Portside

It may only take 3.5% of the population to topple a dictator – with civil resistance

The creation of the UN in 1945 was a victory for the spirit of pacifism, an affirmation of multilateralism, a beautiful progressive idea. This idea must be maintained in face of the pipe dream of unilateralism.

If New Hampshire, Missouri and Kentucky succeed in enacting "right-to-work" bills, it would be the most states rolling back union power in one year since 1947, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Success in New Hampshire would also make it the first state in the Northeast with a "right-to-work" law. The bills are a further reflection of organized labor's falling clout. Just 10.7 percent of American workers belonged to a labor union in 2016.

Amnesty fears the immigration ban announced by executive order on Friday could “become permanent” and extend to more countries.

Already some are calling this vast movement the "resistance." Whether this label is warranted will depend on the degree to which these demonstrations actually challenge repressive power structures not only with public dissent but active disobedience.

Whether you voted for or against Donald Trump, whether you’re gearing up for the revolution or waiting for his next tweet to drop, rest assured that, in the years to come, the ideology that matters most won’t be that of the “forgotten” Americans of his Inaugural Address. It will be that of Goldman Sachs and it will dominate the domestic economy and, by extension, the global one.

When McGarvey, claiming to speak for all the trades, kowtows to a president who launched his political career attacking the legitimacy of the nation’s first black president and stereotyping Hispanics as “rapists and murderers,” he undermines the work and the morale of dedicated activists and potential members, the future of the U.S. labor movement.

We got this; Extreme vetting; Net nightmare; Merger mania; Info lockdown

Theodore Melfi’s film about black women mathematicians is now the biggest movie in America — just in time to teach us crucial lessons for a Trump presidency. So what’s to be done? Hidden Figures offers a crystal-clear answer: Resist.

Today, workers at the city’s Nissan plant are facing a familiar backlash in their 12-year struggle for the right to organize a union. In a show of solidarity, this week cities across the South also steeped in civil rights history — Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Greensboro and Nashville — are organizing local actions to support the Canton workers and build regional pressure on Nissan to allow free union elections.