Portside

After the last presidential ballot - which Chávez won with the same percentage he did his first election yet with a greatly expanded electorate - even his opponents have admitted, despairingly, that a majority of Venezuelans liked, if not adored, the man.

The AFL-CIO held a closed-door executive council meeting last week. The mood at the meeting, one AFL-CIO top staffer said, was that the future of the labor movement was at risk if they continued "business as usual."

Both Trumka and Communications Workers (CWA) President Larry Cohen, who heads the federation’s organizing committee, said on Tuesday that the goal was not just gaining new members or better contracts, important as they may be. Rather, Cohen said, labor would try to “connect the dots” among causes—such as immigrant rights, worker rights, campaign and voting reform—to build a mass movement for a strong democracy at work and in the public arena.

With the Dow Jones industrial average flirting with a record high, the split between American workers and the companies that employ them is widening and could worsen in the next few months as federal budget cuts take hold.

After years of brutal austerity, collapsing economies, widespread unemployment and shredding of the social welfare net, Italians said "basta!" "Enough!"

Manning will surely pay with many years—perhaps his entire life—in prison. But we too will pay. The war against Bradley Manning is a war against us all.

Will the next pope embrace liberation theology? The conventional answer would be: fat chance. However, without going too far out on a limb, one could also answer in the affirmative. In their own ways, both responses will likely be correct.