Greece's migrant fruit pickers: 'They kept firing. There was blood everywhere'

Helena Smith The Guardian
Peasant associations, unionists, left-wing parties and anti-racist groups launch a solidarity campaign in Greece following a summer which saw a court set free the men who shot strawberry pickers in Greece the previous year. Thirty-five workers, most from Bangladesh, were injured in the shooting, four of them critically. They had been asking for unpaid back wages. Most migrant farm workers in Greece are without legal papers.

Tidbits - September 4, 2014

Portside
Reader Comments - Fast Food Workers; Ralph Fasanella; US-Africa Leaders Summit; School's Back and Growing Inequality; Twin Plagues of ISIS and Ebola; Diablo Canyon Nuke Plant; Brazil's Elections; Argentina; Victory for Market Basket Workers and Consumers; Fed-Ex Workers Can Organize; New Culture on the Left; Call for papers on Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital; Today in History - Paul Robeson Returns to Peekskill; Jewish Woman Among the Interned Japanese

Report from Germany - Losing Heads And Sending Arms

Victor Grossman Portside
In Germany heads fall - Lenin's head still needs to be kept buried, and Berlin's once-popular gay mayor bows out. Another head featured in the press belongs to a man who is certainly not gay nor a Lenin. Sadly, current references to Vladimir Putin, evoke all too sharply recollections of German language used against every Russian leader since the start of World War I a hundred years ago.

Refugee Crisis on Our Border: What Can We Do Now?

Duane Campbell Democratic Socialists of America
The recent surge of minors at the border is a symptom of our current failed immigration policy. We need to continue our work with labor and the immigrants' rights movement toward a fair and comprehensive immigration reform for the U.S. - a better bill than the one passed last year in the Senate, which among other things called for doubling the current border patrol by hiring an additional 20,000-plus border agents.

New Report Says U.S. Health Care Violates U.N. Convention on Racism

Miriam Zoila Pérez ColorLines
Recent policy developments, primarily the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion, have the potential to improve access to health care for women who aren't eligible for Medicaid under current requirements. But 19 states, including most in the South where maternal mortality rates are higher, have opted out of Medicaid expansion. Georgia, for example, has 838,000 uninsured women, more than 25 percent of whom are African American.

On Labor Day, A Working Families Party Strategy

By Julie Kushner and Rafael Navar In These Times
Our aim is to build an independent base of political power that can put forward our progressive, populist values and mean it. America actually needs a political movement that can say that increasing union density is a good thing, without blushing. One that knows that declining wages and eroding retirement security are not a “new normal” we must adjust to; that market solutions are not always wise; and that an increasingly financialized economy only benefits the top.