Portside

The people’s veto of SB 5 was a triumph of organization, and of labor’s ability to tell its story to ordinary people. I draw out its lessons for organizers in my book, Collective Bargaining and the Battle of Ohio: The Defeat of Senate Bill 5 and the Struggle to Defend the Middle Class. Worse than simply “right to work,” the 500-page SB 5 was designed to destroy public unions’ ability to operate—or even, in some cases, to exist.

While healthcare workers in Liberia threatened to strike over the dangers of treating ebola patients, nurses in California rallied to demand better training and safety measures to protect nurses handling ebola in the United States.

Are hospitals prepared for dealing with Ebola? The National Nurses Union took a survey of nurses. So far, they say, the data received in the union's survey of more than 1,900 registered nurses at more than 750 hospitals in 46 states and the District of Columbia wasn't encouraging.

Last February, Morales and some of his colleagues, as well as parents whose students attend Holyoke public schools, spoke at a school committee meeting (the equivalent of a school board) and protested a directive from higher-ups to post students’ test scores on the walls of their classrooms, complete with the students’ names. Morales thinks his standing up to the administration has cost him his job. And a preliminary finding from the Ma. Department of Labor backs him up.

Morales, who became Bolivia's first indigenous leader in 2006, will now be able to extend his "indigenous socialism", under which he has nationalized key industries such as oil and gas to finance welfare programs and build new roads and schools.

Weeks after his 1492 landing in the Americas, Columbus thought he had found a large enough supply of gold and slaves to persuade the Christian "Sovereigns within three years [they] would undertake and prepare to go and conquer the Holy Places."Pope Urban II had launched the first Crusade four hundred years before. He hoped the current Pope would ask him to lead "50 thousand foot soldiers and five thousand horsemen" to march on Jerusalem. He never abandoned this hope.

Two years after we last investigated the the foreclosure crisis in most affluent black county in America, things aren't exactly looking up—except, maybe, for the banks.

Lorain unionists are searching for the best way to assert the political power they clearly possess, separate from the Democratic Party.

Are there (short term) political alternatives to the wealth tax to limit or reverse inequality?

Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen F. Cohen of The Nation offer a peek at their recent interview with Edward Snowden. Spencer Ackerman of The Guardian reviews Citizenfour, Laura Poitras' new documentary on Snowden.