Portside

“The lesson you get from the end of the Luddites is: Do the people that are profiting off automation today want to participate in distributing their profits more widely around the population, or are they going to fight just as hard as they did back then?”

The protests igniting across the Occupied Territories to support 1,500 hunger strikers are not merely an act of 'solidarity' with the incarcerated and abused men and women who are demanding improvements to their conditions. Sadly, prison is the most obvious fact of Palestinian life; it is the status quo; the everyday reality.

Democrats and coal-country Republicans say miners are uniquely deserving because of an agreement in 1946, when the government seized mines and ended a strike by agreeing to provide health and pension benefits. Legislative leaders have agreed to the provisions as part of a $1 trillion government funding bill, and rank-and-file members are expected to approve it later this week.

Trump’s policies against immigrants are an intensification of the Obama administration’s targeting of Central American refugees through raids going after women and children in January 2016 as well as using large scale family detention as a deterrence mechanism aimed at stopping others fearing for their lives from fleeing to the US. The Trump administration is flagrantly exacerbating harmful U.S. immigration and foreign policies implemented for over a century.

We envision a South L.A. that is a healthy and economically stable region with opportunities and resources for residents to thrive and sustain themselves, their families, and their communities. This vision is guided by residents with support from a robust public sector that provides equitable investment and full integration of low-income communities of color in the decision-making processes about where, how to invest public funds, especially those coming from the GGRF.

Unprecedented global inequalities can only be sustained by ever more repressive and ubiquitous systems of social control and repression.

In its first 100 days, the Trump administration has deployed Secretary of Defense General Mattis, Secretary of State Tillerson, and now Vice President Pence to South Korea and Japan. Speaking at the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), Pence stated that "the era of strategic patience is over" and threatened that "if China is unable to deal with North Korea, the United States and our allies will."

The tradition of May 1 as the international holiday of the working class began in the United States, but for many decades was lost to the U.S. working class. Beginning in 2006, with mass marches and work stoppages by immigrant workers, working people in this country have begun to reclaim their day.

Gordon Shepherd’s compact Neuroenology is a straightforwardly didactic exercise, tightly focused on wine. It's a companion to his previous work, Neurogastronomy (2012), a well-received study of “how the brain creates flavor,” mostly about food. Lots of wine drinkers, and even wine writers, don’t know some of the facts about wine sensation that Shepherd wants us to learn.

A consumer pressure campaign against labor abuses in the chicken-processing industry has produced some initial results, with a detailed pledge this week from Tyson Foods to build a better workplace for its 95,000 employees.