Portside

Rebuilding labor means more than ticking off new non-white members, however, it also means transformation—and when it comes to workers of color that means integrating individual on-the-job concerns with “off-the-clock” community concerns like climate change, racial profiling, mass incarceration and, certainly, police violence. And therein lies the rub for organized labor as it looks toward the future.

Reader Comments - Karen Lewis starts recovery; Philadelphia Students Support Teachers; Towards a Socialist America; War on the Islamic State; Arming Rebels Does Not Work; Silicon Valley and Organized Labor; New Voters in Ferguson; Investing in Junk Armies; Gaza Reconstruction; Doomed Without a Wealth Tax; Rosenberg Sons' Statement; Announcements - New York and Chicago events; Palestine solidarity

"100% of the profits from 'Marching On Ferguson' will support defending the protestors in the Ferguson area who have faced attacks, wrongful arrest, and violence from the police," Tom Morello says. "I've witnessed countless incidents of racially motivated police brutality in my lifetime and it's time to say 'Enough!' " -- Hear the song, buy the song, here's the lyrics.

President Obama speaking at the Air Force Academy in 2012, told the assembled cadets that they should "never bet against the United States of America... [because] the United States has been, and will always be, the one indispensable nation in world affairs." On that basis, he suggested, the twenty-first century, like the twentieth, would be an American one. You get idea. We are... go ahead, chant it: indispensable! (Tom Engelhardt)

A student-led movement is seeking to `open' a prominent U.S. Jewish campus group to a broader range of voices, and it's gaining ground. Last weekend, Open Hillel will seek to model an inclusive Jewish community that embraces marginalized voices. The treatment of and solidarity with Palestinians has now become the civil rights issue of the day for modern Jews, especially younger Jews who will be here long after the older post-Holocaust generation has moved on...

Thomas Eric Duncan was a victim of a broken system. Why would the hospital would send home a patient with a 103-degree fever and stomach pains who had recently been in Liberia?. Inside story from some registered nurses at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas who have familiarity with what occurred - following the positive Ebola infection of first the late Thomas Eric Duncan and then a registered nurse who cared for him Nina Pham.

Moroccan unions call for a 24 hour national strike on October 29 to protest cuts in pensions and subsidies for gasoline and fuel oil. These cuts have been demanded by the International Monetary Fund.

American businesses are paying out a historically low proportion of their income in the form of wages and salaries. But the Jimmy John’s employment agreement is one small piece of evidence that workers, especially those without advanced skills, are also facing various practices and procedures that leave them worse off, even apart from what their official hourly pay might be.

Long before the shooting of Michael Brown, official racial-isolation policies primed Ferguson for this summer’s events.

This is terrorism. It is the use or implication of violence to achieve a political end. And as in so many other instances of terrorism (harassment of abortion providers, for instance), aimed at women, the government is not protecting its citizens.