Portside

Discussions between the United Auto Workers union and a Tennessee Volkswagen plant have raised fears among Southern politicians that union representation would deter businesses - and badly needed jobs - from coming to their respective states.

In 15 cities today, Walmart workers and their supporters are staging their biggest day of action since the groundbreaking "Black Friday" strike in November. They are demanding that Walmart reinstate 20 workers they say were fired for taking part in a June strike, and they are calling on Walmart to end its poverty-level wage scale and pay a living wage. (Mike Hall, AFL-CIO Now)

Obama's plan to bomb Syria with cruise missiles will do nothing to hasten the end of the conflict. Instead, it will likely prolong it. The US couldn't end the Iraqi civil war despite having over 100,000 boots on the ground. It is highly unlikely that Washington can end this one from 30,000 feet. The "limited" Tomahawk Cruise missile strikes with "no boots on the ground" are quickly expanding to "a broader strategy" to arm and strengthen opposition rebels.

Walmart workers and supporters plan to mount protests in fifteen cities Thursday, a mobilization that the union-backed group OUR Walmart expects will be its largest since last November’s Black Friday strike.

No stranger to protest, the head of Voces de la Frontera, Christine Neumann-Ortiz, has put herself and her organization at the center of one of the most bitter labor disputes in recent Milwaukee history. Can she win?

The question Congress and Mr. Obama must ask now is whether employing force to punish Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons is worth endangering the fragile international order that is World War II’s most significant legacy.

Empire enjoys watching the two sides battle like caged mice, weakening each other to its advantage.

Today’s American readers will find the arguments favoring Peña Nieto’s energy reform familiar. They center around the flaws of the state-run enterprise: its corruption and inefficiency, its coddling of unions, and its monopoly in the national market for consumer goods such as gasoline, which has kept prices high. But thus far, the debates have hardly touched upon the local consequences of this reform for regions that will be most affected.