Portside

POOR John Kerry. This week he emitted a sound that was more expressive than pages of diplomatic babble. In his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations committee he explained how the actions of the Israeli government had torpedoed the "peace process". They broke their obligation to release Palestinian prisoners, and at the same time announced the enlargement of more settlements in East Jerusalem. The peace efforts went "poof".

In a narrow vote this week, the Senate politely smothered the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have protected workers’ rights to compare and discuss their wages at work. Aimed at dismantling workplace “pay secrecy” policies, the legislation built on the 2009 Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which strengthens safeguards for women and other protected groups against wage discrimination.

In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the 'red line' he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons.

“Paul Robeson: A Watched Man” A book by Jordan Goodman. “Paul Robeson,” historian Joseph Dorinson ruefully wrote in the 2002 introduction to his co-edited collection of essays about him, “is the greatest legend nobody knows.”

The current issue of the "International Journal of Labour Research," which is published by the ILO, is concerned with the relationship of unions and worker cooperatives. It is titled, "Trade Unions and Worker Cooperatives: Where are We at?" Rob Witherell, of the United Steel Workers Union has an article in this issue, " An Emerging Solidarity: Worker Cooperatives, Unions, and the New Union Cooperative Model in the United States".

Republicans voted against his approval as part of a broader anti-civil rights agenda, but the 7 Democrats who joined them ought to be mortified by their own cowardice.

Edna Pardo tireless campaigner on the inequities in Chicago schools, and for fairness in Illinois school finance and the Illinois tax system, and longtime leader of the League of Women Voters of Chicago

“The public health sector has been absent from this debate,” said Nadia Steinzor, a researcher on the Oil and Gas Accountability Project at the environmental nonprofit, Earthworks. The science is far from settled. However, waiting for additional science to clarify those uncertainties before adopting more serious safeguards is misguided and dangerous. As a result, a number of researchers and local activists have been pushing for more aggressive oversight immediately.

Angela Davis on Prison Abolition, the War on Drugs, Why Social Movements Shouldn’t Wait on Obama, Solitary Confinement, Immigration Detention and "12 Years a Slave"

As national Democrats prepare to run against the GOP on income equality issues, a giant union has issued a scathing Obamacare document that could undermine that case. "The Irony of ObamaCare: Making Inequality Worse" is the title of the UNITE HERE document that is soon to be making its way to Capitol Hill.