Portside

Six year's ago, Mohamed Bouazizi's protest inspired millions of others to protest their regimes and the status quo. The protests did not bring the renewal that was promised by the branding phrase "Arab Spring," but rather what followed were more of the old calamities. To say that the old Arab regime is better than the revolt against it is like saying that the accumulation of pus in a boil is better than incising the boil and letting the pus out.

Reader Comments: Time's Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art; Reader's Disagree - Is Trump Passing Secrets to Putin - or is Borowitz Satire or Incredible Reality Check; Why Does the Media Misjudge Fascists; Trump Nominee Meets with Austrian Nazis; Teacher Shortages; Trump's Job Plan; Hotel Workers Beat Trump; Los Angeles Fashion Industry; Discussion - Building Mass Socialist Party; Cuban Art Exhibit in New York; and more...

Rebel Crossings charts six 19th century socialists as they journey from the constraints of Old-World Britain to a New-World America. They were part of a wider historical search for self-fulfillment and an alternative to a cruelly competitive capitalism. The book surveys the interaction of feminism, socialism and anarchism, bringing fresh slants on political and cultural movements and upon influential individuals including Walt Whitman, Eleanor Marx, and William Morris.

One month after at least 28 workers lost their lives at a shipbreaking facility, little has changed. And until the government of Pakistan shows the political will to institute radical reforms to protect the lives and improve the wages of underpaid shipbreaking workers, little will change.

Workers at Trump’s Vegas hotel voted to unionize last December after several months of campaigning. A labor agreement, though, was slow to materialize until last week, when over a few days, union representatives and Trump Organization executives negotiated a four-year contract, taking effect Jan. 1, that will cover roughly 520 housekeepers, bartenders, servers, porters and other staff at the hotel.

This past July, the Federal Detention Center instituted a policy that makes inmate visits even more difficult: It limited visits to immediate family only. Practically speaking, the policy cuts off inmates from the people they love at precisely the moment they need those connections most.

Albert Murray (1916-2013), was the kind of intellectual for whom Duke Ellington would write a book jacket blurb. He called the African American writer and esteemed cultural critic “a man whose learning did not interfere with understanding," in praise of Murray's 1975 book Train Whistle Guitar, adding that Murray was "the unsquarest person I know." The Library of America has published new volume of Murray's writing. Greg Thomas takes a look.

Amidst a national flurry of immigrant rights initiatives, the Immigrant Worker Center Collaborative of Boston (IWCC) came up with a proposal that was radical in its simplicity: a demand that President Obama pardon all undocumented people in the United States.

Forty years ago, shop workers in Britain developed the Lucas Plan to save jobs by converting arms manufacturing to industrial production. The struggle for economic conversion, and against the deskilling of work through computer-controlled technology remains relevant today in the search for solutions to the environmental crisis and the employment crisis.

In the face of Trump and the GOP’s likely nationwide attack on unions, labor leaders are scrambling to ensure that they have a hand in reshaping a Democratic Party that has, as union power has diminished, sometimes pushed organized labor to the margins. Union members make up about 100 of the roughly 447 voting members of the Democratic National Committee, making union support a major factor in the race for DNC chair.