Portside

So Stupid It's Not Funny: Trump's Crackdown on Legal Immigration. Johnny Cash Sings "Man In Black" for the First Time. The Case for Potential Trump Money Laundering. How Machines Learn. Not A President, Not Yet A Dictator.

On Dec. 18, New Zealand pop music sensation Lorde announced plans to play concerts in Israel and Russia. On Dec. 24, she announced the cancellation of her Israeli concert, which was scheduled for June 5 at the Tel Aviv Convention Centre. “I’m not too proud to admit I didn’t make the right call on this one,” she said in a statement.

Shortly before his death, James Baldwin wrote that in the U.S., “White is a metaphor for power,” an observation that is deep background for much of the discussion in the masterly book under review, where race and class are intertwined, yet surface differences are used to split the labor force and maintain capital’s hegemony. The book can usefully inform debate on race and class and aid in reconstructing a revolutionary project in the context of Trumpworld.

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Reader Comments: Nuclear Disarmament - Again on the Agenda; Trump's Racism - recalling Martin Niemöller's dire warning in Nazi Germany; Radical lessons of Martin Luther King; #TimesUp; Traditional Labor Organizing - sharp disagreement with Portside Labor post; Sports in Colleges; Oprah - more disagreement with Portside posts; Grim Times in Austria; Announcements: The '60s-Years that Changed America; Concert for Puerto Rico; War or Peace with North Korea? and more....

King’s critique of power was never purely about race: The collapse of independent media is partly what got us here. It was the independent and radical left media that forced mainstream media to cover the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, poverty and the fight against it. Over the last 15 years, more than half the jobs in the news industry had disappeared, media consolidation will quicken this trend.

Puerto Ricans on the island are the most heavily taxed of all U.S. citizens. From 2013 to 2014, 105 different taxes were raised in Puerto Rico. Over a 19-year period, from 1990 to 2009, Puerto Rico paid more federal taxes than six U.S. states. Puerto Rico is projected to have the worst economy on the entire planet in 2018.

There were no federal laws concerning immigration until 1924. When a massive influx of new immigrant groups came at the turn of the 20th century — Italians from Southern Europe and Jews from Eastern Europe — a backlash developed. A new law required for the first time that immigrants to the U.S. have visas, introducing the concept of “having papers” to American immigration policy.

Fifty years after Martin Luther King, Jr., stood with striking Memphis sanitation workers who were fed up with low pay and dangerous conditions, United Electrical Workers (UE) Local 150 is launching a campaign in the same spirit.