Portside

This piece was originally written for Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) in early February 2018 before the appointments of Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State and John Bolton as National Security Advisor. These appointments render an already alarming situation even worse.

There is an old story about Marx: you throw him out the front door and he sneaks back in through the rear window. That is what happened once again.

TigerSwan has also been preying on relief needs in hurricane-hit areas like Houston and Puerto Rico since 2017. So far, the mercenary firm keeps its media presence at a minimum level, attracting little attention from the press.

Attacking railroad workers as "privileged," the French government seeks to break labor strength as Margaret Thatcher did in Britain when attacking miners. In response French unions and labor are responding with a rare degree of unity.

A deft telling of a Wisconsin town and its people who lost their largest employer, a General Motors auto plant, typifying the collapse of much American manufacturing over the past quarter-century. Janesville is also--ironically or not-- the home of Paul Ryan, the U.S. House GOP speaker.

Strikes can improve wages and working conditions, but history shows that more formal channels of negotiation are required to resolve the contradictions between society's reliance on public employees and its failure to value their labor.

Obama revived Pell grants for prisoners, but the program faces a cloudy future.

The March 18 killing of 22-year old Stephon Clark by Sacramento Police once again calls our attention to the racist aspect of the problem of civilians murdered by law enforcement. Angie Thomas's award-winning Young Adult novel is among the most recent literary responses to this crisis.

Sinclair's order was in many ways making working conditions intolerable for these anchors. In the United States, when employers make conditions unbearable or unpleasant, there has long been an option that workers can pursue: form a union and seek protections through a union contract.

Around 150,000 people took part in the Great March of Return, Ahmad Abu Artema, a commemoration of Palestinians killed by Israel forces during the general strike against the 1976 Israeli annexation of land. This year, Israeli fire killed 16 Palestinians and injured another 1400.