Portside

Never in U.S. history has a local school board - or any other board, appointed or elected - chosen to close 49 public schools. School closings are part and parcel of a strategy for remaking the American metropolis and will further cement economic inequality. "Today is a day of mourning for the children of Chicago. Their education has been hijacked by an unrepresentative, unelected corporate school board. Closing schools is not an education plan."

Cynicism or struggle? Cynicism is self-fulfilling prophesy. The generation of 1968 fought - America changed. The changes didn't come easily. Every positive step was met with determined resistance. But we became better and stronger because we were determined to change. Today to make progress, to prevent slipping backwards - will require no less steadfastness, intelligence, and patience than was necessitated before. Graduates today are the most indebted - ever.

"Terracide." A new word - it's meant to encompass the almost unimaginable -- what the big energy companies are doing on and to our planet right now. Their execs are consciously destroying/melting it for profit and if that doesn't make them terrorists -- or terrarists - what does? And if that doesn't also make the companies themselves the biggest criminal enterprise in history, then how would you define that term?

With atmospheric carbon dioxide levels having reached the 400 ppm point - way above the 350 ppm considered to be the upper limit for avoiding environmental catastrophe - organized labor is struggling with the tension between the immediate need for jobs in a crisis-ridden economy and the perils to humanity's future of avoiding the sacrifices required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The following two articles discuss those tensions from different angles.

Protesters will express their outrage at the honoring of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger with the Intrepid Freedom Award for his "his distinguished career defending the values of freedom and democracy." The protest will condemn the honoring of the accused war criminal by the museum's foundation.

If we don’t want our state and national laws drafted by corporations in partnership with right-wing ideologues impervious to empirical evidence of the toll their ideas take, we citizens of all backgrounds who believe in “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” must come together to find our voices and vote our values.

Despite the May 20 ruling by Guatemala’s Constitutional Court, which overturned the original verdict on procedural grounds, the May 10 conviction of that country’s former head of state, General Efrain Rios Montt, for the genocide of Guatemala’s Mayan people, could be a defining event in modern history.

Called the “Ride for Respect,” the demonstration at Walmart corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, will be modeled on civil rights volunteers who rode buses into the South in the 1960s to protest Jim Crow racial injustice.