Portside

Inside squalid quarters, bedrooms are so crowded that men must sleep three to a stack — one on the upper bunk, one on the lower bunk and one below the lower bunk, separated from the floor by only a thin pad for a mattress. In the space between the beds, the men pile cauliflower, onions and sacks of Basmati rice to cook after working all day and washing the construction dirt from their clothes. Exposed wiring hangs from the ceiling, and cockroaches climb the walls.

Reader Comments - Boko Haram; Portside articles on the Ukraine; Brown v. Board-what still needs to be done; Redistributing Income; NRA, Second Amendment; John Oliver; Jon Favreau - a correction; Whiteness of Liberal Media; Was the American Revolution Really Just A Counter-Revolution; THE REAL WORLD - a graduation address never given; Announcements - DIE LINKE, SYRIZA, Future of the European Left - New York - May 28; New Book -- Torture is still an urgent moral issue

And though I am still young, and still searching for answers, I have started down a path where dignity is derived from the law of love, and though it has been said that this trial is personal and not political, I maintain that the personal cannot be divorced from the political.Whereas nonviolent civil disobedience is the manifestation of my ideology, it is rooted in a love ethic that is central to my identity.

The new film, Cesar Chavez: History is Made One Step at a Time, doesn't capture the diversity of the farmworkers' movement. "When I was a farmworker, before the strike, we lived in different worlds - the Latino world, the Filipino world, the African-American world and the Caucasian world," Eliseo Medina as interviewed by David Bacon for In These Times.

Dr. Vincent G. Harding, Civil Rights pioneer, colleague, advisor and speechwriter for Dr. Martin Luther King, died this week at age 82. He drafted King's anti-Vietnam War speech, "Breaking the Silence". As people like King and Rosa Parks became icons, Harding insisted that America could not celebrate their lives without continuing to devote ourselves to the work they and many others had done.

In the world of pen vs. gun, we would all benefit from putting the Arab proverb "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" to good use. If women's rights are a security threat to violent extremists, then women's rights must be the asset we protect.

New Jersey Governor Christie is reducing pension payments worth $2.43 billion to cover a budget deficit thus threatening the stability of the pension fund. He is walking away from a pension overhaul he signed in his first term. He is being sued by the Communications Workers of America and the New Jersey Education Association.

“At first glance the runways of New York and the factories of Bangladesh couldn’t look farther apart, and yet we are all working in the same industry—the fashion industry—which is a $1.5 trillion business, where the work is overwhelmingly performed by young women and girls,” says Sara Ziff, the head of Model Alliance, an advocacy organization for models.

The mixed-income development was ostensibly designed to liberate the poor from the projects. Instead, it has created for the chosen among them a sort of well-outfitted prison.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.