Foreign Domestic Workers Found Historic Union in Lebanon

Eva Shoufi Al-Akhbar English
Despite serious threats to their safety, more than 200 female migrant domestic laborers in Lebanon gathered January 25th to form the first trade union in the Arab world for domestic workers. Lebanese laws deny foreign workers the right to form their own unions, so the new union is aimed at all domestic workers irrespective of nationality. According to the United Nations, the Arab World is home to some 30 million migrant workers.

Dying Communities

Rudy Acuna LA Progressive
California State University Northridge Professor Rudy Acuna relates current campus privatization plans to past and on-going struggles to build and learn from "community" with a challenge to all who resist capital and work for alternatives to institutionalized racism, genocide, Manifest Destiny, urban renewal and privatization.

Friday Nite Videos -- January 30, 2015

Portside
Runaway CEO Pay in 30 Seconds. Jimmy Greene -- Where Is the Love? Delta Flight Attendants: Vote Union. Baba Brinkman – So Infectious. Vindicating Freedom Fighters.

Jimmy Greene -- Where Is the Love?

From saxophonist Jimmy Greene’s new release, Beautiful Life, a celebration of the life of his 6-year-old daughter, Ana Márquez-Greene, whose life was tragically taken, along with 19 other children and 6 educators, on December 14, 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Delta Flight Attendants: Vote Union

For many of the 1,800 Delta flight attendants based at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, the upcoming vote to form a union is about more than wages, benefits and work rules. It’s about getting back what they lost after Delta’s merger with MSP-based Northwest Airlines four years ago.

Baba Brinkman – So Infectious

Ebola. Measles. Bird flu. Get the straight dope from this "rap guide to infection" from the creator of the Off-Broadway hit show "The Rap Guide to Evolution."

Vindicating Freedom Fighters

The Friendship 9 were beaten, prosecuted and convicted for sitting-in against segregation in South Carolina in 1961. This week Ernest Finney, the attorney that represented them in 1961, and South Carolina prosecutor Kevin Brackett asked the court to clear their names.

Israelpolitik, the Neocons and the Long Shadow of the Iraq War

Danny Postel Pulse
A Review of Muhammad Idrees Ahmad’s book ‘The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War.’ The central question Ahmad attempts to answer is: Why did the 2003 Iraq War happen? In one of the book’s most valuable sections, felicitously titled ‘Black Gold and Red Herrings’, he goes through several prevalent explanations/theories and takes them apart one by one.