Portside

Employers use lockouts to weaken unions. Lockouts sabotage the functioning of the union-management relationship, and they undermine standard and secure jobs in favour of more precariousness. Lockouts are also sometimes used to shift production from one plant or country to another, as well as to close unionized plants.

Raoul Peck’s The Young Karl Marx is the best buddy movie since George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969. It’s also among the most important films in decades, bringing to a mass audience not just the revolutionary ideas of Marx and his friend and collaborator Frederick Engels in the early days of modern capitalism, but an approach to politics and history that still has no peer.

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Only a handful of European states are currently governed by left-wing governments, and several of the traditionally largest left-wing parties, such as the Socialist Party in France, have experienced substantial drops in support. Jan Rovny argues that while many commentators have linked the left’s decline to the late-2000s financial crisis, the weakening of Europe’s left reflects deep structural and technological changes that have reshaped European society, leaving left-wing parties out in the cold.

On Sunday, a statue of the democratic hero, Orlando Letelier, was unveiled on Washington’s stately Massachusetts Avenue, near the spot where Letelier was killed in a 1976 car bombing — an assassination ordered by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Ronni Karpen Moffitt, a 25-year-old American co-worker whom Letelier had been giving a ride, also was killed in the attack, which became a rallying point for human rights advocates.

What company gets the most money from the U.S. government? Weapons maker Lockheed Martin. It took in $35.2 billion from the government, or close to what the Trump administration is proposing for the 2019 State Department budget. Boeing, in second place, with a mere $26.5 billion. When it comes to the Department of Defense, perhaps we should retire the term “budget” altogether, given its connotation of restraint. Can't we find another word entirely? Like the Pentagon cornucopia?

“Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.” Fifty years ago, on March 1, 1968, these were the grim words of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, called the Kerner Commission after its chairman, Gov. Otto Kerner of Illinois. Today the situation is worse.

Brazil ignored inequality and injustice for decades, and failed to enforce proper gun controls, allowing a daunting situation to become truly terrifying. In the United States, inequality is skyrocketing. Economic inequality, coupled lax gun control laws, could prove to be a formula that makes the United States more closely resemble Brazil with every passing decade.

This timely piece of work reminds us that the rights we sometimes take for granted have not always been available to all.

A Review of Chocolate Cities: the Black Map of American Life by Marcus A. Hunter & Zandria F. Robinson, University of California Press. Chocolate Cities is an ode to agency. A work of truth-telling without polemics, this book almost literally breaks new ground, revising our most basic ideas of US geography while questioning the truth claims of social science itself.