Portside

Here is a necessary addition to the literature on FBI harassment of Americans and on U.S. social movements over the last century.

Chi-Raq begins with a devastating overture, Pray 4 My City, with the lyrics printed directly on the screen, impossible to ignore. 'I don’t live in Chicago, I live in Chi-Raq,' it concludes, using the controversial nickname given to the city where gun deaths outnumber those in America’s foreign wars. Narrator Dolmedes, Samuel L Jackson, explains that communities under siege aren’t a new phenomenon, and explains how previous authors wrote about such tales.

The service Portside provides is in greater demand than ever. Thousands are discovering that there is a Left in the US, and our daily posts help give a sense of its real scope, however diverse and organizationally diffuse. We turn for you to help because as we grow, so do our financial needs. We will continue, but to measure up to a re- charged and re-vitalized movement, your contributions will make all the difference.

The court is considering whether to overrule its 1977 decision allowing states to require public employees to join a union or pay a fee to cover collective bargaining costs. A win for the plaintiffs—a group of California teachers who say they oppose union efforts to increase pay and protect job security—could cripple public sector unions in about two dozen states that have “agency fee” laws.

To combat the voices of health advocates who expressed concerns on the health effects of the Standard American Diet, which is high in processed foods, the food industry cast doubt and reframed the conversation on processed foods.

How to Promote a Just Transition and Break Out of the Jobs vs. Environment Trap

This new series on Amazon imagines a world in which the Axis powers triumphed in World War II and carved up America into three zones: the Greater Nazi Reich in the East and Midwest, ruled from New York; the Japanese Pacific States, ruled from San Francisco; and a derelict neutral zone splitting them, running roughly along the Rocky Mountains.

The victory of the therapists, counselors, and social workers at Kaiser Permanente in California is a landmark, in healthcare and above all in mental healthcare. The bottom line: these workers have won patient care ratios, they’ve won the right to advocate for patients, and they won these in a context of a nationwide drive to cut costs and press productivity in an industry awash in cash.

There might not be too many young workers represented by unions yet, but that doesn't mean they don't want to be.

From Alexis Rhone Fancher"s State of Grace (2015), an elegy to her son Joshua, we find compassion mixed with irony, grief with dark humor, as the poet's life must go in an absurd world.