Portside

Walmart just Fired 10 Strikers; Reader Comments - Rosenberg Case; North Carolina 'Moral Monday' Protests; NSA Spying; FBI's License to Kill; Syria; James Gandolfini; Summer Reading - what we missed; Population Decline and Climate Change; Message from Berlin Demonstration for Bradley Manning; March on Washington 50th Anniversary - Unfinished March Symposium - Washington DC - July 22; 60th Anniversary of Rosenberg's Execution - Carry it Forward - event report

Gar Alperovitz and Staughton Lynd have blueprints for an `America beyond capitalism.' Both imagine a new America that would evolve through painstaking process in which the virtues of democratic socialism would be prefigured. They offer a component of the answer to what a new New Left must do. Democracy and egalitarianism animates both visions, but neither fully imagines how the Left might gain and use state power or how to change the national or global economic rules.

Remember the phrase "good union job"? Living wages, basic safety protections, and guaranteed quality healthcare for life. Today Peabody Coal is taking away retiree health care and pensions, yet they have record profits. Why the fight for retiree pensions at Peabody Coal is in everyone's interest.

Can photographers be participants in the social events they document? Eighty years ago the question would have seemed irrelevant in the political upsurges of the 1930s, in both Mexico and the United States. Many photographers were political activists, and saw their work intimately connected to workers strikes, political revolution or the movements for indigenous rights. Now a book and a recent exhibition should reopen this debate.

The New Era Windows Cooperative opens its doors (and windows) for business. The workers know launching and running a company won't be easy, but given their deep knowledge of the industry and their personal investment in the project, they are confident they can do it.

Appeals Court rules NLRB cannot require employers to post notices informing employees of their labor rights. The decision, which comes less than three weeks after lack of regulatory enforcement led to a fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas that killed 14 and left about 200 injured, opens the door for businesses to challenge requirements that workers be informed of their health, safety and employment rights.

45 years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered this speech in support of the striking sanitation workers at Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ Headquarters), Memphis, Tennessee on April 3, 1968 - the day before he was assassinated.

March 8 is International Women's Day, launched a century ago by the international workers' movement. To mark the occasion, the UE NEWS asked labor historian Rosemary Feurer to write about the legendary labor organizer Mother Jones. When Mother Jones was mocked as the "grandmother of all agitators," in the U.S. Senate, Mother Jones replied that she would someday like to be called "the great-grandmother of all agitators."