Portside

Ultimately, Alderman Muñoz tells In These Times, the CPC hopes to do just that by using initiatives like a $15 minimum wage to bridge the sharp economic divides that plague Chicago and the country as a whole.

The organizers of Freedom Summer did not just have a one-year plan. The summer of 1964 was always meant to be the beginnings of a multi-faceted, multi-year campaign. Any modern movement to build a more inclusive Black Belt needs to be seen as a generational battle.

Our society’s tendency to idealize local food allows small farmers to pay workers substandard wages, house them in shoddy labor camps, and quash their ability to unionize to demand better working conditions.

Imagine how much stronger the U.S. antiwar movement would be today if its major formations joined together to issue a Call for united demonstrations on both coasts to demand an end to U.S. intervention in Iraq.

Enforcement is not the solution to the latest version of the United States’ immigration issue. To stem immigration, if that’s indeed what is desired, the United States needs to make Central America habitable again, especially since the U.S. government has been the major instigator in the region for at least the past century.

In this moment of reactionary politics, I am reminded of words from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the moral imperatives that anchor public policy: “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

Unfortunately for the governor, waging a competitive re-election fight against Democrat Mary Burke, the data on job growth in Wisconsin keep providing his opponents with political ammunition.

Organised labour, grassroots social movements and progressive NGOs, the workers on the shop floor, the informal workers in our streets, farms and villages, the youth, women and intelligentsia are the best hope of a world that is built on justice, human dignity, social solidarity and inclusive growth.