Portside

More than any of the other civil rights widows, Myrlie Evers showed America her rage. She let the nation see her unfiltered emotion when two all-white juries refused to convict Medgar’s killer, during a time when black anger was not an acceptable display of emotion. She wrote a book and began it with this line: “Somewhere in Mississippi lives the man who murdered my husband.”

A human rights approach could lead the way to resolving the problems of partition and the problems of a two state solution. International human rights treaties offer states alternatives to partition. Instead, human rights conventions offer types of integration that protect the existence and identity of national linguistic, ethnic, and religious groups.

My old friend Ray Smithhart would have loved the irony of union-fighting manufacturer Nissan making a gift of $100,000 to the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute. Known in his later years as the “dean of Mississippi’s labor organizers,” Smithhart worked closely with civil rights martyr Medgar Evers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, forging a link between the labor and civil rights movements that Martin Luther King Jr. himself saw as key to the future of both.

Official Washington still glorifies George W. Bush’s “successful surge” in Iraq while ignoring the wanton slaughter inflicted on Iraqis. So, there remains a high-level desire to harshly punish Pvt. Bradley Manning for exposing the horrific truth about that and other war crimes.

This was the third night of demonstrations. The main meme - as with the flags - is "we are sons of Ataturk". That is, we are a secular republic and we are worried about the autocratic use of power by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, combined with a creeping Islamisation. However, there is another view: "We're all here," one masked woman told me. "Communists, anarchists, democrats. It's not an Ataturkist movement."

It's the nature of the shallow, consumer-driven, dream-drunken culture our society tries to impose on us that we popularly adopt terms without knowing what they mean and, more often than not, they don't mean much of anything. Such is the case with "the Cloud".

With the traditional union model and its emphasis on bargaining by representatives exiting the stage, working people are urgently searching for a new way to challenge corporate power and win a better life for their families. One hundred years later, the road not taken—represented by Local 8—represents one model.

The new bill marks a significant retreat from the Safe Chemicals Act. Missing are dozens of critical provisions designed to protect the public, especially vulnerable groups such as unborn babies, infants and children. These flaws raise this question: “Where exactly was the compromise”? This looks more like an industry bill than a law that will ensure that chemicals in commerce, many of which are polluting our bodies, are safe for all of us – especially kids.

The United States is one of only a few democracies that places the responsibility of registering primarily on each individual voter, rather than making government accountable for ensuring that eligible persons are registered. Not surprisingly, obstacles to registration result in fewer people who are registered to vote. Disparities in voter registration rates directly result in disparities in who votes in any given election, leaving many voices unheard.

When someone says that most Americans oppose race-based affirmative action, what they really mean is most White Americans oppose it.