Portside

Reader Comments: Government Shutdown - Case for a General Strike; AOC and Tax Policy; Los Angeles Teachers; 2020 Elections - Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren; Sexual Harassment in Elections; Resources; Announcements; Protest Music links; and more...

Reader Comments: Comey, Trumpism, Family Trump, Afghan Escalation, Sessions' Dept. of Injustice; Poor Prisons; People's History - Henry Wallace; The Man Who Never Returned; The Investigator; Solidarity Statement for Yale Graduate Union - Add Your Name; Announcements: Resistance Summer; Chelsea is Free; Seattle Labor History Mural; 80th Commemoration of Republic Steel Massacre; Book Tours: In the Fields of the North; The Syriza Wave; Left Forum Opening Plenary additions

July 12, Woody Guthrie would have been 102. The people's artist wrote the words to This Land is Your Land, the peoples' national anthem, and frequently performed with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists on his guitar..

Despite occasional media laments that "protest music is dead," a new generation of performers has been revitalizing music's links to movements, often self-consciously modeled on the folk singers of the past.

Reader Comments - Flashmob for Mandela; The Progressive 'Left"; War and Christmas Truce of 1914; Socialist Origins of the Pledge; Radicals in City Hall; Fidel Castro on Mandela's Death and Who Supported Apartheid; Korea; MSNBC; Announcements - "No Separate Justice" Launch in New York City Jan. 7; Esperanza Spalding Protest Song & Video Calling For Guantanamo Bay

Saturday's Draw the Line held over 200 demonstrations across the United States - it was a day of action marked by song - a phenomenon that is starting to become a major feature of the climate movement.

We can't change the world if we can't even sing together - Dar Williams on what happens if political music dies. "When people come together and sing, mountains can be moved." New film about Victor Jara, Chilean troubadour, murdered by the junta 40 years ago - brings Victor's story up to date. "If you are watching people singing in Wisconsin, you could be subject to arrest." (video)