Portside

It is not just the U.S. image that is suffering. Drone strikes create more enemies of the United States. While Faisal Shahzad was pleading guilty to trying to detonate a bomb in Times Square, he told the judge, “When the drones hit, they don’t see children.”

An unarmed man spent a week dying after being chased by police and suffering a lethal injury over the course of a mysterious 45-minute encounter. He was one of too many to name and the ensuing chaos is wholly the fault of the Baltimore Police Department and our broken system of law enforcement in this country.

What underlies most of these militarized forms of policing is a cynical politics of race that has perverted criminal justice policies; they are no longer about crime or justice, but instead the management of poor and non-white populations through ever-more-punitive practices. Michelle Alexander, in The New Jim Crow, describes how modern criminal justice policy was driven by a Republican effort to appeal to white voters in the South and then also by Democrats...

Punishing the poor; Nuns off the hook; Hip-Hop to the rescue; Women inmates turn prison inside-out; American PEN and Charlie Hebdo

Adam Sandler's The Ridiculous Six is said to be a spoof on The Magnificent Seven. Examples of the disrespect that triggered the walk off included Native women’s names such as Beaver’s Breath and No Bra, an actress portraying an Apache woman squatting and urinating while smoking a peace pipe, and a severely negligent portrayal of the Apache. The movie will star Sandler, Nick Nolte, Steve Buscemi, Dan Aykroyd, Jon Lovitz and Vanilla Ice.

Manitowoc Company in northeast Wisconsin is a preview of the future for what workers will face as states pass "right-to-work" legislation. Over 200 workers went on strike there four years ago. Workers say they think the company set up the workers and union to set the stage for right-to-work and other antiunion laws.

April 20 was Hitler's birthday, a day when in the past few years neo-Nazis around the world have engaged in terror attacks; and on April 20, 2015 the U.S. Army is officially beginning the training and integration of the Ukraine's neo-Nazi stormtroopers.

Ukrainian anti-fascists are calling on people around the world to mark May 2 as a day of commemoration of those who were killed in the trade union building in Odessa.

Another recent horrific injustice in the US is the jailing of African-American school teachers in Atlanta. There is widespread consternation on the Left, but little systemic analysis of this event. Every analyst finds it necessary to include the disclaimer "Of course they were wrong. They should have been fired."

Should we be wondering if the prosecution of cheating Atlanta teachers for racketeering was racist? Or should black parents and educators be leading a movement against high-stakes standardized testing as the gateway tool to privatizing public education in black and brown communities across the country?