The cutbacks have been so drastic in some places that they virtually guarantee injured workers will plummet into poverty.

This International Women’s Day, celebrate Henrietta Leavitt, who took us beyond the stars and into the galaxies.

The idea of 11th-century Scotland as a foreign land for the invading English army created powerful political possibilities in the dramatist’s mind ... with reference to Afghanistan and Iraq (and, perhaps, now Libya) ... seeing the play’s events from the perspectives of both the invaders (who, of course, consider themselves liberators) and the occupied population carries some rather profound implications for the politics of the modern world.

From March 9-20 more than 8,600 representatives of some 1,100 non-governmental organizations will participate in United Nations’ 59th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). Their primary mission is to evaluate the progress in implementing the 20-year Platform for Action adopted at the historic 1995 Conference on Women in Beijing. Women advocates charge progress in implementing the Action Plan has been slow and uneven and major obstacles remain.

Dissent contributor Timothy Shenk interviews noted historian Jill Lepore about her new book The Secret History of Wonder Woman. The book reveals that Wonder Woman, which launched in 1941, was actually inspired by the suffragist feminists and birth control activists of the 1910s and was later an inspiration for women who were involved in women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and the early ’70s. According to Lepore, Wonder Woman is a missing link.