Portside

Bill Fletcher's powerful speech at USLAW's founding in October 2003 is still on target. That founding conference launched USLAW and set the course to the 2005 AFL-CIO convention where we succeeded in putting the federation on record in opposition to the Iraq War - the first time in its then fifty year history it publicly opposed the commitment of US military forces anywhere in the world. His remarks show us how far we have come and how far we have yet to go.

As a Korean American whose parents were born in an undivided Korea, I care deeply about whether my adopted country - which drew the line in Korea, led the Korean War and signed the Armistice Agreement, and to this day militarily enforces the division - takes the just course of action to bring the Korean War to a final resolution.

Coca-Cola is indirectly spreading a controversial message that to lose weight, the food and beverages you consume don’t matter so much as long as you exercise.

Police ... sometimes are workers who make very little money, oftentimes receive very little benefits in terms of the capitalist system that we live in and we want to recognize that . . . If police were to excise police brutality and anti-Blackness from their institution, I think we'd be having a very different conversation. And that's also a conversation that I would be happy to have.

The country has lost one of its most passionate and eloquent voices for the cause of social and economic justice.

Amazon factories, with their insane, round-the-clock delivery schedules, are notoriously hellish places to work. But life at corporate Amazon isn’t exactly a picnic, either.

Angélica Rivera may have dazzled on the TV screen, but her shady relationship with a government contractor has wreaked havoc on her husband's presidency.

Social Security, which continues to provide benefits at costs far below those in the private sector, celebrated its 80th birthday Friday. And polls show Americans are extremely pleased with it. But, while Democrats finally seem to have abandoned their flirtation with benefit cutting, Republicans remain committed to its privatization. Yet campaigning against Social Security is political suicide, so the Republican strategy is to convince voters the program is unreliable.

The rapidly deteriorating health of Mohammed Allaan, a Palestinian political prisoner on hunger strike has pit Israeli legislators, who recently enacted a law mandating that he be force-fed, against physicians, who refuse to comply on grounds that doing so would be tantamount to "torture," and violate their Hippocratic Oath. Hunger strikes have become a common form of protest by Palestinians held indefinitely without charge in Israeli administrative detention.

Fires are proliferating throughout California where an unprecedented drought has turned the California countryside into a tinder box of dry and dying vegetation. But the fires are also emblematic of the state’s dependence on inmates to help battle the wildfires. California’s firefighting program (Cal Fire) boasts the country’s largest inmate firefighting program. Close to half of Cal Fire’s firefighters, approximately 4,000 prisoners, are inmate firefighters.