Portside

Mythology has hidden the true history of how and why the great grape strike started, especially its connection to some of the most radical movements in the country's labor history. After 50 years that silence is lifting. Dawn Mabalon, a history professor at San Francisco State University, has documented the radical career of Larry Itliong, who headed the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), one of the two organizations that carried out the 1965 strike.

Thousands are still imprisoned on federal drug charges who, without presidential clemency, will most likely die behind bars. In 2013, 98,200 people (more than half the federal prison population) were in prison for drug offenses such as trafficking and possession. Within the federal prison system, the overall imprisonment rate for Black women is more than twice that of white women. Latinas are also imprisoned at a higher rate than their white counterparts.

Nike has radically transformed its feminist credentials globally. Few organizations carry as much global power and authority on the economic needs of young poor women as the Nike Foundation, which was founded in 2004 and is led by CEO Maria Eitel, former special media assistant for President George H.W Bush [1]. Under Eitel’s leadership, Nike has turned into a global ‘adolescent girls expert', whose campaigns are endorsed by international women’s rights groups.

The controversy over UC’s use of thousands of contract workers who earn low wages with few, if any, benefits has taken center stage in Sacramento, where legislation that would end such practices cleared the Legislature earlier this month.

Environmental organizations in the U.S. are staffed nearly entirely by whites with little representation by people of color, contributing to a perception that communities of color are not interested in environmental issues. But a poll released this summer surveying 1,200 Latino voters across the country challenged this notion, finding that there is, in fact, broad concern for the environment among Latino voters.

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.

According to those intimately involved in the response to the West African Ebola outbreak, NewLink Genetics owns the rights to a piece of the puzzle needed to quickly test and deploy one of two likely Ebola vaccines and they are holding up the entire process because they are not entirely sure they are going to get rich on it. Others suggest it is incompetence. NewLink seems to be claiming it is just a lot of paperwork.