Portside

Walking with eyes wide open into the ranks of labor is a necessity. An informed approach is critical. Learning about the history, the limitations and the possibilities of a revitalized labor—or labour—movement becomes part of the tool kit for workers crafting novel approaches to challenge their working conditions. Knowledge is a form of power.

Mexican labor unions and workers are, overall, in the worst situation in decades. President Peña Nieto has succeeded in passing a series of so-called reforms - education, labor, energy, and communications - that will have devastating effects on an already weakened labor movement. The Mexican government has controlled unions since the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, but it was in the 1930s that the system of one-party state control over the unions was fully developed.

Sanders faces a problem that often confronts progressive mavericks who strike a chord with the Democratic electorate, but who routinely fail to ring a bell with voters of color. They have often been blinded by cultural assumptions that devalue the sensibilities of the black community. But in 21st-century America, race is fundamental. Sanders has readjusted his policy platform and stump speeches, addressing racism and the criminalization of the black community.

Postwar U.S. authorities helped rehabilitate erstwhile collaborators with the Japanese occupation in the name of fighting communism. Generations later, it’s led to the grandson of a despised Philippine collaborator endorsing the re-militarization of his country’s former occupiers — by the grandson of a war criminal, no less.

The Suppliant Maidens by Aeschylus (ca. 460 BC) is an ancient tale about refugees, sanctuary, and moral duty. Charles McNulty argues that the play provides a precedent for helping us think about today's European refugee crisis. "It provides historical depth" to today's refugee crisis, he says, "framing the basic dramatic situation of its asylum seekers in moral, democratic and religious terms."

The challenge for the Left, at this point, is to provide a space for those who have been newly politicized by the Sanders campaign to continue their work for the progressive positions he advances, rather than accepting the role of being mobilized (as “sheep”) only to support a supposedly lesser-evil DP candidate.

With the spotlight directly on the shortcomings of his government, Stephen Harper tries to capitalize on normal fears about the future and turn them into fear of voting NDP. This means identifying Muslims as a threat to Canada and talking about "old stock" Canadians, to create divisions within the electorate that Conservatives can exploit.

Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the British Labour Party on September 12. He gave his first major speech three days later, September 15, to delegate attending the UK's Trade Union Congress, annual gathering three days later on 15 September. He rejected a style of top down leadership, in favor of one that enables everybody, every union branch, every party branch and every union, so we organically develop their strengths, ideas, and imagination.

The enduring thrust of the Grapes of Wrath is the call to “be there,” to supply the missing response to the “imminent social change.” We see one answer today in the groundswell of support by ordinary people across Europe for welcoming and hosting the migrants, while their governments discuss quotas and border enforcement. But Steinbeck’s novel provokes other responses: a grasp of the meaning of home and homeland — and the trauma of being uprooted from them.

Obama's trade policy is in tatters. The grand design, created by Obama's old friend and former Wall Street deal-maker, trade chief Mike Froman, comes in two parts -- a grand bargain with Pacific nations aimed at building a U.S.-led trading bloc to contain the influence of China, and an Atlantic agreement to cement economic relations with the European Union. Both are on the verge of collapse from their own contradictory goals and incoherent logic.