Portside

Among the demands being met by the government are requirements that companies get certification ensuring that they’re not using child labor, social security benefits for retired farmworkers, equal rights and pay for women, housing built for laborers, recognition of the farmworkers’ union, and healthcare for workers.

Activists’ decision to target corporations reflects a growing conviction that the government is unresponsive to popular demands because it is unwilling or unable to stop the abuses of the corporate world.

Getting cars off the roads would help combat climate change and improve air quality as well. Government policy could make this happen.

During the economic blockade by the US and after a string of serious disease outbreaks, Cuban leader Fidel Castro made biotechnology and medical research a key priority for the allocation of limited government funds. Johnson said: “They’ve had to do more with less, so they’ve had to be even more innovative with how they approach things. For over 40 years, they have had a preeminent immunology community.”

May 9th, Arise for Social Justice in Springfield, MA held the first of over 15 Renter Nation Assemblies scheduled to take place around the country this year. The Assemblies are part of Right to the City’s Homes For All Campaign, a national movement to increase awareness of the housing crisis and implement resident-driven solutions to the massive displacement and housing instability the crisis has imposed.

California is earthquake country but one seismic shift rumbling through the state won’t require bottled water and a three-day food supply. That would be the political and demographic groundswell toward challenging elements of Proposition 13, the property tax measure passed by California voters in 1978 by a landslide and which has been considered untouchable ever since.

John Sweeney, former AFL-IO President his officers, and their staff came into office with high expectations and great optimism. A good part of their inspiration was drawn from SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign that many had directly participated in or saw as a model of success. After all, Justice for Janitors had succeeded in mobilizing members, winning better contracts and organizing thousands of new, mostly Latino members while garnering broad public support.(1)

As an anti-racist white feminist, I wonder if it is enough to be an “ally” in this present and “newest” moment of racist/militarist/carceral violence. Or, is there something more to do? I am thinking hard about this “newness,” which is also very old. White anti-racist feminists can take the lead from our Black and Brown sisters and embrace an abolitionist stance towards chattel slavery and its racist and misogynist remains.

Palestine’s modern colonization begins with British troops landing on Mediterranean shores and moving northward from Egypt conquering the remaining parts of Ottoman territories. “Great” Britain’s planning, machinations and intrigues started earlier but the end of WWI, November 29th, 1917 is the accurate date for the loss of Palestine. From this date, Palestine and the Palestinians were set for dispossession and major powers manipulation to bring about a Jewish state.

The world as seen by Jose Guerrero is a world full of injustice and violence, a gritty and reeling place where people nonetheless rise up in resistance, solidarity and joy; where even death itself is vanquished by the grinning skeletal calaveras who continue celebrating life on the other side.