Portside

That $9.2 billion tax bill that Apple dodged in cooking up a scheme this week to finance a $55 billion stock buyback for its shareholders would have been enough to make unnecessary all of the major budget cuts in the sequester. That's not counting the tax dodges of Bank of America, Citigroup, ExxonMobil, FedEx, General Electric, Honeywell, Merck, Microsoft, Pfizer, and Verizon.

How a proposal for a socially conscious lottery panicked corporations and birthed the 9-figure jackpot.

Bengal tigers can be elusive. They're classified as an endangered species, they're mostly nocturnal, and if they had their way, they wouldn't see many humans, either. Native to Southeast Asia, there are only an estimated 1,850 left in the wild. That makes counting them somewhat difficult—but researchers in Nepal have developed a system that they think will make it easier to figure out how many tigers live there. It works for other species as well.

Los Angeles Walmart worker Tsehai Almaz told The Nation that after visiting the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and meeting with local clergy, she and other OUR Walmart leaders were inspired to follow the example of the 1961 freedom riders. “I feel like we’re facing many of the same issues,” said Almaz, “even though it’s not necessarily about race—this time it’s about respect. And being able to feed our families, and having good working conditions.”

Fueled by a race-baiting, national marketing campaign and the missionary-like evangelism of its affiliates, Care Net has turned the complex reality behind black abortion rates into a single, fictional story: poor black women who have abortions are the unwitting victims of feminists and morally deficient reproductive healthcare providers, embodied in sadists such as Gosnell. Crisis pregnancy centers, in this fable, are the best place those women can go to be saved.

This article is based upon an interrogation of two books: Gregg Shotwell, Autoworkers Under the Gun: A Shop-Floor View of the End of the American Dream; and Jane McAlevey with Bob Ostertag, Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting For the Labor Movement. Each book focuses on an iconic labor union (UAW and SEIU). What they report gives us reason for both deep concern and hope concerning the future of organized labor.