Portside

Henry Cuellar, the conservative, antiabortion Democratic congressman — who Nancy Pelosi called a “fighter for hardworking families” — has shocked the labor movement with a radical bill seeking to eviscerate workers’ rights.

A socialist economy, being run by the majority in the interests of all, simply would not allow our planet to be trashed so that a few of us could live better than the rest.

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death” – Martin Luther King.

Four dissidents were barbarically executed, yet the international community, including the United States, continues a business-as-usual policy, maintaining diplomatic ties, allowing oil and other industries to continue in partnership with the regime.

Deadly COVID outbreaks in California’s prisons fed off decades of neglect—and spurred a wave of organizing that activists hope will further the push for decarceration.

Human capital theory cannot solve our economic woes. It’s time to tell the truth of how we got here and how we can move forward. Replacing human capital theory with a socialist theory of education and collective intelligence would be a good start.

A large strike in Colombia underscores the dangers of free trade agreements and suggests that we should pay close attention to current negotiations around the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Scarcely touched by the nation’s housing recovery and tired of waiting for federal help, Richmond is about to become the first city in the nation to try eminent domain as a way to stop foreclosures.

Governments in Washington, London and Paris should realise that in one respect the slaughter by chemical weapons of hundreds of people in Damascus on 21 August is an opportunity as well as a crime. It is an opportunity because the chemical weapons atrocity and the crisis it has provoked show that the Syrian civil war cannot be left to fester. The use of poison gas is the grossest sign, but not the only one, that the level of violence is spiralling out of control.

Twenty-five years ago it was already evident that damage to the global environment threatened the basic conditions on which life depends and posed a clear and present danger that required a global response. Why, I asked, aren’t governments and politicians racing to meet this looming threat? Why, we might ask today, are we still unable to “get our act together” and make the necessary changes in time?