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WV Teachers Tell Us Why Public Schools and Unions Matter

Jeff Bryant Progressive Maryland
What also makes the West Virginia Teachers strike similar to other effective acts of solidarity against entrenched right-wing power is that it was borne in the democratic cauldron of public schools.

Pennsylvania Steelworkers Send Lamb to Congress, Revive Progressive Coalition

Kevin P. Lynch Portside
The Lamb victory should give heart to the surging young generation who are struggling so passionately for a better and fairer future. Despite Trump’s pandering on the issue of trade and environmental regulations, miners and steelworkers campaigned for the long-term interests of their class.

Let’s Get Real About Russiagate

Katha Pollitt The Nation
Some on the left are still waving away the inconvenient facts that don’t fit with their politics.

Prologue to Greatness: W.E.B. Du Bois and Great Barrington

David Levering Lewis Portside
Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis delivered a speech during the Du Bois 150th Birthday Celebration. Du Bois at age 95 was more radically unorthodox than virtually any other engaged intellectual of the 20th century. The real problem was really the manipulation of race in the service of wealth.

The Fascist Threat and How to Combat It

Mark Solomon Portside
Proto-Fascism - seeding of the political ground for full-born fascism, tends to move from threat to reality when principal segments of finance capital no longer consider parliamentary democracy, their preferred form of rule, to be a guarantor of their hegemony. That tendency is increasingly global.

Tidbits - March 15, 2018 - Reader Comments: Slavery and Modern Capitalism; Stopping Gun Violence and the NRA; Puerto Rico; Viola Desmond; Venezuela; Soviet Union and Stalin; My Lai Massacre; Global Call for Peace; and more...

Portside
Reader Comments: Slavery and Modern Capitalism; Stopping Gun Violence, Stopping the NRA; PA18; West Virginia Teachers; Puerto Rico - Crisis Deepens; Viola Desmond; Venezuela; Soviet Union, Fight Against Hitler...and Stalin; My Lai: Never Again; Global Call for Peace; and more...

Comic Art in the Academy

Paul Buhle New Politics
Once the provenance of teens, counterculturalists or authors who were fans, comics are now entrenched in academic discourse in what the essayist calls, "the theorizing of a kind of artistic poetics." The book under review ably looks at nonfiction comics as apt reflections on modern social ills.

Turn Prisons Into Colleges

Elizabeth Hinton The New York Times
Today, only a third of all prisons provide ways for incarcerated people to continue their educations beyond high school.

Frail, Old and Dying, but Their Only Way Out of Prison Is a Coffin

Christie Thompson The New York Times
Congress created compassionate release as a way to free certain inmates, such as the terminally ill, when it becomes “inequitable” to keep them in prison any longer. Despite urging from lawmakers of both parties, officials deny or delay the vast majority of requests.