Portside

Our aim is to build an independent base of political power that can put forward our progressive, populist values and mean it. America actually needs a political movement that can say that increasing union density is a good thing, without blushing. One that knows that declining wages and eroding retirement security are not a “new normal” we must adjust to; that market solutions are not always wise; and that an increasingly financialized economy only benefits the top.

An argument for additional alimentary arthropods

Why Marxist playwright Berthold Brecht is theater’s hottest old name

In Germany, auto workers get paid well and their companies still profit. Author Thom Hartmann on why living wages and corporate success don't have to be mutually exclusive.

It has taken almost a year of emails, letters and pressure, but at least some of New Mexico's contratistas (farm labor contractors) are finally paying farmworkers the minimum wage they're entitled to

Impatient hedge-fund billionaires do not attempt to conceal their contempt for the rest of us. They are used to making money—fast. Witness what they have done to large segments of the overall economy. Education does not thrive in those conditions, because there is no standard of perfection in any schoolhouse that can survive brutal suppression of uniformity imposed by clumsy testing. A successful school not only makes room for dissent. It constantly nourishes it.

A new report suggests that union membership has increased in New York City and State, particularly in the private sector.

Trying to explain rising inequality without talking about unions is like explaining why the train is late – the tracks are worn, the weather is bad – without noting that one of its engines has been sabotaged.

RAD is a second cousin to everything from privatized highways to the Affordable Care Act, which keeps the public provision and modest expansion of health insurance mostly private. It could be more cost-effective to just appropriate more direct funds to the program and keep it in the public sector, but Congress is not about to do so.

American kids are getting ready to head back to school. But the schools they’re heading back to differ dramatically by family income. Which helps explain the growing achievement gap between lower and higher-income children. Thirty years ago, the average gap on SAT-type tests between children of families in the richest 10 percent and bottom 10 percent was about 90 points on an 800-point scale. Today it’s 125 points.