Portside

This is the tenth article in a series that reviews news coverage of the 2016 general election, explores how Donald Trump won and why his chances were underrated by most of the American media.

For the author of the work under review--much heralded by the reviewer--Czech novelist Franz Kafka was no chronic pessimist or dour, fatalistic misbeliever in human emancipation, but a consistent partisan artist siding with the humiliated.

More than a thousand people rallied and marched on May Day as part of the Seattle March for Workers and Immigration Rights. -

Bad Dictators are arguably Bad, and some are war criminals. But Washington tends to deal with the pro-American dictators by just not bringing them up much.

Whether intentionally or by virtue of the fact that the populations historically affected by low-wage, abusive workplaces are people of color, MLOV’s DC on Strike May Day rally was intersectional, highlighting how the most vulnerable communities are always those with the most complex identities.

Democrats and coal-country Republicans say miners are uniquely deserving because of an agreement in 1946, when the government seized mines and ended a strike by agreeing to provide health and pension benefits. Legislative leaders have agreed to the provisions as part of a $1 trillion government funding bill, and rank-and-file members are expected to approve it later this week.

The protests igniting across the Occupied Territories to support 1,500 hunger strikers are not merely an act of 'solidarity' with the incarcerated and abused men and women who are demanding improvements to their conditions. Sadly, prison is the most obvious fact of Palestinian life; it is the status quo; the everyday reality.

“The lesson you get from the end of the Luddites is: Do the people that are profiting off automation today want to participate in distributing their profits more widely around the population, or are they going to fight just as hard as they did back then?”

The city of Miami can sue Wells Fargo and Bank of America for damages under the Fair Housing Act, the Supreme Court says, allowing a lawsuit to continue that accuses the big banks of causing economic harm with discriminatory and predatory lending practices.

Eric Foner, who recently retired from Columbia University, has focused much of his work on the Civil War and its aftermath. Foner’s work deftly chronicles what he calls “a usable past.” This isn’t history as propaganda, but, in Foner’s words, “a historical consciousness that can enable us to address the problems of society today in an intelligent manner.”