Portside

To get a better sense of the situation on the ground in Venezuela, Green Left Weekly’s Federico Fuentes interviewed Steve Ellner, a well-known analyst of Venezuelan and Latin American politics and a retired professor at Venezuela’s Universidad de Oriente.

An open letter from the great-great-grandsons of Stonewall Jackson.

The case is not the first instance on the government asking tech companies for details on Trump dissidents. Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) briefly tried to get Twitter to reveal information to identify an account holder whose messages on the social media platform had been critical of Trump.

In the margins of one of the hundreds of dog-eared books he kept in his cave, Lay offered an epitaph that also reads like an exhortation: "Dear souls, be tender-hearted." Rediker, the historian of resistance from below, hopes that he has managed to produce "tender-hearted" treatments of all these resisters, but knows that this work, like Lay's own resistance to slavery, must continue well past him.

Though the law is set to take effect on August 28, the pro-union We Are Missouri coalition, led by the Missouri AFL-CIO, says it has collected enough signatures from voters to call for a state-wide referendum in November 2018 that could nullify the legislation.

It is fascinating to watch certain US senators tripping over themselves as they attempt to defend their support for or opposition to the proposed legislation that would make it a crime to support the campaign to Boycott, Divest, or Sanction Israel (BDS) for its continued occupation of Palestinian lands. Their efforts to square the circle of their "love of Israel", opposition to BDS, support for a "two-state solution", and commitment to free speech, has them in knots.

The Republican rising star struggled for two days to get clarity with regard to his appearance at a "white pride" - Ku Klux Klan event in 2002. Initially, his office tried to keep things vague, suggesting it was "likely" Scalise attended. He was a veteran state legislator then, elected from the same precincts where David Duke once ran strong. When it became clear he was not just present but a presenter, Scalise started spinning scenarios that might explain it all away.

Kenworthy thinks that capitalism working at its best—an Americanized version of the Nordic model—would be worth fighting for. I agree.

When unions serve the interests of the few, they lose their way and their ability to be forward-looking. But one of the better-kept secrets is that invariably, they also quietly become alienated from their own members. Inevitably, if the leadership of the PBA continues to ignore and fail on this challenge, new leadership will be destined to take it up.

The American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America into endless wars it can’t win.