Portside

“Taking away local control over wages (and a range of other pro-worker, pro-environment, and pro-civil rights policies) has become a major priority of ALEC, a corporate-backed group with extensive lobbying resources and influence in our state legislatures,” according to an National Employment Law Project statement. “ALEC drafts “model” minimum wage preemption bills for conservative legislatures to simply copy and paste.”

Death of notorious leader known as ‘CIA’s man in Panama’ announced by President Juan Carlos Varela on Twitter

Through much of the United States, Washington is viewed with deep suspicion. When unconnected with a higher purpose, said Augustine, the state is nothing more than highway robbery on a larger scale. (2) When was the last time the American state seemed connected to higher purpose? This sensibility is acute in the rust belt, with our towering hulks of shuttered steel mills, machine shops, auto assembly plants and so on.

Voters in Flint, Michigan "wouldn't ask you about Russia and Jared Kushner," said Turner. "They want to know how they are gonna get some clean water and why some 8,000 people are about to lose their homes"

Portland heroes; Manchester: Islamophobia; Manchester: sexism; ‘Counterterror’ at Standing Rock; Federalist Society cracks down; Islamophobes plan June 10 rallies

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.