Portside

Rep. Scott Allen Statement on the closing of GE Waukesha. Disappointment was my first reaction of the news about GE shutting down its engine manufacturing functions at the Waukesha Power and Water facility. In a press release, and substantiated by my conversation with GE corporate spokesperson, Patrick Theisen, this afternoon, GE wishes to blame the problem on the House of Representatives and that body's failure to act on the U.S. Export Import Bank.

Join us at the largest-ever national conference of single-payer advocates, including hundreds of union activists and leaders!

Letelier described reading the declassified documents and discovering a memo from George Shultz, who served as secretary of state in the 1980s, to President Ronald Reagan. “[Shultz] informs [the president] that there is a conclusive document from the CIA that shows Pinochet ordered the murder of my father. This is concrete information about how Pinochet covered up his responsibility,” he said.

The House Freedom Caucus, a relatively new group of about 40 Republicans loosely associated with the Tea Party, has an extraordinary amount of power in this process. Any potential speaker needs the support of 218 Republicans on the floor of the House. There are currently 247 Republicans in the House. That’s a large majority but without the Freedom Caucus, no candidate can get to 218.

Now with Gov. Malloy proposing anti-union, anti-faculty contract language and pushing the need for public employee concessions as a way to balance the budget – a budget Malloy promised would not need new taxes, cuts or concessions – Connecticut’s public employees are getting a taste of what they feared most.

What is happening in Israel today and what happened last week, last month, and for the past almost 50 years is about cementing sovereignty over land the international community agrees does not belong to Israel and over a subject people, the Palestinians, in contravention of international law. Yet, in Israel there is much talk about whether this is the start of the third intifada, but little talk of ending the occupation, the root cause of the escalating conflict.

Israel's attack on Syria shows how volatile this conflict is. A political solution is now urgent.

In light of the report that the economy contracted in the last quarter of 2012 due partly to cutbacks, Ezra Klein notes that one man's big government socialism is another man's premature and destructive fiscal retrenchment.

Most Greeks want an end to austerity; they also want real reform. The worst outcome for Greece would be the further rollback of workers' rights and the social safety net without a purge of the corrupt elites and their clients in the media, in business and in the unions-a nightmare of exploitation policed by the lads from Golden Dawn. Greece,

Mairead Corrigan Maguire, 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland, calls for support for Julian Assange. His only crime is that he embarrassed the U.S. and other powerful governments with WikiLeaks' release of documents in which the U.S. military appear to have deliberately killed civilians.