Portside

Klaus Ernst, former co-chair of Germany's Left Party (Die Linke) and uion leader explains his party's opposition to TIPP and its position on the minimum wage and recent strike struggles.

With its numerous religious awakenings and repeated instances of religiosity as political theater, it's easy to forget US civic life is secular. Author Kevin Kruse argues that the effort to ground political rights in spiritual authority and not in democratic discussion and decision-making originated with a coterie of corporate heads, right-wing politicians, reactionary pastors and cultural icons as a bulwark against progressive politics and New Deal legislation.

Scholars are producing increasingly detailed accounts of how the U.S. government utilized artists and culture in the Cold War anti-Communist crusade. According to former diplomat John H. Brown, this new study, by Greg Barnhisel, shows that an important factor in making modernism work for U.S. Cold War interests involved "defanging modernism of its radicalism and turning it into an international vehicle for whitebread all-American convictions."

The bail system affects the poor disproportionately, and the legal outcomes for those who await trial behind bars are much worse than the outcomes for those who don't. The work of Pretrial Services Agency shows that alternatives to bail exist.

This week, members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus sent a letter to President Obama, with a copy to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, asking him to immediately commute the sentence of political prisoner Oscar López Rivera, a decorated Vietnam War veteran.

The New York Times and NPR recently released their summer reading recommendations. Their lists might lead you to believe that only white authors are writing books worthy of summer reading. Here are two alternative lists from The Root and Book Riot.

A new report “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women” by the African American Policy Forum (co-authored by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and Andrea J. Ritchie) offers the stories of girls and women—both cis- and transgender—whose names are not as well known in the mainstream and argues that fewer numbers is no excuse for erasure.

Demonstrators protest Mayor Libby Schaaf's new policy banning nighttime street protests.

Bernie Sanders has a long record of supporting pro-worker policies. Vermont union members learned long ago that the mutual benefit derived from their work with and for Sanders goes far beyond the results of labor’s usual (and sometimes tawdry) transactional relationships with public officeholders.

Of course, you don’t have to be homeless to use a library, but that’s the point. You don’t have to be anyone in particular to go inside and stay as long as you want, sit in its armchairs, read the news, write your dissertation, charge your phone, use the bathroom, check your email, find the address of a hotel or homeless shelter. Of all the institutions we have, both public and private, the public library is the truest democratic space.