Portside

Strikes can be legally threatening and socially disruptive. But in the absence of any serious, social efforts to change the economy, it is perfectly reasonable for workers to defend their interests. So long as the economy is as radically unequal and oppressive as it is, workers have a right to strike. They have that right just the way anyone facing oppression has a right to resist it.

Here is the prepared text of the address that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders delivered on Friday (April 15) at a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. The conference is focused on “Centesimus Annus,” a landmark social justice encyclical by Saint John Paul II: “The Urgency of a Moral Economy: Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of Centesimus Annus”

Several union officials charge that Working Families Party officials this year re-worked the presidential endorsement process in a way that rigged it for Bernie Sanders with the hopes that its work on behalf of the Vermont senator would help the party raise money and increase membership.The unions that remain argue the party will play a critical role mobilizing the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

To use a term that has become commonplace in our world when discussing commerce, the prospect of nuclear conflict has globalized war and it’s a nightmare of the first order. In the post-Cold War world, Exhibit A in that process would certainly be the unnerving potential for a nuclear war to break out between India and Pakistan.

You could call it a perfect storm: a fiscal crisis converging with a deep secular economic decline.[1] Once touted as the showcase of U.S.- led economic development, debt-strapped Puerto Rico is currently embroiled in a struggle for survival. During the mid-twentieth century, Puerto Rico grew at a rapid pace, betting on cheap labor, privileged duty-free access to the U.S. market, and tax incentives for U.S. companies.

Let’s offer thanks for small favors when someone -- in this case, ex-Army Ranger and TomDispatch regular Rory Fanning (author of Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger’s Journey Out of the Military and Across America) -- feels the urge to do something about the massive, militarized propaganda effort in our schools. In my book, Fanning is the equivalent of any 12 of our generals and we need more like him both in those schools and in our country. Tom Engelhardt

For Palestinians, Honduras and Guatemala might seem too distant, too irrelevant for our struggle. And while there are some apparent stark differences in our lived realities and in the faces of our oppressors, there are commonalities as well. In Palestine as well as in many parts of Central and Latin America, the oppression is directly sponsored by US military and financial aid. And in all these places our collective survival rests upon defending and preserving our land.

At a time when much of the culinary world believes in farming like pioneer settlers and looking its meat in the eyes, This wants us to abandon peas and carrots (“Middle Ages!”) for their constituent parts—glucose, sucrose, cellulose, amino acids, and more.

CSPG's Poster of the Week calls attention to the same issues that energized the ongoing Democracy Spring protests in Washington, DC--the loss of democracy in an age of big money corporate politics.

The old model of collective bargaining can’t be resurrected. Herewith, some new models of how workers can win and wield power.