Portside

 Despite hyped-up media accounts, Bernie-or-Bust was just one of many directions explored in Chicago.

Birmingham, Alabama, 74% African-American, with 47 % of its children living in poverty passed a minimun wage bill to take effect this March. Republican in the State House passed legislation to undue the measure, taking away the right of local juristiction to enact labor ordinances that impact workers. As a result, 42,000 low-wage workers in Birmingham lost wages increases. Now workers are fighting back with a state-wide Living Wage campaign.

It is no coincidence that CEO pay has reached astronomical levels at the same time that income inequality has widened to a level not seen since the eve of the Great Depression or even the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. A wide body of scholarship has linked the two. CEOs, who earn 335 times the pay of their average employee, make up a big chunk of the 1 percent. Some ideas to change that are kicking around.

Five thousand members of the Minnesota Nurses (MNA) walked out June 19, kicking off a weeklong strike at five Allina hospitals in the Twin Cities. The immediate sticking point is health insurance, but this is also a showdown over nurses’ power on the job, as Allina pushes to hand over staffing decisions to a robot.

As these and other thoughtful observers acknowledge, the question is not an easy one. On the one hand, in the U.K., the movement to leave is led by the right — with a generous sprinkling of racist elements — and a Brexit victory would likely strengthen their hand. On the other hand, the EU has increasingly become a neoliberal project and — partly because neoliberalism generally requires it — an anti-democratic one.

A historian debunks liberal myths about racism, the New Deal, and why the Democrats moved right.

Neoliberal policies and practices dominate the European Commission, European Parliament, European Central Bank, European Court of Justice and a compliant media legitimises the whole conquest. This has left the EU constitution as the only one in the world that enshrines neoliberal economics into its text. Therefore the EU is not – and never can be – either socialist or a democracy.

Net Neutrality yes; Decoding the decision; Comcast’s 3-card monte; Monday surprise; Refugees and tech

Leave’s libertarians will destroy the welfare state. The desire to give the ruling class two fingers is understandable, but we must resist this false patriotism.

'Indian Point' directed by Ivy Meeropol takes an unblinking look at the dramatic debate over nuclear power by going inside the aging plant that looms just 35 miles from New York City. With over 50 million people living in close proximity to the facility, it has stoked a great deal of controversy in the surrounding community, including a vocal anti-nuclear contingent concerned that the kind of disaster that happened at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant could happen here,