Portside

Republican Governor Bruce Raynor launches ferocious attack on organized labor in Illinois. The Governor has aimed his attack against both public and private sector workers. This goes beyond Wisconsin Governor Walker whose attack was mainly aimed at public sector employees.

In Chicago, many have used the energy and opening created by these ongoing protests to re-animate existing long-term anti-police violence campaigns. On Saturday afternoon, hundreds of people gathered at the Chicago Temple to show our love for police torture survivors on the day after Jon Burge was released from house arrest. The gathering was billed as a people’s hearing and rally in support of a reparations ordinance currently stalled in the Chicago City Council.

The new Detroit renaissance does not address why the city declined in the first place. It does little to address poverty, unemployment and access to resources for the vast majority of the city’s residents. What’s worse, the gentrification of downtown Detroit contributes to greater inequality and polarisation, which are growing challenges for cities around the world.

Through a request under South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act, EFF found that, over the last three years, prison officials have brought more than 400 disciplinary cases for “social networking”—almost always for using Facebook. The offenses come with heavy penalties. In 16 cases, inmates were sentenced to more than a decade in what’s called disciplinary detention, with at least one inmate receiving more than 37 years in isolation.

Ai-jen Poo's 'The Age of Dignity' bridges the gap between the concrete political and practical challenges of an aging population—and the harder moral questions of how we ought to treat our elders and how we imagine our own aging and death. The book is part testimony from caregivers and recipients; part manifesto, urging us to see the new demographic reality in a positive light; and, more cautiously, part exploration of how we might do better by our senior citizens.

KIM BARKER: I would argue that if you're wondering why your government is so broke and you can't really get anything passed through Congress, campaign finance has a lot to do with that.

... most people are aware that Wall Street crashed the economy and rode out of town scot-free, collecting unimaginably huge bonuses along the way. But vagueness breeds passivity. Fortunately, we now have Bob Ivry’s Seven Sins of Wall Street as an indispensable guide for tracking down live villains and unburied bodies. By the time you reach the end, all the sheer fury anyone with the merest flutter of a moral pulse felt back in 2008/2009 wells up again, white hot.

Wall Street banks handed out $26.7 billion in bonuses to their 165,200 employees last year. That amount would be enough to more than double the pay for all 1,085,000 Americans who work full-time at the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

The National Union of Healthcare Workers says it's prevailed in a March 19 do-over election at Seton Medical Center over its arch-rival, the Service Employees' International Union, but the other side says the verdict isn't official yet.