Portside

With the Dow Jones industrial average flirting with a record high, the split between American workers and the companies that employ them is widening and could worsen in the next few months as federal budget cuts take hold.

Both Trumka and Communications Workers (CWA) President Larry Cohen, who heads the federation’s organizing committee, said on Tuesday that the goal was not just gaining new members or better contracts, important as they may be. Rather, Cohen said, labor would try to “connect the dots” among causes—such as immigrant rights, worker rights, campaign and voting reform—to build a mass movement for a strong democracy at work and in the public arena.

The AFL-CIO held a closed-door executive council meeting last week. The mood at the meeting, one AFL-CIO top staffer said, was that the future of the labor movement was at risk if they continued "business as usual."

Recent events have begun to cause labor activists to seriously consider if a hamstrung NLRB, and emboldened employers, could potentially inspire some unions to push the limits of labor law to try alternative means that are outside the law or if they can and should borrow the strategies used by the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to expand civil rights.

Obama needs to do something that doesn't come easily to him. He needs to demolish the previous terms of debate, some of them partly of his own making - he needs to disavow earlier mistaken policies that he embraced. Otherwise he will preside over the worst eight-year economic record of any Democratic president, and the steepest rate of decline in social spending. He will leave an economy even more unequal than he inherited. He needs to find the audacity to restore hope

A study, published last week in The New England Journal of Medicine, is now shaking up the field of cardiovascular medicine , infusing it with optimism This is a watershed moment in the field of nutrition, medical experts say. For the first time, researchers have shown that a diet can have an effect as powerful as drugs in preventing what really matters to patients — heart attacks, and strokes and deaths from cardiovascular disease.

Attacks against unknown militants reportedly may account for the majority of drone strikes. So what signatures does the U.S. look for and how much evidence is needed to justify a strike?

The latest skirmish in an escalating battle between ver.di, one of the largest unions in Germany, and Amazon, which employs 8,000 permanent workers at eight distribution centers in the country, one of the online retailer’s largest markets outside the United States. Deservedly or not, Amazon’s labor relations have lately come under intense scrutiny by German media.