Portside

A joint project of the Democratic Socialists of America and the United Electrical workers union, Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee recruited volunteers to talk with workers who wanted to organize around COVID-19 concerns.

Here is a book on union organizing that seems about to become a classic for our times.

People making power, challenges to center-left heads of state, new developments in Nigeria and Namibia, Engels at 200, and more

“It is so disrespectful of the agencies and the employers to shunt these cases aside and not do everything possible to investigate the exposures,” said Peg Seminario, a retired union health and safety director.

Joe Biden’s likely nominee to head the powerful Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden, called for cuts to Social Security, saying, “we need to put both entitlements on the table as well as taxes.”

As this book both documents and generously discusses, rising income inequality leads to a plague of ills: higher rates of people in prison, higher teenage birth rates, higher rates of mental illness, more child neglect and bullying.

Inequality is reaching feudal proportions, where very few own almost everything, and everyone else is crushed under the wheel of engineered destitution.

I’m the chair of the local Democratic Party in a Wisconsin county that Donald Trump won. It wasn’t for a lack of progressive organizing. It was because national Democrats have failed communities like mine.

How France responded when a right to post was taken away. Holiday gift scams, Substack, the Huawei war, and more.

John Carpenter’s movies provide visions of societies falling apart. No wonder his work is resonating now more than ever.