Portside

Fire-breathing rhetoric, or raving three a.m. tweets, may assuage the anger of those left behind by the Reagan revolution, at least for a while. But for how long? And what happens then?

Extinction: Lisa Allen Ortiz, child of Mendocino county, California knows a thing or two about birds and about how precarious are the lives of many species, speaks of our impending "civic sorrow."

We believe that Women's Rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Women's Rights. We must create a society in which women - including Black women, Native women, poor women, immigrant women, disabled women, Muslim women, lesbian queer and trans women - are free and able to care for and nurture their families, however they are formed, in safe and healthy environments free from structural impediments. Marches in 616 cities - full list and information.

While it is doubtful that US President-elect Donald Trump ever read George Orwell's 1984, Trump's cabinet choices appear to come right out of the doublethink that ruled Orwell's dystopian society. In Orwell's book, the Ministry of Plenty rationed essentials while the Ministry of Truth manufactured falsehoods. Trump's choice for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is perhaps the most extreme of Trump's cabinet nominees.

Honoring King's vision and legacy thus requires not simply remembering his most well-known dream: a racially inclusive society very different from the one that existed in his, or sadly, our own time. It requires recognizing the need to redistribute the power from the oppressive, exclusionary institutions, many of the same ones - housing, schools, criminal justice, the economy - he fought for until the day he was taken from us. What does honoring that vision mean today?

Brexit has come to the United States. For thirty years now, in Europe and the United States, a bipartisan neoliberal consensus has embraced the benefits of globalization and the rise of the "knowledge economy." If only workers would go back to school, retrain, and send their children to college, the good jobs that disappeared would somehow return. But those good jobs did not arrive, and voters have opted for a faux populism that promises to reverse globalization.

King’s strategic advice to the striking Memphis sanitation workers is still useful: winning requires placing the struggle in a larger context that challenges elected officials and government at every level to make America a better nation!

Reader Comments: Rearming Germany; Martin Luther King Today; Obama Commutes Sentences of Oscar Lopez Rivera and Chelsea Manning - Now Commute Leonard Peltier Sentence; Obama's Farewell Address; Meryl Streep; Cuban Medical Internationalism; Privatization Articles; Puzder Confirmation as Labor Secretary Pushed Back; Rodrigo Duterte - Readers Disagree; Announcements: Whitney Museum - Free Inauguration Day `Diversity' Show; Trumpism: How Should the Left Respond?; more...

Communities of color in Chicago meticulously documented the CPD's pattern of racist violence.

Communities of color in Chicago meticulously documented the CPD's pattern of racist violence.