Portside

For the novelty fetishists, everything's new, new, new. Boston-based poet Jill McDonough shines a light on what's happening, what's coming. Only maybe not.

Noting that conditions today are similar to those at the dawn of the Gilded Age characterized by disproportionate wealth and extreme corruption, retiring DC Metro Labor Council President Joslyn Williams added, "In that era, they were lobbing vicious attacks against workers with guns and batons. Today, they are armed with suits and maneuvers that undercut workers from Wall Street to the state house to U.S. Supreme Court."

Were the mass 'We are Charlie' demonstrations in France in support of 'We are France,' in the best republican tradition or a shot against Muslim immigrants signifying that 'You are not?' Polymath Emmanuel Todd argues that the demonstrations, like much of Charlie Hebdo's satire, were not so much attacks on toxic religious ideology as broadly anti-Muslim and anti-Arab, indicating that the vaunted French secularism has lost its solidaristic component, 'equality.'

The Portside moderators send our heartfelt thanks to our readers, for coming through in response to our annual appeal! We don't do a lot of fundraising -- just this annual appeal. We are grateful, and gratified, that the response allows us to keep to this bare minimum. Again, many thanks from the left side of the ship - the portside. Full speed ahead in the new year.

A children's book showing happy slaves in the South was pulled off the market last weekend after a major controversy about its contents. This is just the latest flareup in an ongoing dispute about books aimed at children that show slavery and racist subordination in a positive light.

Greek sailors plan a 48 hour strike to protest the government's planed attack on social security as well as their plan to eliminate the seaman's insurance fund.

The outcry over the nomination of 20 white actors, and no black ones, for the Academy Awards gained momentum Monday — Martin Luther King’s Birthday — as director Spike Lee and actress Jada Pinkett Smith announced they would not be attending the ceremony on Feb. 28.

A decision for the plaintiffs in Friedrichs would tell the nation’s 6.2 million unionized state, city, county and school district employees that they can enjoy the benefits offered by their unions without having to pay for them. By some estimates, between 1 million and 2 million workers could be expected to stop paying union fees, at a cost to public-sector unions of $500 million to $1 billion a year.

The Portside moderators send our heartfelt thanks to our readers, for coming through in response to our annual appeal! We don't do a lot of fundraising -- just this annual appeal. We are grateful, and gratified, that the response allows us to keep to this bare minimum. Again, many thanks from the left side of the ship - the portside. Full speed ahead in the new year.

“The Civil War truly was a time when women, for the lack of a better word, came into the workplace,” says PBS chief programming executive Beth Hoppe. “It was also a time when medicine was undergoing huge changes.” Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who plays a nurse, said that part of what she appreciated about “Mercy Street” was getting a part in a project where women find each other in conflict over power and intellectual traditions, rather than simply for the sake of drama.