Portside

If the labor movement must invest in politics, it would be wisest to do so at the community/local/state level. It is there, our ‘laboratories of public policy’, where the labor movement can have the most positive impact on the lives of working people.

The names of Berta Cáceres’s murderers are yet unknown. But we know who killed her.

A new history deepens our understanding of the origins of the gay rights movement and the transformation it has brought about.

The ideology and practice of neoliberalism, resulting in rising inequality and the imposition of austerity policies, brings us to the national debate about whether it is appropriate for public funds to underwrite the costs of public higher education or whether higher education is essentially to be seen as a private good and an individual (or familial) responsibility.

On March 8, 1971—while Muhammad Ali was fighting Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, and as millions sat glued to their TVs watching the bout unfold—a group of peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they could find. These documents revealed an FBI conspiracy—known as COINTELPRO—to disrupt and destroy a wide range of protest groups, including the Black freedom movement.

The March 3rd assassination of Berta Caceres, coordinator of the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (COPIHN), sent shock waves across the country, sparking outrage and demands for an independent investigation. Last month COPIHN issued an international appeal warning of government complicity in the increasing violence directed at the indigenous opponents of the notorious Aqua Zarca Dam Project. Caceres won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015.

People across the globe are organizing local actions to decry current priorities that spend $1.75 trillion/year on arms when our planet is in crisis.

Over the next few weeks, hundreds of cities and campuses worldwide will be participating in Israeli Apartheid Week, which aims to raise awareness about Israel’s ongoing settler-colonial project and apartheid policies over the Palestinian people. IAW is an opportunity to partake in something truly global while strengthening local efforts in support of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice, and equality.

Aside from the fact that unions seldom use their most powerful weapon, the strike, and aside from the fact that even fewer unions ever mobilize and organize their biggest asset, the members, our biggest problem in bargaining is that labor’s financial analysis of corporations only touches the surface. It misses the vast bulk of corporate hidden wealth. Labor economist Les Leopold explains how companies hide their wealth in his new book, Runaway Inequality.

As wealth becomes concentrated in fewer hands, so does political and social power via foundations and non-profits. In the January issue of the New York Review of Books, veteran journalist Michael Massing noted that, in the past 15 years alone, “the number of foundations with a billion dollars or more in assets has doubled, to more than eighty.” A study by the watchdog organization Global Policy Forum, finds that foundations are so powerful they bypass governments and UN.