Portside

Many of the concerns progressives have about OR were outlined in a petition released by the Bernie Delegates Network on Tuesday entitled, "Support and Improve 'Our Revolution.'" One particularly important one was the omission of anything about the essentially neocon foreign and Defense policy that dominates establishment politics. Another is whether OR will support only Democrats or whether it will also support third party candidates.

State banks and power stations shut and public transport halted in some states as public sector workers take industrial action.

This paper finds that Black union workers of today are very different from Black union workers of the past. In particular, Black union workers today are more likely to be female, older, have more years of formal education, be immigrants, and work in the public sector. Black union workers also enjoy higher wages, and better access to health insurance and retirement benefits than their non-union peers.

PROMESA has already brought changes to Puerto Rico, including slashing the minimum wage to just US$4.25 for people under 25 amid high levels of poverty and unemployment. Funding for pensions, education, and healthcare is also facing cuts, while basic services are at risk of privatization.

“We really got together for the fun of it, singing in Pete’s basement on Macdougal Street,” Mr. Hellerman told The New York Times in 1980. “We sang for unions, at picket lines and at hootenannies, but we had no anticipation of getting jobs. Even Pete, the most accomplished of us, could not get jobs on his own, so we couldn’t expect anyone to pay for four of us.”

President Recip Tayyip Erdoğan has effectively used Turkey’s failed coup to isolate his internal opposition and consolidate his personal power. In the wake of the coup, the Kurds have suffered setbacks in Turkey and throughout the region. But there is also evidence of some shifts in regional alliances that may impact the deadly civil wars in Syria and Yemen, if the outside powers fueling the two conflicts can agree on negotiated solutions to these unwinnable wars.

Turkey’s major trade unions called for a one-day strike on 29 December to protest the government-led military operations against the Kurds. Union representatives declared that they would persist in struggle against those who are trying to destroy the hope of both peoples [Turks and Kurds] to live together and build a common future.

A recently released secret U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) file can be justifiably termed “Stranger than Strangelove”, the 1964 film that satirically captured the madness of the Cold War. It reveals for the first time the scale of the holocaust that would have been unleashed in a nuclear war. The U.S. planned to attack more than 1,200 “Soviet bloc” cities, killing an estimated 520 million people. Even “friendly forces and people” would be radiated.

In one of the largest U.S. natural gas leaks ever recorded, Southern California Gas Company’s Aliso Canyon plant outside of Los Angeles is leaking harmful methane gas at a rate of 110,000 pounds per hour, and according to the company, it may take more than three months to plug it. The single leak, which has been called the worst environmental disaster since the BP oil spill in 2010, accounts for a quarter of the California's entire methane emissions.

Although there were many horrible developments in 2015, there were some goods ones too -- and let these encourage us to bring in the new year truly striking back at the injustices of the empire.