Portside

A short compilation of hard times music. Run DMC Hard Times. Ry Cooder No Banker Left Behind. Josh White Hard Times Blues. Willie Nelson Summertime. Charlie Palloy Buddy Can You Spare a Dime.

Noting that conditions today are similar to those at the dawn of the Gilded Age characterized by disproportionate wealth and extreme corruption, retiring DC Metro Labor Council President Joslyn Williams added, "In that era, they were lobbing vicious attacks against workers with guns and batons. Today, they are armed with suits and maneuvers that undercut workers from Wall Street to the state house to U.S. Supreme Court."

Reader Comments: Sanders' Health for All Plan; Deportations; Flint's Water; Richard Levins - Presente!; Add Your Name - End All U.S. Support for the Government of Saudi Arabia; Your Action Needed - A Park for Pete Seeger; Action for Puerto Rico; Ursula K. Le Guin Rips Bundy Militia in 194 words; Making All of the World's Art Accessible to Anyone Online - Ansel Adams photography; and more...

Were the mass 'We are Charlie' demonstrations in France in support of 'We are France,' in the best republican tradition or a shot against Muslim immigrants signifying that 'You are not?' Polymath Emmanuel Todd argues that the demonstrations, like much of Charlie Hebdo's satire, were not so much attacks on toxic religious ideology as broadly anti-Muslim and anti-Arab, indicating that the vaunted French secularism has lost its solidaristic component, 'equality.'

The Haitian Revolution sowed fear in the hearts of Cuba's slaveholding class. In Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, historian Ada Ferrer undertakes a comprehensive evaluation of the impact made by the Haitian Revolution on Cuba, then still a Spanish colony located only fifty miles from Haiti's western sea borders.

The Portside moderators send our heartfelt thanks to our readers, for coming through in response to our annual appeal! We don't do a lot of fundraising -- just this annual appeal. We are grateful, and gratified, that the response allows us to keep to this bare minimum. Again, many thanks from the left side of the ship - the portside. Full speed ahead in the new year.