Portside

Nurses as Housekeepers at Vanderbilt Medical Center: An Untold Story Behind the Story.

Forty years after founding the Children’s Defense Fund, which advocates for federal and state resources for children, Edelman is still at work in the fund’s red brick building on E Street NW, displaying at 74 the same passion she had in 1967, when she was a 27-year-old civil rights attorney leading Sen. Robert F. Kennedy through the Mississippi Delta.

We need to be a nationally networked movement of many local, regional and issue-focused groups so we can unite into one mass movement. Research shows that nonviolent mass movements win. Fringe movements fail. By ‘mass’ we mean with an objective that is supported by a large majority and 1 percent to 5 percent of the population actively working for transformation.”

In today’s United States, labor unions and Latino voters are two key pillars of progressive politics. Yet when Eliseo Medina worked for the UFW from 1965-1978, the situation was very different. The UFW was the only union that prioritized grassroots electoral outreach, and among the few groups focused on registering Latino voters and getting them out the vote. Medina would play a key role in expanding this UFW model nationally, and through the broader labor movement.

At the top of the federal government, even a brief shutdown of “core NSA operations” is unthinkable. But at the grassroots, a permanent shutdown of the NSA should be more than thinkable; we should strive to make it achievable.

SEIU 721, which represents 55,000 who've had no raise in five years, plans to protest county's proposed 6%-raise-over-30-months offer.

When one of Britain's best-known science writers went to Los Angeles to meet the show's writers for a new book, he found a team dedicated to inserting gags about complex math problems. And you thought it was just a cartoon…

The explicit and enduring ramifications of Wal-Mart v. Dukes are still to be determined. Two years later, it’s becoming clear just how much the ruling has reshaped the American legal landscape. But it’s not as though everyone is rolling up their tents and going home.