Portside

With the poet's thanks and apologies to Walt Whitman, Dan La Botz captures the spirit of resistance in today's America and reaffirms the importance of speaking up and marching, marching, marching. Note the poem below is also translated into Spanish and French.

 At the root of Father Berrigan’s teaching was a faith in the prospect that great masses of people—and, perhaps, a few of their leaders—might yet be awakened from the slumber of inaction before it was too late. He never stopped preaching a gospel of action that risked arrest in order to challenge militarism and inequality.

The actions by the Verizon workers show that it is possible to fight back against the power of employers to dictate the terms of the employment relationship. They remind us that the supremacy of big corporations, like technological changes and market forces, are not inevitable but reflect political and managerial choices. It appears workers are finally finding a way to counter the corporate strategies that have defined—and held back—the U.S. economy in recent decades.

What if we defined ourselves – to the movement, the public, and the courts – not as criminals but as law-enforcers trying to halt governments and corporations from committing the greatest crime in human history?

No war crime, says the Pentagon. We say we need an independent investigation of the brutal U.S. attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan, which killed 42 people.

The government has not responded to repeated requests for an independent investigation of Berta's murder. Rather, they interrogated COPINH members repeatedly as suspects.. This outraged Marleny. "She was our mother, our sister! How could we turn against her!" Thousands turned out in Tegucigalpa on April 15 for a demonstration honoring Berta.

Beyonce breaks out; Jews of color convene; A Prince; A farewell to red-baiting; Market feminism; The segregation of rock

The new documentary film Solitary goes inside a supermax prison to discover what it’s like being in solitary confinement—a practice experts now describe as unnecessary and prisoners say is torture.