Portside

A Los Angeles City Council committee voted unanimously to authorize a study on nearly doubling the minimum wage for employees of large hotels in the nation's second-largest city. The L.A. proposal is one of several municipal moves toward raising wages well above the 5-year-old federal rate of $7.25; at $15.37, it would set a local hotel industry wage floor far beyond the $10.10 proposed by congressional Democrats.

The Jackson mayor had ambitious plans to bring "people power" and a "solidarity economy" to his city and state.

"This press conference is about waking up America to the fact more tarsands coming into this country, and right away with the Keystone pipeline you have 45 per cent [more oil], is a danger to the health of our people," Boxer warned while sharing stories about residents who suffered ill health after nearby oil spills.

The Northwestern University football team’s struggle to form a union raises the question of what it means to be a worker.

By any measure, Nugent's statement about Obama as a "subhuman mongrel" comes directly from what Jefferson had written about black people in America in his book, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785).

Svoboda’s success over the past few years and the presence of neo-fascist groups such as Pravy Sektor in Independence Square are signs of a crisis in Ukrainian society.

An interview: In his new book, Haiti: Dilemas e Fracassos Internacionais (“International Crossroads and Failures in Haiti,” ), Seitenfus takes a long view of the electoral crisis that he witnessed in 2010. In his account, Haiti’s tragedy began over two centuries ago in 1804, when the country committed what Seitenfus terms its “original sin,” an unpardonable act of lèse-majesté: it became the first (and only) independent nation to emerge from a slave rebellion.

While the union blamed right-wing politicians and ‘outsiders,’ it is clear, as Sam Gindin emphasizes in this Bullet, that the reasons for the defeat, and its implications are much more complex and require a broader rethinking of union strategies and politics. Though levels of unionization in Canada have not hit the lows of the U.S., the need for a profound rethinking applies as well to the Canadian trade union movement.

Progressive analysts note that proposed cuts to boots on the ground-style forces will not weaken US's global hegemony.

For nine days early this month, eight of the LAPD’s highest ranking officers toured Israel on a trip organized by LAPD Deputy Chief and commander of the Counter-Terrorism and Special Operations Bureau, Michael Downing, and headed by LAPD Information Technology Bureau commander Horace Frank. It’s likely that the grant that paid for the LAPD’s Israel trip came from DHS.