Portside

Reader Comments: Nunes Memo - Big Dud; Puerto Rico - many still without power; Union Membership Growth...Amidst Decline; Medicare for All - Canadian Readers Tell Their Story; Teaching Slavery; Antonio Gramsci; Trump's Military Parade - in song; Olympic Truce Actions; Cuba's Historic Literacy Campaign; The Puerto Rican Socialist Party; Scholarships for Young Activists; 50th Anniversary of the Orangeburg Massacre; and more....

The recent split in the Canadian Labour Congress over organizational issues will inhibit the search to renew trade unions. A vision of a powerful, effective, inclusive union movement of the future needs to be developed. If leaders let personal grievances or institutional rivalry dominate the discussion, we will fail, and it may take years to heal the damage.

We’re not living in the dystopias of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, the author insists, but in the shifty algorithmic universe of Philip K. Dick, where the world that the Internet and social media shape is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. In this view, it’s a world in which technology is developing in ways that fudge the difference between the human and the artificial.

New Labor Forum’s “Working-Class Voices” columnist Kressent Pottenger interviewed Narbada Chhetri, former nail salon worker and director of Organizing and Advocacy at Adhikaar (a social justice organization based in New York City with approximately eight hundred members serving the Nepalese and Tibetan community), and Pabitra Dash, nail salon worker and organizer at Adhikaar, about the poor working conditions of nail salon workers in the United States. Highlights of the interview follow.

Bresha Meadows was 14 years old when she took the drastic step of shooting her father, after systems repeatedly failed her. We can learn from Bresha’s case that while she’s free, there is still an epidemic of criminalizing women and girls who fight back against domestic and family violence.

In the fall of 2014, word got around Pendleton, in Indiana, that a crew was coming to make a film, called “O.G.” It was to feature prisoners and guards as actors and extras. No one had ever attempted anything like it.

Most people who die in US jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers remain invisible, with little and often no information shared with family, friends and the broader public. 

When soldiers are idolized, respect for militarism and war grow accordingly. Military training, military expenditures, military intervention, and military escalation become ways to “support the troops” or, at the least, take on a friendlier glow.

This "very important" book offers a new examination of the role of African Americans in the American Revolution and of how racism was used in the service of creating the United States in the late 18th Century.

The Chinese Communist Party, at its 19th Congress, set the goal to eliminate extreme poverty by 2022 and then begin process of "socialist modernisation." The challenge the country will face is to combine economic growth with environmental protection and to address the extreme inequality within society.