Portside

SEIU, the Teamsters, AFT, CWA, UFCW, UNITE HERE, ATU and the UFW joined dozens of other labor and community organizations today in a national Strike for Black Lives. Meanwhile, unions are pushing the fight for racial justice beyond resolutions.

If the work of abolition is not only about stopping prisons, but also about imagining a future in which we win, then people cannot be released from prisons only to be put on the streets or to premature disability at the poultry factory.

Do we want to provide care for the most vulnerable members of our society, or do we want this to just be a business where real estate owners are making money, and we don’t really care...

This is not the first time that an uprising against anti-Black racism has opened the door to significant change. There’s the little known rebellion of Black Air Force personnel at Travis Air Force Base in California in May 1971.

As calls to defund police grow, peacemakers on the frontlines of Chicago’s gun violence epidemic have dramatically reduced homicides and shootings.

Sharp reductions in spending on police, prisons, and the Pentagon could free up hundreds of billions of dollars for programs that might begin to fill the gap in spending on public investments in communities of color and elsewhere.

The results were overwhelming. With 100 of the 103 precincts where the issue was on the ballot reporting, 87 percent of voters were backing the $15-an-hour wage. Just 13 percent voted against the advisory referendum. That huge level of support will strengthen the hand of activists who are encouraging the city council to consider a major wage hike.

This new Cold War is not about communism taking over the world. It is more about returning to 19th century balance of power interests, borrowing the phrase John Kerry has used against Putin. It is about dividing up the spoils of the first Cold War among the triumphal capitalist democracies, as if Russia is defeated and short-lived. Pushing Western capitalism and NATO towards Russia was sure to touch off the current escalation, and worse may come.

The banning of Students for Justice in Palestine at Northeastern University, replicates sanctions being imposed against numerous student Palestinian rights groups across the country. Israel's heavy-handed reaction to these campus organizations is symptomatic of its increasing isolation and concern about waning American support and have alienated traditional supporters of Israel, including many young American Jews.

Republicans can continue their desperate move to convince Americans that being anti-choice is actually pro-woman. But we are not stupid, and they are not fooling anyone. The more anti-choice politicians, pundits and activists underestimate women by continuing with their rhetorical sleight-of-hand, the more they reveal themselves. The anti-choice movement cannot erase us from our own lives by insisting that abortion isn't necessary.