Portside

Nobody in their right mind wants more violent protests. But, as Martin Luther King said, ‘a riot is the language of the unheard’.

The recent surge in interest in inversion transactions is explained primarily by U.S. based multinational firms’ increasingly desperate efforts to find a use for their stockpiles of offshore cash (now totaling around $1 trillion).

The revealing story of Chicago undercover officers Mo and Gloves

The South is the fastest-growing region of the country but the data shows that the scope and sources of population growth vary considerably across the South with significant consequences for future elections.

Protest rallies in Oakland, California and Tel Aviv highlight sharpening demands for an end to Israeli military action against Gaza and for a Palestinian homeland.

“There’s a real rank-and-file rebellion going on right now,” says Jen Wallis, a Seattle switchman-conductor for Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) Railway. “People who’ve never been involved in the union, never went to a union meeting, they are showing up and they’re joining Railroad Workers United in droves.

In analyzing Israel's current military campaign in Gaza, a leading Jewish activist says "the underlying problem is the denial for freedom and basic human rights to millions of people, for decades." The heart of the problem is not Hamas or who the Palestinian leadership is, it is the Israeli occupation, beginning with the expulsion of the Palestinians from their land in 1948 (what the Palestinians term the Nakba or "catastrophe").

Media portrayals of the mass protests in response to the killing of 18 year-old Michael Brown obscure the serious human rights issue of police violence against African-Americans. Many press reports characterized the protests as a "mob reaction," instead of a "justifiable outpouring of community anger and grief." The media is "doing incalculable damage" by not placing the outpouring of community outrage in Ferguson and beyond in its "political and historical context."

The immigrant workers who helped rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina are the targets of systematic civil rights violations. The federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has launched a series of race-based immigration raids wherever Latinos in New Orleans gather. And those immigrant workers who are organizing to stop what they charge are "unconstitutional, race-based, stop-and-frisk style raids" are being targeted for deportation.

Market Basket workers don’t have a union. But they achieved in three weeks what few unions have accomplished in recent years: They stood up to their multibillion-dollar employer, won local and national sympathy for their struggle, and stayed united. Boston Globe 8/12/14