Portside

In 2017, President Donald Trump and the Wisconsin GOP struck a deal with Foxconn that promised to turn Southeastern Wisconsin into a tech manufacturing powerhouse. Three years later, the factory — and the jobs — don’t exist, and probably never will.

The fast-fashion industry has long been known for exploitative practices, which have continued during the pandemic, despite the health risk to garment workers. “Fashion masks,” substitute actual protection for mere simulation.

A recent survey on workers and learners in Los Angeles County by the UCLA Labor Center found that “52% have been laid off, terminated, or furloughed from their jobs due to the pandemic.” It is very hard to study with many insecurities in your life.

“It is a shame – we have an important mission, regardless of COVID. Many SNF [skilled nursing facility] residents are and will continue to suffer and die without...repairs.”

From Trump’s “joking” about holding power beyond his term limit, to enfeebling the integrity of mail-in ballots without evidence, it’s clear that voter intimidation may be the tip of the iceberg of what’s to come.

The famous Mississippi writer’s smashing party recipe--a story in itself.

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?

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.

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.

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.