Portside

"We would not be having this healthcare deconstruction if we had the Voting Rights Act!"

A series of energy revolutions—some natural, some technological—built upon one another to give us our rich, diverse biosphere.

American slavery happened – we are still living with its consequences. I believe we are finally ready to face it, learn about it and acknowledge its significance to American history.

Stacey Walker’s astonishing lyric poem depicts the postwar trauma of an American veteran of the Iraq war and his wife, as the war lives on in their bed.

Inauguration Day demonstrators potentially face decades in prison on charges they say are all ‘Trumped’ up. The arrests and subsequent indictments appear to correspond to the Trump Era pattern of a shock-and-awe gambit followed by a lot of confusion and disarray. Advocates are concerned President Trump’s ‘law and order’ message, combined with his contempt for dissent, could mean an intensified police and prosecutorial response to demonstrations.

Donald Trump announced in Miami the policy his government has decided to implement with regard to Cuba. These were announced in a Theater named after Manuel Artime, civilian leader of the mercenary brigade that invaded our country at Playa Girón or the Bay of Pigs. It was a grotesque Cold War-era spectacle, made before a small audience, composed of old henchmen and thieves of the Batista dictatorship, mercenaries from the Playa Girón brigade and terrorists...

British artist, novelist, prodigious essayist and poet John Berger, best known for her magisterial and approachable Ways of Seeing and who died in January, is remembered here for his radical approach to Art, when it functions to make sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, when it becomes a meeting place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, what Berger called guts and honor.

The ousting of President Dilma Rousseff has provided an opportunity for the proponents of neoliberalism and those who want to break union power. Most of Brazil's union centers fear that proposed government reforms will weaken unions and further the spread of subcontracting.

The truth is ugly as sin. The NFL is denying Colin Kaepernick employment not because he isn’t “good enough” but because he is being shut out for the crime of using his platform to protest the killing of black kids by police. NFL owners don’t make pariahs out of players who beat women or face accusations of murder. Kaepernick’s pariah status is about sending a shot across the bow at every political athlete—particularly black athletes—that they better toe the line.

Why the white worker theme is harmful. It’s a mistake to racialize an economy that harms the entire working class. What has happened to more whites now is that the market has moved past them as well. It took almost 40 years to get to this point, in the near term no recipe of policy fixes will sufficiently remedy the effects. Democrats need to focus on reversing those long-term trends, but also must have something to offer workers now.