Portside

The trigger for the protest was the video that was made public last week, showing police officers beating an Ethiopian-Israeli man, a young man serving in the Israel Defense Forces and in uniform, but it was preceded by years of frustration. “It’s a pressure cooker that exploded. There are hundreds of young Ethiopians the police open case files against for no reason, and that ruins their lives."

Baltimore, not at all uniquely, has experienced a century of public policy designed, consciously so, to segregate and impoverish its black population.

A petition drive has been launched in San Francisco rename Justin Herman Plaza after the renowned poet, Maya Angelou. Presently, the plaza honors Justin Herman, who was head of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency during the period when it displaced thousands of low-income residents from the South of Market and Fillmore districts. This latter displacement, which critics attacked as “Negro Removal,” is one of the most shameful episodes in San Francisco history.

In its expansive report, the AFL-CIO reports 4,585 U.S. workers were killed on the job and 50,000 died from occupational diseases in 2013. U.S. workers suffer from 7.6 million to 11.4 million injuries each year. Workplace violence continues to be the second leading cause of job fatalities, with women workers suffering 70% of the lost-time injuries related to workplace violence. Latino workers continue to be at increased risk of job fatalities.

On nearly all indicators of mortality, survival and life expectancy, the United States ranks at or near the bottom among high-income countries. Pick almost any measure of social cohesion over the last four decades and you will find the United States took a wrong turn along the way. The bloated incarceration rates and rock-bottom life expectancy, the unraveling families and the stagnant college graduation rates amount to an existential threat to the nation’s future.

Last month, when Pope Francis described Ottoman Turkey’s slaughter of between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians during World War I as “the first genocide of the 20th century,” the Turkish government predictably denounced his characterization. However, those who assert the first genocide in the 20th century was carried out by Germany against the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia (South-West Africa) have also raised concerns about the Pope’s statement.

April 26th marked the 29th anniversary of the Chernobyl catastrophe, the worst nuclear disaster in history. And, according to a new Greenpeace report, preventing further major releases of radioactivity into the environment seems to be a race against time. There are more than 1.5 million tons of radioactive dust inside the ruins. And a collapse of the sarcophagus and other structures, which could lead to their release into the environment, cannot be ruled out.

Whose country is this anyhow? Whose world is it going to be? Those are questions that May Day, the international workers' holiday, has always asked. Listen to these five songs of labor and struggle, from brand new to nearly a century old, and take pleasure and inspiration from how they point to answers.