Portside

Gov. Bruce Rauner is on track to spend $50 million on legislative races this year. Even for a guy like Rauner, that’s a lot of money– nearly twice what he spent on his own campaign two years ago. Two Rauner allies, billionaires Ken Griffin and Richard Uihlein, are also spending tens of millions of dollars. The end game is taking down unions and squelching voting rights.

New details are emerging about how AT&T has been spying on Americans for profit with a secret plan called Project Hemisphere.

Voting rights advocates have won a string of court battles, but state election officials have found ways to restrict early voting anyway—often at the behest of GOP leaders. ----- Rethinking about our two party system and our election system: Ranked-choice voting opens up elections to a broader, more diverse range of candidates and ideas. ----- Modernizing our voter registration system.

Historians are so accustomed to viewing slaveholders at the top of a complex pyramid of class, racial, and gender hierarchies in Southern society that we forgot that they were also the nation’s most powerful political leaders, and the world’s most powerful slaveholding class. Only in the past fifteen years or so have historians begun to look more systematically at slaveholders as leading national and international actors, as well as Southern social elites.

Rank-and-File Union Members Challenge AFL-CIO Leadership's Support for Pipeline. A delegation from Labor For Standing Rock, comprised of rank-and-file workers and union members to mobilize growing labor support for the First Nation's fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock camp the weekend of October 29.

The pilot of Good Girls Revolt does a good job of setting the scene for why the women decide to sue in the first place, even if the gender discrimination lawsuit that inspired the series isn’t even mentioned as a possibility until episode two.

The Movement for Black Lives is calling on cities to launch participatory budgeting processes to make public spending fairer.

Cohn became the Trumps' lawyer and filed a $100,000 million countersuit against the government for defaming the Trumps. But in this case Cohn's bluster didn't work. The Justice Dept. had solid evidence of discrimination, and Cohn had nothing. The Trumps eventually settled and agreed to make apartments available to minority renters.

The current deadlock on the Supreme Court makes it particularly attractive for plaintiffs looking to block Obama administration policies to file suit in federal courts in Texas, sometimes directing their cases to particular judges there. Any appeals go to the 5th Circuit, widely viewed as the most conservative federal appeals court in the country.

The shocking images of the National Guard destroying tepees and sweat lodges and arresting elders this week remind us that the battle over the Dakota Access Pipeline is part of the longest-running drama in American history -- the United States Army versus Native Americans.