Portside

Recently Richmond CA a majority "minority" city has been in the news with an innovative plan to take on the banks and fight blight and the banks have declared war on the city. Richmond is also the community that has taken on Chevron, and the soda industry, has passed "Ban the Box" and municipal IDs. This article describes the organizing that was critical to making all of this possible.

"Today there is literature coming out of Syria that we could have never even dreamed of just a few years ago," Atrash says.Rather than relying on metaphors and allegorical images, these new poems rely on literal, visceral descriptions, with a newfound emphasis on a united Syrian identity instead of religious symbols.

“It’s a real live class war we find ourselves in as we meet here,” LA County Federation of Labor Executive Secretary-Treasurer Maria Elena Durazo told delegates from the fifty-seven unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO. Noting the corporations and Koch brothers arrayed against organized labor, Durazo paraphrased boxer Mike Tyson: “Everybody’s got a plan until I hit ‘em in the face.”

In a more promising departure from past practice, the AFL-CIO has allocated time for daily convention “action sessions”—numbering about fifty in all. This smorgasbord of panel discussions tilts heavily toward political topics and seems designed to give the proceedings the trendy buzz of a Netroots Nation conference. Many of these workshops showcase the federation’s new or old ties with community-based labor support groups, immigrant workers centers, among others.

How’s your 401(k) doing? Working Americans ask themselves this question — and angst about the answer — a great deal these days. Any why not? For most Americans, retirement reality has turned chillingly stark: Either you have a robust set of investments in your 401(k) or you’re facing a rocky retirement.

Teachers have paralyzed Mexico City in protest of President Nieto's sweeping reform bill, but do they have popular support or political leaders on their side?

The Chilean Song Movement had become so identified with Popular Unity, it had been such a strong factor, emotional, cohesive, inspiring, that the military authorities found it necessary to declare `subversive' even the indigenous instruments, whose beautiful sound had become so full of meaning and inspiration. Together with prohibiting even the mention of Victor's name, they banned all his music and the music of all the artists of the New Chilean Song Movement.