Portside

A major agricultural labor action is entering its second week in Mexico, where such walkouts are rare. But workers report that they gained experience in the US - via the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, or with the UFW on the west coast - and those lessons helped inspire workers to organize and fight for their rights in Mexico.

While hysteria and panic reign over the barbaric acts of the faraway Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, U.S. involvement in the “war on drugs” in a neighboring country gets just passing attention here. Curiouser and curiouser, hysteria and panic over Mexico only seem to rise when ISIS is reputed to be involved (at least in the fantasy worlds of various right-wingers). Consider it all part of the true mysteries of our strange American age of repetitive war.

If Billie Holiday and Ethel Rosenberg were alive, they’d both celebrate their 100th birthdays this year. At first glance they may seem an unlikely couple, but a closer look reveals surprising parallels.

The Ukraine conflict has become a complex proxy war involving four of the world’s five original nuclear armed countries: the United States, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom. It’s time to step back from the brink.

Our own progress against racism in the United States remains too recent, too fragile, and too incomplete to go on abetting apartheid in Israel.

Cuba to be certified by WHO as first country to eradicate the transmission of HIV and syphilis from mother to child.

A U.S. Appeals Court has ruled FedEx’s employees in California, Oregon, and other states with similar employee-protection laws, are FedEx’s employees, "employees as a matter of law.” The Court ruling is similar to the recent National Labor Relations Board ruling against McDonald's for similar practices, designed to circumvent labor standards by pretending their employees are independent "contractors" or employees of "franchises" or labor "contracting companies."