Portside

Just in time for this year’s presidential primary, a new law in Maryland will allow former offenders on probation or parole the right to vote.

On February 28 2016, Delmer Berg of northern California died. He was last known veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade--the 2800 American volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War. Here is a tribute for them all.

Republicans in Virginia have proposed a referendum in November to strengthen the state's existing open shop laws. In this, an opportunity presents itself that labor unions must take. Our goal should not simply be to defeat the proposal: it should be a realignment of the conversation surrounding the role in labor unions in Virginia’s—and America’s—political economy.

The results prove it's far too early to declare the nomination contest over. As FiveThirtyEight's Harry Enten admits, to find an upset on the same scale as what Sanders achieved in Michigan you'd have to go back over 30 years. Those polls that put Illinois and Ohio out of Sanders's reach look a lot less reliable today. And if Sanders wins in those states, it won't be his viability as a candidate that is in question.

Can disruptive social movements change the world or are we better served by take-it-slow, wait-a-year-or-more-to-speak-up, incremental change? Mark and Paul Engler make a case for the former, arguing in their new book, This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century, that supposed pragmatism often stands in the way of genuine progress. The grand slogan of Paris, 1968 -- "Be realistic, demand the impossible" -- is sage and sober advice.

In 1970, the United States Post Office Department issued a 6 cent stamp to commemorate the Stone Mountain Memorial. Ken Lawrence summarizes the historical and political background of the memorial and suggests that the stamp was veiled gift to Southern advocates of white supremacy.

Events in Germany are truly alarming - with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) moving up into third place and both the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) slipping. This is connected with the immigrant wave but laden with too many nasty memories - and there is rightward shifts in France, Poland, Slovakia, Denmark and Sweden.

Reader Comments: Celebrating International Women's Day (Bev Grant in song); Democracy Spring - call for national civil disobedience actions in Washington, DC in April; Trumpism - What it Means; Race and Representation; Stephen Hawking and Robots; In Memory of Dr. Quentin Young; Tech Workers and Unions; Report from Palestine; Leonard Peltier Film Series starts in New York.

Matthew Desmond is an academic who teaches at Harvard - a sociologist or, you could say, an ethnographer. But I would like to claim him as a journalist, and one who has set a new standard for reporting on poverty. In Milwaukee, he moved into a trailer park and then to a rooming house on the -poverty-stricken North Side and diligently took notes on the lives of people who pay 70 to 80 percent of their incomes for homes that are unfit for human habitation.

After she left office, Clinton criticized Obama’s quip that a central principle of his foreign policy was “don’t do stupid s---,” saying that “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” Maybe so, but it reflects a common sense that Sanders and Obama exhibit, and Clinton consistently does not.