Portside

Portside previously ran Mark Solomon's piece, Whither the Socialist Left - 2. Portside previously posted some of the comments received in Tidbits. Here are two, longer and more in depth responses by Duncan McFarland and Ethan Young. Portside welcomes additional reader responses, and will help further facilitate this discussion.

Reader Comments - Defending Immigrants; Protecting Detroit's Water; Israeli and Palestinian Families Comfort Each Other; Hobby Lobby; Peoples Climate March; Overtime Pay; Global Action on Antibiotics; Homeopathy was quackery - readers respond; Full Employment and Shared Prosperity; Mapping Militarism; Limits of Corporate Citizenship; Abe Cohen - R.I.P. Seeger Family's Memorial Concert Series for Pete and Toshi - July 17 - 21 - New York City and surrounding area

Rallies, marches and picket lines were held at schools, council offices and town and city centres across Great Britain and Northern Ireland as public workers protested decline living standards, working conditions and a threat to their right to strike.

Israel's attack on Syria shows how volatile this conflict is. A political solution is now urgent.

In light of the report that the economy contracted in the last quarter of 2012 due partly to cutbacks, Ezra Klein notes that one man's big government socialism is another man's premature and destructive fiscal retrenchment.

Most Greeks want an end to austerity; they also want real reform. The worst outcome for Greece would be the further rollback of workers' rights and the social safety net without a purge of the corrupt elites and their clients in the media, in business and in the unions-a nightmare of exploitation policed by the lads from Golden Dawn. Greece,

Mairead Corrigan Maguire, 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland, calls for support for Julian Assange. His only crime is that he embarrassed the U.S. and other powerful governments with WikiLeaks' release of documents in which the U.S. military appear to have deliberately killed civilians.

Republicans say it’s a simple change, opting out to opting in. But by making it more difficult for public employee unions to collect dues, GOP lawmakers in Kansas and Missouri could weaken a chief political nemesis. If organized labor is dealt that blow this year, the stage could be set in subsequent years in Missouri to push for a right-to-work law — the most contentious of disputes between management and unions played out in state legislatures across the nation.