Portside

New York has a real subway. Seems like anywhere I want to go is walking distance from a station. There are 421 of them, so it figures they're close to almost anywhere along its 656 miles of tracks in four boroughs. The great thing about the subway is the people. New York is so diverse - it feels like you're seeing people from everyplace on earth in just a few subway cars. I see people tired from work, having trouble keeping their eyes open, or sometimes just asleep.

This Memorial Day, let us remember the men and women soldiers who have suffered and died from war-caused conditions called variably soldier's heart in the Civil War, shell shock in the First World War, PTSD in the Vietnam War, and moral injury in the Iraq War...Let us not forget those who died from the nightmares of war - at their own hand.

Reader Comments- Progressive Wins: Philadelphia / Los Angeles; Third Party Builders Meet; What U.S. Really Owes Black America; Thirty Years After MOVE Bombing; The Nakba: The Intentional, Deliberate Dispossession of Palestinians; Remembering Guy Carawan; David Letterman Show and whiteness; Educators and School Staff Make a Difference; Mike Brown Would Have Been 19; Announcements- Greece Solidarity 4 All U.S. Tour; Left Forum 2015 Today in History-Post-War Strike Wave

After a decade long campaign led by Unite union, fast food chains have committed to ending zero hour contracts in New Zealand. Tens of thousands of workers in the fast food industry will now have secure hours of employment. This victory in New Zealand -- supported by workers in Indonesia, Korea, Philippines, Hong Kong and elsewhere represents a fundamental shift in the employment relationship of the most vulnerable workers in the country

The public health repercussions of this deal could be massive. The negotiating countries represent at least 700 million people, and U.S. negotiators refer to the TPP as a “blueprint” for future trade deals. The TPP attempts to rewrite existing global trade rules and would dismantle legal flexibilities and protections afforded for public health.

"At the Women’s Court, women testified courageously of their experiences of losing family members to massacres, of mass rape and kidnapping, and of ethnic persecution. They demanded that such events never be repeated. This feminist re-imagining of a court in which women victims are the central focus was very inspiring and thought-provoking to me as an international lawyer."

American workers and organized labor have an interest in addressing climate change and in putting millions of people to work making the transition to a climate-safe economy. But much of labor is still committed to an “all of the above” energy policy that promotes all jobs—even those destroying our climate and future. Can that change?

The win marks a major victory for the Pennsylvania Working Families Party, which endorsed Kenney. The endorsement lauded Kenney for his work on Philadelphia’s City Council “supporting efforts to raise wages, improving Philly’s schools, increasing access to housing, ending the discriminatory practices of the criminal justice system, and limiting corporate power in politics.”

Supporters of higher wages say they hope the move will reverberate nationally. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced this month that he was convening a state board to consider a wage increase in the local fast-food industry, which could be enacted without a vote in the State Legislature. Immediately after the Los Angeles vote, pressure began to build on Mr. Cuomo to reject an increase that falls short of $15 an hour.

The history of public housing in the United States can be read, in part, as a history of the modern impoverishment of racial minorities, in particular, of the African American population. As reviewer Rhonda Y. Williams notes, Edward G. Goetz has written a "multi-layered analysis of housing policy and redevelopment," in a book that "explicitly examines black removal from urban spaces and the perpetuation of racialized poverty."