Portside

In death Margaret Thatcher has caused further division. The left has failed to convince enough people of the alternatives

Arguments against Michigan's 5-day-old right-to-work law are prompting conservative activists and Republican authors of the historic legislation to consider other ways to reduce the power of public-sector unions.

First, a terrible jobs report, then a Democratic President offers a budget that proposes cuts to Social Security and Medicare. What they actually heard was Austerity 2013 - U.S. style. President Obama's offering up a cut in Social Security (make no mistake, that's what it is) contravenes promises he has previously made about not undermining the program and a recent flat out pledge by Vice-President Joe Biden that it would not happen.

The use of threats and isolation against Iran and North Korea is a bizarre, perilous way to conduct foreign relations

More Sandys are surely headed our way, more climate-driven disasters of all sorts...They will be no more "natural" than the Chicago fire, the Johnstown flood or the San Francisco earthquake. We need to deal with now is the power of the finance, insurance and real estate sector whose leading corporations now effectively run our economy. Without doing that, the "nature" these interests have helped create will punish us all while providing a ghoulish boondoggle for a few.

Readers comments: CPI, Grand Bargain, Social Security Cuts; Labor Party Time?; Whither the Socialist Left; Plan B; Thatcher - Reality & Myth; Incredibly Angry Songs About Iron Lady; Forgotten Radical History of March on Washington; Medi-Cal interpreters; How Maggots Heal; Announcements - Two events with Angela Davis - Berkeley - Apr 17; Los Angeles - Apr 19; May Day 2013 - New York; The Labor Film Database In Memoriam: Harry Kelber; Philip Bonosky (memorial Apr 21)

NLRB passed by Congress and later amended by Congress - weakened by the courts - judges who are not elected. The answer is that the strong protections in the law Congress passed have been weakened by "judicial amendments" - that is, by court decisions that weaken or even eliminate worker rights and protections created by Congress.

One in thirteen workers in the Lone Star State - nearly one million - are employed in the booming construction industry. But large numbers of these workers are undocumented and unorganized, and employers are taking advantage.