This article was written for Mexican Labor News and Analysis and therefore emphasizes NAFTA’s impact on Mexico.

The Three Amigos summit meeting of President Barack Obama of the United States, President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico, and President Stephen Harper of Canada just held in Mexico amounted to little more than a reaffirmation of the neoliberal agenda represented by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that took effect twenty years ago.

My problem with Julia's analysis is that it repeats the standard line that is being repeated throughout the press regardless of political point of view. I think there are two main problems with this party line.

While we recognize that the following statement represents the point of view of a small minority both within the Ukrainian rebellion and in Ukraine at large, we reprint it here nonetheless, thinking that it is an important statement of the left. – Editors.

Euromaidan and a Program for the Left

Euromaidan’s popularity has nothing to do with Ukrainians finding the question of free trade with the European Union so significant that it emboldened them to survive sleepless nights on the square. The country’s socioeconomic problems, which are much more acute than those of its neighbors to the East and West, gave the protest its meaning.

There’s no single recipe for building the social movement we need to make public education what it should be, to nurture and protect democracy and kids’ well-being.  But we can see essential ingredients coming together in many different places.

Dear Friends,

As the uprising in Ukraine seems to be coming to a crisis after weeks of mass demonstrations and occupations, I would like to translate for you the following letter received last week from Julia Gusseva, the Russian translator of Victor Serge and co-organizer of the International Conference of Independent Labor Unions in Kiev last November. Julia, an activist since the ‘80s, is one of the founders of the Praxis Center in Moscow, and writes from an anarcho-syndicalist viewpoint.

Four Argentine oil workers were convicted last December 12 of having killed a policeman in the midst of a strike and a demonstration demanding the release of a jailed union member. The four—Ramón Cortez, José Rosale, Franco Padilla, and Hugo González—were sentenced to life in prison, while six other defendants were each sentenced to five years in prison on charges of coercion.

Steve Kindred, an irrepressible American radical— student and antiwar activist, socialist, and labor organizer—died of cancer on December 9, 2013 in New York City at the age of 69.

In California a legal battle is being fought that has political implications for teachers everywhere.  It’s being cast – incorrectly –  as a confrontation between teachers’ jobs and students’ rights.

Bhaskar Sunkara, editor and publisher of Jacobin, has written an article for Al Jazeera America that, while ostensibly a defense of the great American songwriter and folk singer Pete Seeger, is actually an apologia for the American Communist Party.

            Is the push for preschool something we should celebrate?  Yes and no.

Susan Weissman. Victor Serge: A Political Biography. New York: Verso, 2013. Notes. Biographical glossary. Bibliography. Index. 452 pages.

From its opening pages Susan Weissman’s Victor Serge: A Political Biography thrusts us into the life of this remarkable revolutionary and writer as he plunges into the Russian Revolution with all of its contradictions. Weissman has written a wonderful intellectual and, above all, political life of Serge that focuses on his experience in the Bolshevik Party and then in the Left Opposition, explaining how he attempted to understand and express through his journalism, essays, histories, memoir, novels and poems the meaning of it all as the workers’ revolution first faltered and was then transformed into the Stalinist regime. Weissman’s Victor Serge takes up virtually all of the major incidents, issues, and personalities of the revolution during the 1920s and 1930s, giving particular attention to Serge’s coincidences and differences with Leon Trotsky.

     It’s hard to overstate how frightened US teachers are in many schools and districts.  We know from research that many teachers in schools now chose this career because they love kids and/or their subject matter.  Some of activists in social justice causes but many have never taken an interest in what they’ve viewed as “politics,” remote from their work.  These teachers aren’t prepared for the ferocity of the attack they’ve experienced, and teachers unions have been so weakened, legally and politically, that teachers