Portside

In a more promising departure from past practice, the AFL-CIO has allocated time for daily convention “action sessions”—numbering about fifty in all. This smorgasbord of panel discussions tilts heavily toward political topics and seems designed to give the proceedings the trendy buzz of a Netroots Nation conference. Many of these workshops showcase the federation’s new or old ties with community-based labor support groups, immigrant workers centers, among others.

“It’s a real live class war we find ourselves in as we meet here,” LA County Federation of Labor Executive Secretary-Treasurer Maria Elena Durazo told delegates from the fifty-seven unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO. Noting the corporations and Koch brothers arrayed against organized labor, Durazo paraphrased boxer Mike Tyson: “Everybody’s got a plan until I hit ‘em in the face.”

"Today there is literature coming out of Syria that we could have never even dreamed of just a few years ago," Atrash says.Rather than relying on metaphors and allegorical images, these new poems rely on literal, visceral descriptions, with a newfound emphasis on a united Syrian identity instead of religious symbols.

Researchers find genome-wide evidence of convergent evolution between bats and dolphins.

We let companies close factories here, move the equipment to China, bring the same goods back to sell in the same stores, and call that “trade.” But we don’t just “let” companies do this, we give big tax breaks that practically force companies to do this.

Go looking for enemies in the world, you are likely to find some. How did this happen? Officials still talk about “national defense” as though Americans only want to protect their homeland—to be left alone in Fortress America. But that hasn’t been US strategy for more than sixty years.

In this latest battle over appointments to the NLRB, class divisions emerged starkly. “There’s an open conspiracy among corporate law firms, federal judges—many of whom used to be in the same firms—the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Republican Party—particularly its senators,” says Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America. This [NLRB debate ultimately] is a question of which side are you on?

The Chilean Song Movement had become so identified with Popular Unity, it had been such a strong factor, emotional, cohesive, inspiring, that the military authorities found it necessary to declare `subversive' even the indigenous instruments, whose beautiful sound had become so full of meaning and inspiration. Together with prohibiting even the mention of Victor's name, they banned all his music and the music of all the artists of the New Chilean Song Movement.

The parallel with Iraq is crystal clear.

We can change the South and by doing so, we can change the nation.