Portside

The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed after the attacks of 11 September 2001, and provides the legal cornerstone for the so-called US "war on terror". It allows the US government to wage war at anytime, any place and on anyone deemed a threat to national security – with remarkably little evidence needed.

Following a five-day organizing training and strategy summit in Birmingham, members of the labor group OUR Walmart, a non-union organization backed by the United Food & Commercial Workers union, will announce a plan to send civil rights movement–style caravans of workers from around country to converge at the retail giant’s June 7 annual shareholder meeting.

Guantánamo is not an anomaly. Prisoners — who are on U.S. soil and not an inaccessible island military base — are routinely and systematically force-fed every day.

For 40 years, many economists' have promoted increasing cost sharing through higher copayments and deductibles, the replacement of fee-for-service payment systems with capitation as in Health Maintenance Organizations, and competition where multiple insurers offer a variety of plans catered to individual consumer's interests and in competition with each other. These practices have produced the worst of all worlds, rising costs along with restrictions on access.

Austerity and corruption – and disgust at the style of the presidency – have created profound disillusionment on the left

This article is based upon an interrogation of two books: Gregg Shotwell, Autoworkers Under the Gun: A Shop-Floor View of the End of the American Dream; and Jane McAlevey with Bob Ostertag, Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting For the Labor Movement. Each book focuses on an iconic labor union (UAW and SEIU). What they report gives us reason for both deep concern and hope concerning the future of organized labor.

Fueled by a race-baiting, national marketing campaign and the missionary-like evangelism of its affiliates, Care Net has turned the complex reality behind black abortion rates into a single, fictional story: poor black women who have abortions are the unwitting victims of feminists and morally deficient reproductive healthcare providers, embodied in sadists such as Gosnell. Crisis pregnancy centers, in this fable, are the best place those women can go to be saved.

Los Angeles Walmart worker Tsehai Almaz told The Nation that after visiting the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and meeting with local clergy, she and other OUR Walmart leaders were inspired to follow the example of the 1961 freedom riders. “I feel like we’re facing many of the same issues,” said Almaz, “even though it’s not necessarily about race—this time it’s about respect. And being able to feed our families, and having good working conditions.”