Portside's posts did not go out as scheduled Saturday and Sunday. Our service provider, May First, upgraded all of their servers Saturday, to prevent coordinated hacking and DOS - Denial of Service attacks. Unfortunately there were conflicts between the new server software and the software that Portside uses to send posts. We have identified the problem, and are now working to correct it. Below is an Index of the posts that were posted to our website over the weekend.
On March 8, 1971—while Muhammad Ali was fighting Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, and as millions sat glued to their TVs watching the bout unfold—a group of peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they could find. These documents revealed an FBI conspiracy—known as COINTELPRO—to disrupt and destroy a wide range of protest groups, including the Black freedom movement.
The ideology and practice of neoliberalism, resulting in rising inequality and the imposition of austerity policies, brings us to the national debate about whether it is appropriate for public funds to underwrite the costs of public higher education or whether higher education is essentially to be seen as a private good and an individual (or familial) responsibility.
If the labor movement must invest in politics, it would be wisest to do so at the community/local/state level. It is there, our ‘laboratories of public policy’, where the labor movement can have the most positive impact on the lives of working people.
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