Portside

Bertolt Brecht on whistle-blowers, those who oppose their own governments immoral activities; Reader Comments on NSA Spying; Civil Liberties Suit; Edward Snowden; Angela Davis; Undercounting the Poor; Syria; The Rosenberg Case ; Paleo Diet; Announcements - Meeropol, granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; Manifesto and Petition in Support of the Monument to the International Brigades in Madrid - Help by signing.

Gar Alperovitz and Staughton Lynd have blueprints for an `America beyond capitalism.' Both imagine a new America that would evolve through painstaking process in which the virtues of democratic socialism would be prefigured. They offer a component of the answer to what a new New Left must do. Democracy and egalitarianism animates both visions, but neither fully imagines how the Left might gain and use state power or how to change the national or global economic rules.

When 10 Nobel Laureates call on President Obama to reject once and for all the Keystone XL oil pipeline, perhaps it's time he do that.

UAW President Bob King, seeking to extend the union's base into auto plants across the South, has endorsed a German-style labor structure for a range of U.S. factories -- not just ones owned by German automakers such as Volkswagen AG but also Detroit Big 3 plants with existing UAW contracts and nonunion assembly plants in the South.

Student support workers at Evergreen State College win strike. They are members of The Washington Federation of State Employees/AFSCME. After 17 months of negotiations followed by mediation they went on strike May 28. Their new contract goes into effect July1. This is a rare example of an effective strike in recent years.

After more than a decade of sitting out the fiercest race in town, leaders of the United Federation of Teachers are plotting a comeback.

The AFL-CIO supports these Turkish labor federations’ call for immediate end to the brutal police crackdown in Turkey. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka sent a letter to Prime Minister Erdogan supporting the demands of the unions.

At present the polls wobble between six and nine percent for The Left. Yet if ardent speeches like those three, with no punches pulled, can be followed by an equally vigorous election campaign, that two digit goal, though by no means easy, may not be unattainable.