Portside

Postwar U.S. authorities helped rehabilitate erstwhile collaborators with the Japanese occupation in the name of fighting communism. Generations later, it’s led to the grandson of a despised Philippine collaborator endorsing the re-militarization of his country’s former occupiers — by the grandson of a war criminal, no less.

The Suppliant Maidens by Aeschylus (ca. 460 BC) is an ancient tale about refugees, sanctuary, and moral duty. Charles McNulty argues that the play provides a precedent for helping us think about today's European refugee crisis. "It provides historical depth" to today's refugee crisis, he says, "framing the basic dramatic situation of its asylum seekers in moral, democratic and religious terms."

The challenge for the Left, at this point, is to provide a space for those who have been newly politicized by the Sanders campaign to continue their work for the progressive positions he advances, rather than accepting the role of being mobilized (as “sheep”) only to support a supposedly lesser-evil DP candidate.

With the spotlight directly on the shortcomings of his government, Stephen Harper tries to capitalize on normal fears about the future and turn them into fear of voting NDP. This means identifying Muslims as a threat to Canada and talking about "old stock" Canadians, to create divisions within the electorate that Conservatives can exploit.

Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the British Labour Party on September 12. He gave his first major speech three days later, September 15, to delegate attending the UK's Trade Union Congress, annual gathering three days later on 15 September. He rejected a style of top down leadership, in favor of one that enables everybody, every union branch, every party branch and every union, so we organically develop their strengths, ideas, and imagination.

The enduring thrust of the Grapes of Wrath is the call to “be there,” to supply the missing response to the “imminent social change.” We see one answer today in the groundswell of support by ordinary people across Europe for welcoming and hosting the migrants, while their governments discuss quotas and border enforcement. But Steinbeck’s novel provokes other responses: a grasp of the meaning of home and homeland — and the trauma of being uprooted from them.

We live in a country that embodies three different dystopian archetypes at once: America is partly a panopticon surveillance-and-security state, as in Orwell, partly an anesthetic and amoral consumer wonderland, as in Huxley, and partly a grand rhetorical delusion or “spectacle,” as in Dick or “The Matrix” or certain currents of French philosophy.

Washington’s decision to arm Syria’s Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East. Breaking all President Barack Obama’s rules of disengagement, the US is now fully engaged on the side of armed groups which include the most extreme Sunni Islamist movements in the Middle East. For the first time, all of America’s ‘friends’ in the region are Sunni Muslims and all of its enemies are Shiites.

Richard Davis chairs the negotiating committee at the nonprofit responsible for the Minnesota Orchestra. Last October 1, Davis and his fellow corporate managers who run the nonprofit "locked out" the orchestra's musicians after they refused to accept a contract offer that would have cut musician pay by up to 50 percent and jumped annual health care premiums by up to $8,000. These musicians are not striking. Quite the contrary. They offered to keep working.

This month, not only with words but also with actions, Edward Snowden is transcending the moral limits of authority and insisting that we can fully defend the Bill of Rights, emphatically including the Fourth Amendment. What a contrast with New York Times columnists David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and Bill Keller, who have responded to Snowden’s revelations by siding with the violators of civil liberties at the top of the U.S. government.