Portside

If unions find better strategic partners outside the labor movement on a particular issue, they should proceed on the basis of their analysis of what is needed, not hold back and wait for labor unity. Too often a particular union’s political stance may reflect a private employer’s growth plans, not the general good for working people.

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Sixty miles south of the Arizona border, the devastation from a toxic spill has led to an epochal battle between a transnational mining conglomerate and an alliance of miners and farmers.

The Council on Foreign Relations is a supercharged, highly connected establishment think tank. While producing reports and staffing varied policy working-groups, its recommendations are invariably market-based. CFR leaders and members pass through the revolving door of the federal government to high positions of authority, no matter which party holds power. The book under review, Wall Street's Think Tank, charts the council's key links to US imperial policy.

AFL-CIO leaders have reached out to union members in support of actions that can be taken to stop and prevent police killings of people of color. Racism plays an insidious role in the daily lives of all working people of color. This is a labor issue because it is a workplace issue; it is a community issue, and unions are the community. Philando Castile was a union member, and so his family is our family. Ideas of what you can do from labor activists.

Elected officials operate within the parameters of possibility. Movement politics is about redefining those parameters. Whoever is elected in November - even Trump - takes office in a country percolating with organized discontent at inequality, climate change, Citizens United, police violence. That's movement politics.

Throughout the twentieth century, liberal wisdom held that "socialism" or a social-democratic political formation could not be viable in America. Future historians may look back at the 2016 Sanders campaign as a great wave that swept away this old wisdom. But that new history will be written only if activists seize the opportunity before us to build, from the enthusiasm and activism of the Sanders campaign, enduring organizations.

How – and how far – the “political revolution” will continue remains to be seen. What has already occurred is a surge of support for the Green party. Many of Sanders’ delegates will be pressing the campaign’s radical demands within the Convention. This activity will draw its participants beyond what they could hope to achieve within the constraints of Sanders’ candidacy. Yet it was the vast reach of that candidacy which made possible these steps to go beyond it.

Between 2009 and 2013, the number of people ages 50 and older in federal prisons increased by 25 percent, making them the fastest-growing segment. Compassionate release has been granted infrequently. From August 12, 2013, to September 12, 2014,2,621 federal prisoners applied for compassionate release.Of those, only 85 people were ultimately released.

This new book by Enzo Traverso is "a master class in historical analysis," writes reviewer Alan Wald. This "full-on riveting reconceptualization of 1914-1945 as a 'European Civil War,"' he adds, "is a benchmark achievement in the flowering of socialist scholarship by the generation identifying with May 1968."