Portside

Everyone deserves a great public education, but better schools alone can’t fight inequality.

Heck, the LA Times said authorities are cautioning that it is too soon even to call the shootings a “hate crime.” Since the shooter is said to have shouted “Heil Hitler,” I’m going to go out on a limb and say it was a hate crime. And I’m also pretty sure it was a form of terrorism.

University of California unionized grad-student instructors lead higher-ed fight for fair treatment.

Since the founding of public higher education, our nation has moved progressively toward expanding the doors of access. But in the last generation, we have moved in the opposite direction. State higher education funding on a per-student basis is lower today than it was in 1980. Federal financial aid no longer provides grants robust enough to defray the rising cost of college.

In her new book, All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power, Nomi Prins traces the hundred-year history of collusion between Washington and Wall Street. Prins reveals how a small number of bankers have played critical roles in shaping a century’s worth of financial, foreign and domestic policy in the United States including the Federal Reserve, the response to the Great Depression, and the founding of the IMF and the World Bank.

Across the northern plains, native grassland is being turned into farmland at a rate not seen since the 1920s. The environmental consequences could be disastrous.

When it comes to our immune response, genetics takes a back seat to pathogens.

Elevated long-term unemployment for all groups, like we see today, means that today’s long-term unemployment crisis is not due to something wrong with these workers, it is due to the fact that businesses across the board simply haven’t needed to significantly increase hiring because they haven’t seen demand for their goods and services pick up enough to warrant it.

The current issue of the "International Journal of Labour Research," which is published by the ILO, is concerned with the relationship of unions and worker cooperatives. It is titled, "Trade Unions and Worker Cooperatives: Where are We at?" Rob Witherell, of the United Steel Workers Union has an article in this issue, " An Emerging Solidarity: Worker Cooperatives, Unions, and the New Union Cooperative Model in the United States".

“Paul Robeson: A Watched Man” A book by Jordan Goodman. “Paul Robeson,” historian Joseph Dorinson ruefully wrote in the 2002 introduction to his co-edited collection of essays about him, “is the greatest legend nobody knows.”