Portside

Reader Comments: Time for Impeachment - Differing responses from Portside readers; Voting - Gerrymandering, and Racial Segregation - Today; White Working-Class Voters and the Future of Progressive Politics; Chelsea Manning is Free!; News from South Africa -- COSATU Bans Zuma from Speaking at its Events; Jewish Voice for Peace video - Israel Palestine Conflict 101; and more...

U.S. and Brazilian union activists joined May Day celebrations in São Paulo. More than 14.2 million Brazilians were without a job in March. With young workers and workers of color especially hard hit by rising unemployment and proposed legislation that would undermine fundamental worker rights, they are standing up for the their future by mobilizing in the streets, through their unions and other associations.

The author argues that the Terror of the French Revolution was a price worth paying, and that the lessons from overthrowing the old regime should temper today's trend of maligning oppressed people's resort to violence as itself a rationale for ongoing class injustices. The reviewer, no critic of revolutionary struggle, argues that the author overemphasizes the pursuit of vengeance then and now involved at the expense of politics and a weighing of class forces.

In these early days of the Age of Trump, there is an upsurge of interest in Margaret Atwood's 1985 harrowing dystopian novel. Jennifer Helinek reminds us why this book has become a modern classic.

A group of Wisconsin lawyers plans Thursday to ask the state Supreme Court to increase the rate to $100 per hour, a raise that would place Wisconsin's rate among the highest in the country. The request would cost about $34 million more per year to cover the roughly 55,000 publicly appointed cases.

Even amid the scandal of the firing of FBI director James Comey—an action in which Sessions himself had a central part—Sessions has quietly continued the radical remaking of the Justice Department he began when he took the job.

We encourage all the people who are listening or reading this to go to FamilyValuesAtWork.org and sign up. We will plug you in wherever there are struggles going on or help you start new ones.

The attack in Manchester was likely by Sunni radicals (ISIL has claimed it), and came two days after President Trump blamed all terrorism on Shiite Iran at a speech in Saudi Arabia, the proponent of a form of extreme Sunni supremacism. In 1996, Manchester had also been victimized by a bomb at a civillian center; in that instance left by the Provisional IRA. The question is: can anything be learned from looking at 1996 and 2017 in the same historical frame?

Mothers who work full-time and have a high-school degree make 67 cents for every dollar made by a dad with a high-school degree. More staggering is that mothers have to earn a bachelor’s degree or more in order for their earnings to outpace fathers with only high-school degrees. At every education level and in every state, mothers are paid less than fathers. On average, a mother makes about 71 cents to a father’s dollar.

Herbert presents an airtight case of structural racism in America — and it’s a case I’m laying out at length here in case you don’t see the film. If we are going to throw these words around, we better understand their meaning and use that understanding to inform the work that we — white people — must do.