Portside

Fatal shootings by police are up by 6 percent during the first six months of 2016, compared with the same period last year. Fatal encounters are strikingly similar to last year’s shootings: Blacks continued to be shot at 2.5 times the rate of whites. But many more are being captured on video.

As the head of Fox News, Ailes has deployed his survival skills frequently to weather scandals of career-ending proportions and a bitter power struggle with Rupert Murdoch’s oldest son, Lachlan. But in the wake of Gretchen Carlson’s shocking sexual-harassment lawsuit against Ailes, there are signs that the 76 year-old’s luck may have finally expired.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are both on record against the TPP. So why does the draft Democratic platform only say that “there are a diversity of views in the party” on the TPP? This weekend Texas populist Jim Hightower will present the Democratic Party platform committee with a Bernie Sanders-sponsored amendment to make a clear statement against a lame-duck vote on TPP.

Once-fraught ideas and symbols are now a routine matter of partisan combat. This is scary.

It happened again this week, as it has happened more than 100 times so far this year. Police in Louisiana and Minnesota shot and killed two more black men. Stop asking us to be calm. Stop asking us to wear the mask. Stop asking us to take whips, nooses and now police bullets without emotion. In the words of Fannie Lou Hamer, "We are sick and tired of being sick and tired." Two years after Ferguson, police induced murders are continuing...#BlackLivesMatter

The disgraceful history of voter disenfranchisement is no secret. For more than a century, African Americans (and other marginalized groups) were restricted or evendisqualified from voting. Today these practices are formally outlawed, yet we still see patterns in voter turnout that indicate that voting discrimination is alive and well. Non-voters also tend to be younger, less educated, and less affluent than their voting counterparts.

A thoughtful and nuanced look at the role identity played in this year's primary contest between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton by a Sanders supporter. Hillary's passionate female (and male feminist) supporters are speaking with sincerity about their hopes for a gender revolution. The reality is that women work for less pay; do more childcare; are often single parents; must weather sexual harassment, abuse, and assault throughout their lives...

On both sides of the Atlantic, citizens are seizing upon trade agreements as a source of their woes. While this is an over-simplification, it is understandable. Today's trade agreements are negotiated in secret, with corporate interests well represented, but ordinary citizens or workers completely shut out. Not surprisingly, the results have been one-sided: workers' bargaining position has been weakened further, compounding the effects of legislation undermining unions.

Reader Comments: Bernie, Endorse?, What Next?; Dominican Republic; Indigenous Peoples in US; Hawaii; Tair Kaminer - Israeli Political Prisoner - Inspiring People Worldwide; Elie Wiesel - Responses to Max Blumenthal; Austrian Election Update; On Socialism; on the IWW; Angry response to post about Viet Thanh Nguyen; Resources: The Invention of the White Race; Mining and Resistance in Dinétah; Announcement: From Sanders to the Grassroots: National Student Conference

The Encyclopedia Britannica has gone through many editions, but the 1910-1911 scholars edition is nonpareil. Dennis Boyles' book says why, and enumerates what is lost when readers gain accessibility and cost-savings from easy access to Wikipedia and other venues but lose in depth and authority.