Portside

Some critics, including some in the labor movement, suggest that unions have to abandon collective bargaining and pursue other strategies for worker gains, such as winning higher wages through legislation. But collective bargaining can still work, and it is still necessary.

Recent experiments show how sound can interplay with your sense of smell—and, thus, flavor—in the brain

From a flawed database that identified dozens of toddlers as gang members to an application process designed to provide deportation relief to young migrants, here are the systems that could hasten mass deportation efforts if used against immigrant communities.

On January 2, 2017 Portside posted "The End of Progressive Neoliberalism" by Nancy Fraser http://portside.org/2017-01-02/end-progressive-neoliberalism. Here is a reader response which call for a "critique of liberal multiculturalism and liberal feminism, while advancing a socialist-feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist vision. And let us try to leave behind the sectarian divisions that have hampered us and seize the opportunity to build a new left."

Many of the folks I know are getting ready to play serious defense in 2017, and they’re not wrong. Before we take up our three-point stance on the national line of scrimmage, however, maybe we should ask ourselves not only what we’re fighting against, but what we’re fighting for. What kind of United States of America do we actually want? Maybe, in fact, we could start by asking: What is a country for? What should a country do?

The Syrian tragedy is a key moral and political question today. Yet it has not been easy for leftists around the world to decide where they stand on Syria.To illuminate the history and nature of the Syrian conflict, Yusef Khalil for Jacobin conducted an extensive interview with Yasser Munif, a Syrian scholar who studies grassroots movements in the country.

“We don’t win anymore. As a country, we don’t win.” “We don’t want to use our military, honestly. We don’t want to use our military. But we’re being scoffed at right now and we never fight to win.” “It will change. We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning. Believe me.” Donald Trump on the state of America

At a time when police departments around the country are being criticized for a lack of a transparency, the arrival of Legal Aid’s "cop accountability" database represents a bold attempt to systematically track officers with a history of civil rights violations and other kinds of misbehavior, and thereby force judges, prosecutors, and juries to take the officers’ past actions into consideration when adjudicating cases.

Black history museums struggle to survive; The history of lynchings revealed and mapped; Blacks in the Holocaust; David Cole on Bryan Stevenson; Resurrecting Lucy Parsons

Karen Friedman, executive vice president and policy director at the nonprofit Pension Rights Center in Washington, is highly critical of the new law while acknowledging that pension reforms are needed. “We are not saying don’t fix multiemployer [plans],” Friedman said. But an act that allows plans to cut retiree pensions is “such a departure from current law,” she said. “It’s just such a buzz saw on retiree pensions.”