Portside

George Goehl and National People’s Action spent the last 6 years developing a new organizing strategy. The organization now commits itself to a vision of a “new economy”: democratic and public control of finance, and cooperative and alternative forms of business ownership. NPA also envisions giving workers real decision-making power within corporations and giving the public the right to revoke the charters of corporations that provide too little social value.

Sid Caesar at the height of his fame, was drawing audiences of up to 25 million. Broadway theatre owners complained, they always had empty seats on Saturday nights - the time that Your Show of Shows and later, Caesar's Hour, were broadcast live to the nation. Caesar's fans included Albert Einstein - who died before their planned meeting - and Alfred Hitchcock, who remarked that "the young Mr Caesar best approaches the great Chaplin of the early 1920s".

Reader Comments - Cecily McMillan Update - Occupy Activist Faces Seven Years in Jail - Trial Postponed to March 3rd; Africa; Latin America; Learning from History; Slavery; UAW Campaign at Volkswagen; Amiri Baraka; Pete Seeger memories; Announcements - CISPES Delegation to El Salvador; Workers Get a Cut on Powell Books purchases; New Video - The USA's new underclass; Labor Notes conference - April 4 - 6 - Early bird discount

For more than 66 years, Palestinian refugees have been languishing in squalid conditions across camps in the Middle East. But do all of them agree that a return to Palestine is necessarily the best solution? Through her extensive research, Paula Schmitt finds that while different refugees may have different desires, hopelessness remains everyone's worst enemy.

If workers vote to join a union at Volkswagen's Tennessee plant this week, they'll be changing America's labor relations for the better - Harold Meyerson. (Voting started yesterday, Feb. 12, and continues through tomorrow, Feb. 15) Lane Windham looks at past labor and UAW organizing efforts in the south.

The March 2 sit-in is expected to be the largest act of civil disobedience by young people in the recent history of the environmental movement and it will be led by just the demographic that helped propel Obama to the presidency. The protest, known as "XL Dissent," is meant to send a clear signal to President Obama that the base that helped elect him sees Keystone XL as a decision that will define his entire legacy.

“I can't say enough good things about The Empire of Necessity. It's one of the best books I've read in a decade. It should be essential reading not just for those interested in the African slave trade, but for anyone hoping to understand the commercial enterprise that built North and South America. The sprawling commerce in slaves also supplied Europe with the retirement money it's been living on for more than a century.”

A spellbinding orator and a teacher of enormous influence, he never indulged in academic point-scoring. Hall’s political imagination combined vitality and subtlety; in the field of ideas he was tough, ready to combat positions he believed to be politically dangerous. Yet he was unfailingly courteous, generous towards students, activists, artists and visitors from across the globe, many of whom came to love him.