Portside

July 12, Woody Guthrie would have been 102. The people's artist wrote the words to This Land is Your Land, the peoples' national anthem, and frequently performed with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists on his guitar..

Reader Comments - Detroit Denying Its Citizens Water; New Voices for Peace by Jews; Politics and Lies Triggered an Unintended War; UK's Largest Union Backs Boycott; Portside Readers Respond - Whither the Socialist Left; How Social Movements Can Win; Bernie Sanders; On the Waterfront and Working-Class Studies; Scotland; Common Core and Bill Gates; Equal Rights Amendment

An independent Scotland would give us the opportunity to construct a social solidarity that would say we are not prepared to let reaction destroy our economy, our jobs and our community. My choice is based not on nationalism but on how best to push forward the interests of my class.

As more and more workers become part-time employees they and their advocates are fighting for steadier hours.

Though the bitterness against Kazan has lingered lo these many years, we in working-class studies should reclaim On the Waterfront as one of the important texts for understanding what happened to American labor in the postwar period. We do so not to redeem Kazan, but to honor the workers that he and Schulberg were trying to represent.

“When the leaders of my city, when the mayor stands proudly and takes credit for closing 54 public schools that are mostly on the South and West Sides of the City of Chicago, there is nothing but a continuation of the decades-long disinvestment in good-quality schools,” Rush said.

“This nurse concluded that the military’s Guantanamo force-feeding policies are not humane,” Reprieve’s Crider said in an e-mailed statement. “Yet the military still insists that they are—so why won’t the Obama administration release the ten-plus hours of Mr. Dhiab being force-fed that I have seen? I think the American people would be very concerned to see what is happening at the prison.”

In many ways, Brownback’s term has been a perfect experiment in Republican governance. Take a crusading conservative governor, give him a legislature with Republican super-majorities so he can do pretty much whatever he wants, and let him implement the right’s wish list. The result was supposed to be a nirvana of economic growth and budgetary stability. But the opposite happened.

Our movement isn’t strong enough yet to end US enabling of the carnage in Gaza—but the shift in public discourse is a crucial first step. Now we just have to escalate our own work to get on to that next stage.

Listeners prefer and respond more favorably (or in technical terms, in a more “proceptive” fashion) to opposite-sex voices that contain these special subtle acoustics