Portside

Back in September, the International Association of Machinists and United Steelworkers ended their labor-management partnership with Harley-Davidson over the company’s plan to build a plant in Thailand. The partnership agreement, two decades old and praised as a model by some, is the latest iteration of the ‘jointness’ trend first pioneered by UAW and General Motors in the 1980s.

Being a land defender in Latin America is extremely dangerous. A recent Front Line Defenders report found that in 2017, more than 300 human rights defenders – 80 percent of which were from Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and the Philippines – were killed. “An analysis of the work done by those killed is instructive: 67 percent were engaged in the defence of land, environmental, and indigenous peoples’ rights and nearly always in the context of mega projects, extractive industry, and big business.

The version of the paper published here is heavily edited for length. The full version, along with citations, a bibliography and a syllabus for study groups, is available; for a copy and/or to be put in touch with the author and other activists in Wisconsin Citizen Action, write Organizing Upgrade at info@organizingupgrade.com.

Los Angeles is the wage theft capital of the United States. Workers here lose $26 million to wage theft every week according to the UCLA Labor Center. The crime has major impacts on local economies. It decreases taxable income, lowers wage standards, and in California alone is estimated to cost the state $7 billion in lost payroll taxes.

On Thursday, a federal court in California ruled that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) unlawfully detained thousands of suspected immigrants on the basis of unconstitutional requests from ICE known as immigration detainers. “The court’s decision vindicates years of work by the Los Angeles immigrant community to challenge the Sheriff Department’s abuses and throws a major wrench in the Trump administration’s deportation machine,” said Jessica Bansal, litigation director of NDLON.

Over the course of their research, they conducted more than 100 interviews with tenants who are essentially renting from Wall Street firms. The report tells the stories of absurd rent increases, dangerous failures in property management, and high eviction rates. And, as the authors note, lower income families and people of color are disproportionately affected by these practices.

Records obtained through a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request reveal that the United States Army Corps of Engineers inappropriately attempted to guide the companies funding DAPL toward providing an environmental justice analysis of the pipeline that would conclude that there was no disproportionate impact on a racial minority. Internal Corps email excerpts -- received through discovery by Earthjustice -- show the decision makers behind the pipeline wearing lenses fogged with racism.

In 2018, 12 Latin American countries from Mexico to Peru will hold elections at different levels: presidential, legislative and municipal. Of the 12 elections, seven are for their respective presidents in Costa Rica, Cuba, Paraguay, Colombia, México, Brazil, and Venezuela. What are the expectations?

From limiting abortion access to destabilizing the family planning safety net, Trump and social conservatives did considerable harm while also signaling their intentions for further attacks in the years ahead.

There is new interest in the slaughter and massacres that took place during the Vietnam War. This may in part be a response to the fact that last month (January 2018) marked the 50th anniversary of that war’s Tet offensive. In Vietnam many of the massacres (My Lai was by no means unique) were perpetrated by soldiers as well as their officers from the so-called “land of the free.” I use this descriptive term intentionally because one of the things that is often declared to be constitutionally “free” from rational regulation in the U.S. are guns.