Portside

Sanders’ candidacy is less a test of the power of the populist message than a test of populist energy and independence. The biggest obstacle is less to convince voters that he’s right than to convince them that he’s a serious candidate, worth supporting. He has to find ways to get a hearing. And he has to find ways to overcome understandable cynicism. That is the challenge to the emerging populist movements.

The six Baltimore police officers involved in the arrest of Freddie Gray - who died after being injured in police custody - have been charged criminally, State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced Friday. "Where are the jobs for the young people some so swiftly label "thugs?"" Len Shindel worked at Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point Plant in Baltimore for 30 years and for most of that time was an activist and USWA representative.

"I learned how to fight the long shifts, the bashed fingers," writes poet David Salner of his mining experiences, but he also sees the beauty of sorrow. An appropriate lyric for May Day.

Historian Mark Lause discusses an intriguing slice of baseball history, including the Knights of Labor influenced fight for labor rights and against the color bar in baseball. Great even for those who don't associate spring with baseball!

Looking for another reason to worry about fracking? We're going to bubble-wrap the entire planet with the overabundance of plastic it produces.

Why the verdict? There was the obvious and unrelenting hostility of the judge, the mild-mannered demeanor displayed by Officer Bovell on the witness stand, an inclination on the part of individual jurors to take the word of uniformed authority over that of protesters. That Cecily McMillan was the victim of a brutal sexual assault and wound up being tried as the aggressor - was too disturbing a reality for the jurors to come to grips with.

The movie, Cesar Chavez, documents his life and his role in the 1965 Delano Grape Strike. An aspect of the film is the largely forgotten contributions of Filipino Americans to the farm labor movement. Since the 1920s, when Filipinos first learned to organize into unions in Hawaii, Filipinos were important leaders in organizing farmworkers to fight against unfair working conditions.

In a weak macroeconomy, the employment rate is a better indicator of labour market strength, since it avoids the arbitrary distinction regarding whether someone is sufficiently "active" in their job search to qualify as being officially "in" the labour market. The erosion of Canada's labour market performance over the last couple of years is not surprising in light of the general stagnation of the main drivers of economic growth in our system.

Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization. But reason does not lift us upward to the heavens. It does not bring us into contact with the sacred. It does not permit us to curb our self-destructive urges. Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson mocked the myth of human progress and the folly of hubris.