Portside

Nearly a year after its victory on Staten Island, the Amazon Labor Union is grappling with election losses and internal conflict.

Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them

Bon Jovi’s hit “Livin’ on a Prayer” is an anthem about working class survival. But it also contains a deeper message about class struggle.

Working people never stopped fighting as neoliberalism was imposed. Bouts of resistance kept resurfacing, but remained localized and politically narrow. In the absence of structures that could give workers confidence in collective struggles, workers were left with survival tactics that came at great cost and unintentionally reproduced neoliberalism’s individualist ethos.

What is going to stop ex-President Trump from returning to the White House is voters refusing to vote for him. Indictments and prosecutions can play a role in that inasmuch as they are the society communicating to itself what is okay and what is not. They can play a role in shaping public opinion but they are no replacement for an election.

When we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Gideon ruling this year — recognizing the right to counsel conferred by Gideon’s persistence and Justice Hugo Black’s resolve — we are erasing a far longer and richer legacy: the history of the women who invented the idea of the public defender.

In the recent weeks leading up to Pope Francis’ July 5 visit to Ecuador, the right-wing opposition has staged increasingly violent protests against President Rafael Correa’s government. Correa, who was re-elected in 2013 with 57% of the vote, has likened the opposition tactics of “mobilizations, provocations, victimizations,” to those used by the Venezuelan opposition. (In a 2010 attempted coup, President Correa was injured and held captive for 12 hours.)

Will the push to remove and proscribe the Confederate flag and other Old South symbols in the wake of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church massacre in Charleston, SC result in meaningful change? After all, Southern states faced a wave of protests over the flag in the early 1990s and early 2000s that led South Carolina to move its Confederate flag from the capitol dome to the statehouse grounds and Georgia to revise its state flag, but nothing more.

According to the Washington Post, which, in the absence of reliable government statistics, is one of the news organizations tallying the number of police killings in the U.S., cops killed some 461 people in the first six months of 2015. And, more than a fourth of those slain, the reporters say, were "in the throes of mental or emotional crisis." The Washington Post estimates that in 2015, on average, police killed one mentally disturbed person every 36 hours.

Santa Cruz County’s Board of Supervisors recently suspended all business with the five giant banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Citicorp, who recently pleaded guilty to felony charges of criminal collusion. While the small California county’s portfolio is only valued at $650 million, Santa Cruz County Supervisor Ryan Coonerty says he’ll be contacting other local jurisdictions to urge them to follow Santa Cruz County’s lead.