Portside

A talk given at the "Labor for Bernie" national conference, April 1, 2016 in Chicago

A three-member NLRB panel denied Volkswagen’s request for the agency to review a December 2015 election in which skilled-trades employees in Chattanooga voted overwhelmingly to designate UAW Local 42 as their representative for the purpose of collective bargaining.

The report, Fracking by the Numbers: the Damage to Our Water, Land and Climate from a Decade of Dirty Drilling, was published Thursday and analyzes data released by government and industry sources over the past ten years.

The Mexican-born Texas poet Hugo Esteban Rodriguez Castañeda suggests a Latino identity based on hardship, danger, fear, but also an enduring spirit of survival that is as indigenous as el huizache--the acacia tree--which also happens to be the name of "The Magazine of Latino Literature."

Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center, recently edited a new book with the Rev. James Lawson Jr., a renowned civil rights activist who worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and helped launch key campaigns for social justice. For generations, he has taught the principles of nonviolence to civil rights leaders, committed activists, community organizers and, in recent years, UCLA students as a guest lecturer.

Unfolding events of the past several months have confirmed that the presidential contest now underway is the most historically significant in at least the last 50 years. The reasons for this are several according to long-time activist Linda Burnham in this April 2016 piece.

Science nowadays often starts from the assumption of continuity between humans and animals, while shifting the burden of proof to those who insist on differences. Anyone who asks me to believe that a tickled ape, who almost chokes on his hoarse giggles, is in a different state of mind than a tickled human child has his work cut out for him.

Branch Rickey certainly deserves credit for confronting his fellow owners and their racist attitudes by signing Jackie Robinson and, in doing so, advancing the cause of civil rights. However, there is more to this story than Rickey and Robinson. In fact, the desegregation of baseball came after a decade-long campaign by black and left wing journalists and activists.

After Occupy in 2011, and the wave of fast-food strikes the following year in New York City, the movement to raise wages took a new turn and a bolder stance: $15 an hour and a union. When the campaign first began, that pay demand seemed like a pipe dream. Yet the call for $15 resonated. Now, the movement has scored victories in two of the biggest states in the country.

Bernie Sanders delivered one of his most sweeping indictments of modern capitalism and unchecked market forces on Friday at an address at the Vatican. He called for a focus on "the common good" as a moral imperative, drawing on the teachings of the Catholic Church for insights into the plight of the most vulnerable members of society.