Portside

'If you thought you had a fight a month ago, you ain't seen nothing yet,' say protest leaders as 151 arrested

While so far protests remain isolated, poor conditions across Cambodia, and poorer Asian states for that matter, could result in more widespread demonstrations. Bangladesh may be garnering most of the headlines due to recent tragedies, but conditions across poorer Asian states remain equally dire. Still, governments are hesitant to step in out of fear that manufacturers will relocate elsewhere, taking jobs and tax revenues with them.

We all want to believe a recovery is here, but indicators are that it's not. We're getting swindled again by banks and politicians.

A former shipfitter at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy and a longtime labor union activist, Mr. Richardson cofounded Military Families Speak Out, an organization that mushroomed to include more than 4,000 families, along with chapters in 18 states. Mr. Richardson, who directed the Labor Extension Program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and trained union leaders around the world, died May 4 in his Jamaica Plain home. He was 60.

It's the nature of the shallow, consumer-driven, dream-drunken culture our society tries to impose on us that we popularly adopt terms without knowing what they mean and, more often than not, they don't mean much of anything. Such is the case with "the Cloud".

This was the third night of demonstrations. The main meme - as with the flags - is "we are sons of Ataturk". That is, we are a secular republic and we are worried about the autocratic use of power by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, combined with a creeping Islamisation. However, there is another view: "We're all here," one masked woman told me. "Communists, anarchists, democrats. It's not an Ataturkist movement."

Official Washington still glorifies George W. Bush’s “successful surge” in Iraq while ignoring the wanton slaughter inflicted on Iraqis. So, there remains a high-level desire to harshly punish Pvt. Bradley Manning for exposing the horrific truth about that and other war crimes.

My old friend Ray Smithhart would have loved the irony of union-fighting manufacturer Nissan making a gift of $100,000 to the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute. Known in his later years as the “dean of Mississippi’s labor organizers,” Smithhart worked closely with civil rights martyr Medgar Evers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, forging a link between the labor and civil rights movements that Martin Luther King Jr. himself saw as key to the future of both.