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Dakota Access Pipeline and the Future of American Labor

Jeremy Brecher Labor Network for Sustainability
Supporting Native Americans and their tribes, environmental, climate protection, human rights, and many other groups joined the campaign against the pipeline. The Obama administration intervened to temporarily halt the pipeline. The Dakota Access Pipeline has become an issue of contention within organized labor. Why has this become a divisive issue within labor, and can it have a silver lining for a troubled labor movement?

The Secret Struggle Against Apartheid

Peter Cole Jacobin
They undertook secret missions against South Africa's apartheid regime. Sensational story hidden for over 40 years. In the 1960s, a group of leftists risked everything to revive the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. These international activists who embraced a working-class radicalism that was internationalist, cosmopolitan, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist - and most important, steadfastly opposed to legalized racial oppression in South Africa.

Radical Internationalism: What Europe & the Left Need

Yanis Varoufakis The New Statesman
The left has been in disarray since 1991 - it never fully recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union, despite widespread opposition to Stalinism and -authoritarianism. In the past two decades, we have witnessed a major spasm of global capitalism that has triggered a long deflationary period across the United States and Europe. Just as the Great Depression did in the 1930s, this has created a breeding ground for xenophobia, racism and scapegoating.

The Left Deserves Better Than Jill Stein

Kate Aronoff In These Times
Stein's Green Party run doesn't offer a plan to win, or to build power. The Left is capable of so much more. If politics were a battle for the moral high ground, both Bernie Sanders and the Green Party might be in full control of the three branches of government. Sadly, it's not and they're not.

Free Trade Winners and Losers

Gary Herman Union Solidarity International
The Canada-European Union "Free" Trade Pact, due to be signed on October 27, like other such agreements, favors corporate power and profits at the expense of working people. Dock workers action last July shows resistance is possible.

Tidbits - October 6, 2016 - Reader Comments: UE Calls for Trump Defeat; Fact Checking Pence; Israel Seizes Women's Boat to Gaza; Women of Salt of the Earth; New York's Muslim Communities; and more...

Portside
Reader Comments: UE Calls for Trump Defeat; Fact Checking Pence; Israel Seizes Women's Boat to Gaza and 13 dangerous women - What you can do; Who to Vote For-Lessons from the Past for Leftists; Prison Strike Continues-Now Joined by Alabama Prison Guards; Reader query - why did you use certain sources in your labor post?; Cubs and Socialism; Public Option; The Women of Salt of the Earth; Announcements: Labor and Islam; NYPD Surveillance of New York's Muslim Communities

Slavery and Property: The Great Trap

Maya Jasanoff The New York Review of Books
As more and more settlers arrived in the English colonies, the property they owned north and south increasingly took the human form of African slaves, encouraging the credo that freedom for some required the enslavement of others. The books under review exhaustively cover the early slavery period, where even the Puritan ideal of a city on a hill actually rested on the backs of numerous enslaved and colonized people.

Play “FeedingThe Dragon” Recalls Life With Dad, A DC 37 Member

Kevin Zapf Hanes AFSCME
A play about a young woman growing up in New York City where her father was a live-in custodian at the St. Agnes Branch Library Library on Amsterdam Avenue between 80 and 81st Street. She describes what a wonderful life she had living in a library and how much the union, District Council 37, AFSCME meant to her and her family. "Feeding the Dragon" has opened at the Pittsburgh City Theatre in Pennsylvania.

Voices from Solitary: Welcome to the Round House

Mathew Davis Solitary Watch
I’m currently housed in F-house at the Stateville CC. F-house is the last functioning “round” house in America. The round house is just that, a circular building with 4 levels of cells around the outer ring with a central tower, allowing, by the use of backlighting, a single observer to watch over an entire cell house. This is a great source of pride for Stateville officials, not so much for those of us housed within.

Harvard Dining Services Picket in Historic Strike

Brandon J. Dixon and Hannah Natanson The Harvard Crimson
The workers’ strike marks the first time they have walked off the job during the academic year, according to Brian Lang, president of UNITE HERE Local 26, the Boston-based labor union that represents HUDS. The strike is the first walk out Harvard has seen since 1983.