Portside

The manufacturing industry has been hit hard since China's acceptance in the World Trade Organization. The industry includes imports of computer and electronic parts and accounted for 56 percent of the $240.1 billion increase in the US trade deficit with China. An estimated 1,249,100 jobs were eliminated in the electronic industry.

Of course it’s the same struggle: “It’s the same people,” says Saru Jayaraman, the director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. “Young people working in fast food are the same people as those who are the victims of police brutality. So the Walmart folks are talking about #blacklivesmatter and the #blacklivesmatter folks are talking about taking on capital.”

A review of The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, by Betty Medsger (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) by Lawrence S. Wittner. The Burglary tells the story of how, on March 8, 1971, in the midst of the Vietnam War, eight peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in an effort to discover whether the FBI was working, illegally, to suppress American dissent.

Agustin Morales was fired from his job as a Massachusetts public school teacher after being elected president of his union and after he participated in collective protest against an element of education reform. Here is the story of how community groups, parents and other teacher union activists came together to support him and help him win his job back.

Agustin Morales was fired from his job as a Massachusetts public school teacher after being elected president of his union and after he participated in collective protest against an element of education reform. Here is the story of how community groups, parents and other teacher union activists came together to support him and help him win his job back.

It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

Politicians are getting fat off the destruction of the lives of young black men and women, who are the overwhelming victims of American policing and unjust practices of the judicial system. "Broken windows" policing has criminalized entire communities, leading to thousands of frivolous arrests that ruin people’s lives.

The successes of the civil rights movement were hardly based on simply revealing the racism of the United States. The Black Panthers and civil rights movements were about creating alternative bases of power, e.g. structures be they in law, mass mobilizations or community organizations that went beyond venting a narrative.

“This is a history making moment,” Eric Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, tells protestors. “It’s just so overwhelming to see all who have come to stand with us. Look at the masses ­ black, white, all races, all religions … we need to stand like this at all times."

The shift of capital from housing, jobs, education, to profitable arenas has meant there are huge numbers of people everywhere in the world who are not able to sustain themselves. They are made surplus, and as a result they are often forced to engage in practices that are deemed criminal. And so prisons pop up all over the world, often with the assistance of private corporations who profit from these surplus populations.