Portside

If those who are prosecuting this onslaught against our public schools succeed, they will have made workers more insecure, created a compliant, alienated, and low-wage labour force, and devised new ways to make money – a massive testing industry, for-profit schools, consulting services. They will also have put another nail in the coffin of democracy.

The play, which ran in San Francisco from May 9th to June 16th, had an all-male ensemble of 10 actors who portrayed the stories and sentiments of many of the soldiers in the much-lauded, 300-year-old Scots Highland Regiment known as “The Black Watch.” The script, by writer Gregory Burke, was faithfully based on his months of interviews – in, yes, pubs – with former Black Watch troops who had completed two tours of duty in Iraq (2003 & 2004) and one in Afghanistan (2009)

A new report put out by Public Citizen found that in 2010, healthcare workers (including hospital staff) reported 653,900 workplace injuries and illnesses. That’s approximately 152,000 more (a 432 percent higher rate) than the industry with the second highest number of injuries—manufacturing—even though the healthcare sector is only 134 percent larger than the manufacturing sector.

Gov. Snyder’s plan to suspend democracy, drive one of America’s largest cities into bankruptcy and deprive workers of their hard-earned retirement security, moved dangerously closer to reality today when without a single negotiation with unions, workers or retirees, Snyder authorized Detroit’s financial manager to file for bankruptcy.

Those of us who research race, racism and inequality must continue to name racism without sugarcoating it; to analyze the ways in which racism is maintained and produced inside and outside of our discipline. Most important, we need to interrogate the new hidden forms of structural racism and deconstruct, in the best sense of the word, the ways in which racism expresses itself in the age of "post-racial color blindness."

By controlling warehouses, pipelines and ports, banks gain valuable market intelligence, investment analysts say. That, in turn, can give them an edge when trading commodities. In the stock market, such an arrangement might be seen as a conflict of interest — or even insider trading. But in the commodities market, it is perfectly legal. In 2011, an internal Goldman memo suggested that speculation by investors accounted for about a third of the price of a barrel of oil.

Most workers in the U.S. look to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for standards to protect them from exposure to hazardous chemicals. Protection for farmworkers from pesticides is left to the EPA's authority under the Worker Protection Standard of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act ("FIFRA"), a standard that is far more lenient than OSHA rules and is fundamentally inadequate.

An inspiring grassroots movement is fighting back against the GOP’s outrageous budget cuts and attacks on democracy.

When the Earth caught fire, killing the dinosaurs, fresh water ecosystems did ok.

The logical consequences of Silicon Valley capitalism: Social stratification and class antagonism