By Howard Ryan

Parents raised the stakes in the battle over the corporate takeover of education when they occupied a Chicago school Friday. They didn't reverse the school board's "turnaround," but they did crack a wall of silence from city leaders.

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by Carolyn J. Jacobson

While Catholic bishops are organizing to get religious-affiliated institutions exempted from providing contraceptive coverage, some unions and women’s organizations are counter-mobilizing. They want to defeat a proposal that would allow employers or insurance companies to refuse coverage of any health care service based on undefined “religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

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by Mark Brenner

Hard to believe, but a scrappy rank-and-file magazine and organizing institute, founded in 1979 to bring together leaders from an inspiring string of wildcat strikes and union reform caucuses, turns 33 today.

Labor Notes has grown a lot since then, training thousands of activists at 10 regional Troublemaker Schools last year and publishing a daily stream of unique news and analysis about unions and work, from labor's point of view.

Labor Notes is more than a website and magazine.

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By Jane Slaughter

Michigan’s top union leaders are deciding whether to attempt to amend the state constitution to block emergency managers and a "right to work" law through a ballot initiative this November.

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by Lenny Potash

Though it’s passed the legislature twice before, a bill to establish a single-payer universal health insurance system in California failed in the state senate in January. Democrats and much of labor hung back, showing how the national health care law looms over state efforts.

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By Jane Slaughter

Ending the most heated conflict labor has seen in years, the Longshore Union (ILWU) and transnational grain exporter EGT announced they had reached a deal. The union's path there was filled with risks.

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By Theresa Moran

Two years after President Obama and Democrats abandoned labor’s much-anticipated Employee Free Choice Act, they have refused to block Republicans intent on making life miserable for airline and rail workers.

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By Jenny Brown

Wrenching testimonies from laid-off workers are overflowing the internet, crying out from the pages of policy reports, and popping up in commercial media. But unions are still grappling with how to organize the unemployed into a political force.

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By Jerry Mead-Lucero

Two Chicago worker centers are fighting for hundreds of laid-off workers left in the wake of sudden business closures, still owed back pay. Advocates say such mass firings are not uncommon.

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By Theresa Moran

Wisconsin public workers face harsher work rules and shrinking paychecks as contracts expire and Governor Scott Walker’s anti-union bill sets in. Unions find they must shift from a servicing model to organizing in order to survive.

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According to this story (at the very bottom), Mayor Michael Bloomberg says he has never contributed to Americans Elect, although he praises Americans Elect and says that the more choices for voters, the better.

If Buddy Roemer gets the Americans Elect nomination, and if Gary Johnson gets the Libertarian nomination, and if Virgil Goode gets the Constitution Party nomination, 2012 will be the first presidential election in U.S. history in which five parties each had a presidential nominee, each of whom was also a declared candidate, and each of whom had served either in Congress or as a Governor.

Of course, this presumes that the 2012 Republican nominee will be a person who has served either as a Governor or in Congress.

Another historical note, assuming the candidates named above become nominees, will be that the Libertarian Party will be the second non-major party in U.S. history to have run as many as three presidential nominees, each of whom had once been a Governor or a member of Congress. The three, for the Libertarian Party besides Gary Johnson, are Ron Paul and Bob Barr. The only other minor party that has had at least three former members of Congress, or former Governors, as nominees, is the American Independent Party, which had George Wallace, John Schmitz, Lester Maddox, and John Rarick.

On February 22, the Washington State Senate Government Operations Committee passed HB 1860, which provides for elections for party officers at the primary.

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by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The African American Left’s failure to formulate a Black Agenda has made it “largely irrelevant during the greatest crisis of capitalism since at least the Great Depression, and the worst economic and social crisis for African Americans since the death of Reconstruction.” The default Black Agenda is Obamaism, which is corporatism, and the death of Black politics. “If all that matters is Obama, then there is no need for a Black political agenda – except four more years of Obama.”

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by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

One out of three Americans believes Iran is this country’s greatest enemy – testimony to the corporate media’s powers of distortion and the grotesque national worldview that results. “We are told that Iran is poised to develop nuclear weapons, kill all Israelis, launch terror attacks in the United States and perhaps create bad weather too.” U.S. media have little value “beyond predicting when they will allow a president to begin carrying out bad deeds.”

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A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Bruce A. Dixon

The most successful organizations for economic self-help of the last hundred fifty years have been labor unions, and in the US, African Americans have been more likely to form and join unions than any other group. So when President Obama imposed new restrictions on organizing unions, and make it easier for companies to dismiss and disregard union contracts he struck a blow first and hardest against black collective action for economic security.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20120222_bd_collective_economic_selfhelp.mp3

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A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

Educational policy in the Obama era isn't about education at all. It's about replacing skilled, experienced teachers with rootless temps better suited to serve in the privatized holding tanks they wish to turn public schools in poor neighborhoods into, for a population on its way to low wage jobs and prisons.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20120222_gf_ChicagoSchools.mp3

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A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Bruce A. Dixon

We hear all the time about what geniuses the masters of capital, the lords of innovative technologies and global supply chains are. But are modern supply chains really that different from the transAtlantic slave trade, which brought genocide of Native American and African peoples and destruction of natural environments?

http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20120222_bd_myth_of_capitalist_efficiency.mp3

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by Marsha Coleman-Adebayo

Barack Obama campaigned under a banner of transparency in government, but has proven to be the most secrecy-fixated president of all time. Across the breadth of the bureaucracy, there is a mania to hide the facts from the people. “Senior leaders of the Department of Defense intentionally and consistently misled the American people and Congress about success in the Afghan War.” Public employees labor in fear. “These agencies are corrupt and we are still on the bus fighting like Rosa.”

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by Kevin Alexander Gray

Jeremy Lin may be an ethnic novelty, but there’s nothing new or fresh about the way some folks have reacted to his displays of skill. “One can never underestimate the capacity of people to be ignorant or stupid.”

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