We have Human Rights Watch. Why not Irony Watch? To wit: U.S. President Barack Obama issued an executive order on Monday declaring Venezuela a national security threat… … “We’ve seen many times that the Venezuelan government tries to distract from its own actions by blaming the United States or other members of the international community for events inside Venezuela,” [White House spokesman Josh] Earnest said in the statement.”  

While we’re all arguing about what went down in Wisconsin and about the state of the labor movement, I hope we can agree that the rights of labor are central to any notion of a decent and just society.  Sadly, that proposition remains controversial, and even liberals have retreated from it in recent decades.  (Which is why this post from liberal political theorist Elizabeth Anderson was so refreshing!) In this must-read piece, Mark Ames details the sorry retreat of prominent human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the ACLU from any real commitment to labor rights.  Ames doesn’t mention two excellent reports that the ACLU and Human Rights Watch did prepare on the rights of labor—The Rights […]