Portside

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued long-awaited new rules to modernize and streamline union certification elections and to eliminate the worst cases of pre-election delay. The board is mandated to protect the rights of employees to form unions and bargain collectively, but numerous academic studies have demonstrated that the current NLRB election process fails to protect workers' free choice.

The heroes of antiquity are perhaps due for another revision of their status.

Secretary Kerry’s attempt to conclude . . . accords was . . . always quixotic and doomed to failure. A powerful Israeli state simply has no reason to abide by its commitments with a stateless, weak people divided into bantustans and encircled by checkpoints. If Palestinian statelessness is at the root of the crisis, then the solution is obvious. The Palestinians must erect, and be recognized as, a state.

In 1964 . . . Ella Baker said: "Until the killing of black men, black mothers' sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother's sons, we who believe in freedom cannot rest. Baker's words continue to resonate today . . . sparked by the police killings of young black men, but rooted in the underlying grievances of racial injustice around jobs, housing, schools, and the criminal justice system.

A proposed dam on the Mekong River would provide energy for the region, but at a significant environmental cost.

Digging through the world’s oldest graveyard with African paleontologists.

Since the massive anti-war protests against the war in Vietnam, the U.S. government's war machine has made “perception management” a high priority, feeding the U.S. people a steady diet of propaganda, even getting peace groups to buy into “pro-democracy” wars. The Minnesota experience with the Committee of Solidarity with the People of Syria is an example of these efforts made to enlist peace and social justice groups into supporting U.S. wars.

With the election of Takeshi Onaga as the new governor of Okinawa, the Okinawa people have once again expressed in clear terms their opposition to the attempts by the U.S. and Japan to turn their already militarized island into "the largest concentration of land, sea, and air military power in East Asia." Okinawa is key to the U.S. military's "Pivot to Asia", but 1.4 million Okinawans are continuing to demand the removal of all U.S. military bases there.

This week the President/CEO of the National Newspapers Publishers Association, the 73-year-old federation of more than 200 Black community newspapers in the United States, called upon the Black community to support full normalization of relations with Cuba. Benjamin Chavis, Jr. noted only Congress can lift the embargo of Cuba, and only the people can "force Congress to do the right thing." Now is not the time for Black America to be silent, he said.

In terms of losses in human lives, 2014 has been a horrific year for Palestinians, when an Israeli war against the Gaza Strip killed and wounded thousands. While some aspects of the conflict are stagnating between a corrupt, ineffectual Palestinian Authority (PA), and the criminality of Israeli wars and occupation, it would also be fair to argue that 2014 was also a game changer to some degree—and it is not all bad news. And here are five reasons why.