Portside

Fifty-some years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, we are still waiting for the end--not necessary of the world, but the US embargo. Poet Peter Neil Carroll recalls an October day when Paul Simon, relatively unknown, sang for a class of nervous students at Queens College and how a young Cuban today looks back at that moment.

Thanks to grassroots organizing, the CLC, for the first time, took a clear position of solidarity with a Palestinian-led human rights campaign. The convention also showed progress on Indigenous rights, racism, queer or trans rights, mental health, and environmental justice. The potential of that progress, however, is limited by a "business-as-usual" approach by too many union leaders. What matters now is how union members act on the progress made.

Returning to two of socialist Jack London's classics, The Iron Heel and The People of the Abyss--both available free at Project Gutenberg--the reviewer finds stark similarities between the deprivation of the early 20th century and the modern world of neoliberal capitalism, with its gig economy and the emergence of a precariat, valorizing London's injunction that class supremacy can rest only on class degradation.

After a robust union campaign the Fairfax Connector went from a unit at risk of decertifying to a strong union shop.

This book is an updated telling of the history of the federal government's role in creating our nation's racially segregated neighborhoods and all-white suburbs.

“Taking away local control over wages (and a range of other pro-worker, pro-environment, and pro-civil rights policies) has become a major priority of ALEC, a corporate-backed group with extensive lobbying resources and influence in our state legislatures,” according to an National Employment Law Project statement. “ALEC drafts “model” minimum wage preemption bills for conservative legislatures to simply copy and paste.”

A new proclamation by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture partially rolls back the stronger school nutrition standards in place since 2012, allowing states to grant exemptions for serving whole-grain rich products, and delaying any of the upcoming requirements to lower sodium levels until after 2020.

To create pressure on the district, a group of teachers organized their own protest. The 11,000-member Philadelphia Federation of Teachers didn’t authorize the action. Instead it was a rank-and-file group that got the employer's attention.

Organized labor is being strangled by laws that block workers from exercising the rights to organize, to strike, and to act in solidarity. Unions should respond by building a rights movement, placing the struggle for those rights front and center in all movement activity, including organizing, protest, civil disobedience, political action, administrative advocacy, and litigation.

Watching “I Love Dick” is like attending an exhibition for which the artist has supplied her own curator’s notes. It’s an experience as much as a story: arresting, disorienting and provocative. It’s also very conscious of explaining to you how and why it arrests, disorients and provokes.