Portside

As yet another scandal involving Medicare Advantage made headlines this week, progressive U.S. lawmakers and advocates renewed calls to abolish the private health insurance program.

Lately, in the West, the sentiment on the prospects of a peaceful end to the war imposed on the Ukrainian people is heard more and more often. But are such negotiations possible, and who will benefit from them? And does Putin actually want peace?

The gun control movement has won important legislative and legal victories since the massacre at the Connecticut elementary school a decade ago. But not significant federal legislation.

The American media needs to call this movement what it is, fascism, and demand accountability and answers from the thousands of Republican politicians nationwide who refuse to repudiate it.

Reader Comments: Brittney Griner; Kyrsten Sinema; Rail Unions; Why Unions?; Peru - Background to a Coup; Jewish Groups Oppose Rep. McCarthy’s Threats; Executions and Violent Suppression in Iran; Democratic Lawmakers Visit Havana; more ....

We should use all our leverage to influence corporations, civil society, our government to support projects around the world committed to working-class liberation without unconditional support or unconditional condemnation of any particular regime.

Bernie Sanders says he is "prepared to run for president of the United States." That's not a formal announcement. A lot can change between now and 2016, and the populist senator from Vermont bristles at the whole notion of a permanent campaign. But Sanders has begun talking with savvy progressive political strategists, traveling to unexpected locations such as Alabama...

Washington raised the minimum wage in 1998 linking it to inflation. In the 15 years that followed, the state's minimum wage climbed to $9.32 - highest in the country. Meanwhile job growth continued at an average 0.8 percent annual pace, 0.3 percentage point above the national rate. Payrolls at Washington's restaurants and bars, portrayed as particularly vulnerable to higher wage costs, expanded by 21 percent. Poverty has trailed the U.S. level for at least seven years

Reader Comments - International Women's Day; Cecily McMillan; Ukraine; Venezuela; Are Unions Necessary?; Gov. Christie and Bridgegate; What the Hell Is Barack Obama's Presidency For?; War in Iraq; Announcements - Dignity in Action -San Francisco -Mar 8; Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Commemoration -New York - Mar 25; New book - Save Our Unions: Dispatches from A Movement in Distress; Today in History - Supreme Court rules in Dred Scott - March 6, 1857

"Moral Mondays" movement spreads in South as a coalition of the NAACP, other activist organizations, including unions, rallied Monday in Tallahassee, one day ahead of the opening of Florida's 2014 legislative session.