Portside

The success of the organizing is due to everything from the abysmal recovery from the 2008 economic crisis to Occupy Wall Street's role in shifting the national dialogue from austerity to economic inequality. But Fight for 15 is due primarily to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which initiated the campaign in 2011 and has poured tens of millions of dollars into growing waves of protest that are battering the image of the fast-food giants.

UCORE’s 20 member caucuses come from all over the country and from both teachers unions, the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers. Locals and caucuses in the network consider themselves social justice unionists, balancing bread-and-butter issues with working to create equity and keep public schools in the hands of communities rather than private enterprises.

This weekend, the Art Institute of Chicago is commemorating the famed and controversial Wall of Respect, which celebrated black achievement, with a symposium and other events.

With the passage of half a century, it may be difficult to understand why so many political and cultural organizations, led by individuals with a generally liberal or leftist outlook, covertly collaborated with the CIA in the 1950s and first half of the 1960s, before exposés in Ramparts and other publications put an end to most such arrangements. This was also a period in which many other Americans with similar views collaborated with the FBI.

“These researchers had deliberately withheld treatment for this group of poor, uneducated, black sharecroppers in order to document what eventually might happen to them. I became incensed. How could physicians, who were trained first and foremost to do no harm, deliberately withhold curative treatment so they could understand the natural history of syphilis?”

As soon as the fighting started in the spring of 2011, the genebank’s staff switched gears from collecting and distributing seed samples to devising a rescue plan. People there became very familiar with northern Syria’s back roads as they drove the seeds out of the country.

The worst-paid workers in America have been the mainly silent and most extreme victims of the rising inequality and wage stagnation for the past 40 years in America. Their occupations have also been—and are projected to be—the fastest growing part of the workforce.

“It’s disturbing when you have what amounts to American soldiers viewing American citizens somehow as the enemy,” local alderman Antonio French told CNN.

On April 26, a mass rally will take place in Union Square, followed by a march to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza where millions of petition signatures will be presented to UN and NPT officials. The rally will launch a “Global Wave,” with participants symbolically waving goodbye to nuclear weapons. The Global Wave will travel west, by time zone, with public events scheduled in Papeete, Manila, Amman, Bethlehem, Stockholm, Paris, London, Sao Paulo and points in-between.

If there’s an engine that continues to draw millions of workers into the Persian Gulf’s draconian labor regime, it is the middlemen—the underground network of recruitment agents that reaches into every corner of rural South Asia, dangling the possibility of a better life before communities ravaged by neoliberalism.