Portside

How’s your 401(k) doing? Working Americans ask themselves this question — and angst about the answer — a great deal these days. Any why not? For most Americans, retirement reality has turned chillingly stark: Either you have a robust set of investments in your 401(k) or you’re facing a rocky retirement.

In a more promising departure from past practice, the AFL-CIO has allocated time for daily convention “action sessions”—numbering about fifty in all. This smorgasbord of panel discussions tilts heavily toward political topics and seems designed to give the proceedings the trendy buzz of a Netroots Nation conference. Many of these workshops showcase the federation’s new or old ties with community-based labor support groups, immigrant workers centers, among others.

“It’s a real live class war we find ourselves in as we meet here,” LA County Federation of Labor Executive Secretary-Treasurer Maria Elena Durazo told delegates from the fifty-seven unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO. Noting the corporations and Koch brothers arrayed against organized labor, Durazo paraphrased boxer Mike Tyson: “Everybody’s got a plan until I hit ‘em in the face.”

"Today there is literature coming out of Syria that we could have never even dreamed of just a few years ago," Atrash says.Rather than relying on metaphors and allegorical images, these new poems rely on literal, visceral descriptions, with a newfound emphasis on a united Syrian identity instead of religious symbols.

Researchers find genome-wide evidence of convergent evolution between bats and dolphins.

We let companies close factories here, move the equipment to China, bring the same goods back to sell in the same stores, and call that “trade.” But we don’t just “let” companies do this, we give big tax breaks that practically force companies to do this.

Go looking for enemies in the world, you are likely to find some. How did this happen? Officials still talk about “national defense” as though Americans only want to protect their homeland—to be left alone in Fortress America. But that hasn’t been US strategy for more than sixty years.