Portside

The US now is less equal and socially mobile than Europe. Many say education is key to addressing this growing inequality. But the American education system is an offshoot of an increasingly class-driven society, where Americans from different class backgrounds are living in what are effectively becoming different countries. And this inequality threatens to perpetuate itself "almost automatically."

Thirty years since the Union Carbide gas leak tragedy, Bhopal is a city defined—and divided—by the disaster. Authorities labeled 36 wards gas-affected and 20 wards gas unaffected. Today, the contrasts between these areas are clear. The gas-affected areas are home to shanty towns where the deaths took place. They surround the now-dilapidated factory. It is in these towns that the legacy of the 30-year-old gas disaster lives on.

Policymakers have to figure out how to turn economic growth into wage growth for the bottom 90 percent. Otherwise the American Dream will just turn into another fairy tale.

Eric Garner and Michael Brown are just two of many victims of white supremacy in America

Low wage workers in more than 180 cities stage strikes and demonstrations demanding a $15 minimum wage and the right to organize. They are protesting an economic order in which they have no way to breathe.

We find ourselves at a similar moment, fifty years after that critical turning point in civil rights movement history, with “Again?” on our lips and a familiar feeling of dread in response to the violence we witness on the video of the killing of Eric Garner, the incredible amount of force used on a man who announced over and over again, “I can’t breathe.” We need again vision and big thinking—a commitment to playing offense and addressing the problems at their roots.

Chokehold Death Protests. Economic Agenda for America. Springsteen: My Oklahoma Home. She's Beautiful When She's Angry. The Feather and the Cannonball.

Reader Comments- Race inequality...by the Numbers; Darren Wilson Acquittal; Workers and Students Leave Jobs, Classes in Nationwide Walkout for Ferguson; Thanksgiving; Univ of Virginia Finally Confronts Its Rape Problem; Madison Teachers Recertify Union; Walmart Black Friday Protests; Price of 13-Year War on Terror; Chile; Israel's Jewish State Bill; 2014 and Future Elections; ALEC Blueprint for 2015; Wanted: A Challenge to Clinton; Chicago's Mayoral Race (correction)

In a normal grand jury proceeding, the prosecutor presents evidence for a few days, then asks the grand jurors to return an indictment, which they nearly always do. Of 162,000 federal cases in 2010, grand juries failed to indict in only 11 of them. The standard of proof for a grand jury to indict is only probable cause to believe the suspect committed a crime. It is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which is required for conviction at trial.

Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning exhibit something of Eugene Debs' understanding that dissent is not disloyalty. Drawing on the courage of - yes - Warren Harding, and while offering clemency would not be politically easy, it would in time [to] burnish Barack Obama's dubious civil liberties legacy.