Portside

I am not an expert on Egypt, or Chile – most of my knowledge about General Pinochet comes from a book by a Guardian writer, Andy Beckett. But I know enough that when Margaret Thatcher died, reminders of her enduring support and praise for Pinochet left a nasty taste in the mouth. While people are dying in the streets of Cairo, to read an expression of the same sentiment from a respected, globally-read newspaper is repellent.

I propose that a consequential Left can only proceed as a project for reconstructing American democracy, root and branch. We are not finished with making this country a real democracy. We need to complete the process of Radical Reconstruction that began after the Civil War, and stalled until the Second Reconstruction of the mid-twentieth century.

No one is responsible for paying cabbies a “minimum wage,” because these drivers are not considered employees. But Callahan and a group of Chicago cab drivers are challenging that long-held assumption. Under the name “Cab Drivers for Justice,” or, as most call it, “Cabbies for Justice,” they are pursuing what could be a landmark legal case.

The calls for stricter gun control laws are not enough. Although the gun murder rate in some large cities is down, the causes of urban gun violence remain the real problem. At the June 1966 gang summit, Dr. King asked Chicago’s gangs to channel their energies into nonviolent protest of poverty and inequality. He tried to imprint upon the young men gathered at the Sheraton that violence was futile, and would likely get them nowhere but a grave or a prison cell.

How three young undocumented activists risked everything to expose the injustices of immigrant detention—and invented a new form of protest.

The issue is the potential for a powerful individual's racist worldview to manifest itself into discriminatory workplace policies. A black worker threatened to report the restaurant to the EEOC and was told: "You don’t have any civil rights here." That is what we should be talking about, not Deen's contemptible word choice. More broadly, she symbolizes the injustices plaguing the entire restaurant industry. The evidence is mounting. Restaurants are clearly segregated.

Four Years Into the Recovery and We’re Just a Fifth of the Way Out of the Hole Left by the Great Recession

It’s well known that as the Truman White House made plans to use the first atomic bombs against Japan in the summer of 1945, a large group of atomic scientists, many of whom had worked on the bomb project, raised their voices, or at least their names, in protest.