Portside

About 8% of teachers leave the field each year, due to long workdays, low salaries and challenging conditions. Some predict a gap of 112,000 teachers by 2018. Some states are lowering the bar for teaching jobs. But there are plenty of good ideas about how to support teachers and improve the jobs in order to lower turnover and improve morale.

While the U.S. set up the electoral system in the Philippines, the feudal/comprador classes manipulate it so that personalities, not ideology, and bribery determine the outcome. Democracy in the Philippines is actually the rule of the privileged minority of landlords, bureaucrat capitalists, and business partners of foreign mega-corporations (called compradors) over the majority. All presidential candidates promise change for the better.

Instead of gifting sugar-laden sweets, try giving more nutritious snacks. Here are some fun ideas that serve as enjoyable and thoughtful gifts, and which can be motivational nudges toward living a healthier lifestyle.

The day after the Army handed down its decision on the Dakota Access Pipeline, it announced a public hearing on water permits for another controversial Energy Transfer Partners project: the Bayou Bridge Pipeline, which would cut through the ecologically important Atchafalaya Basin wetlands in south central Louisiana. The hearing will take place in Baton Rouge on Jan. 12.

How to Swamp Washington and Double-cross Your Supporters Big Time.

In collaboration with the Garment Worker Center and UCLA Occupational Safety and Health (UCLA LOSH), the UCLA Labor Center just released Dirty Threads, Dangerous Factories: Health and Safety in Los Angeles’ Fashion Industry. The study finds that fast fashion, an approach that moves garments from design to shelf at an accelerated pace, leads to dangerous working conditions for garment workers.

Trump’s recent cabinet nominations show deep allegiance to Wall Street and his intention to continue the policies of displacement, gentrification and rising rents at the expense of the American People.

Democrats were wrong to think that shifting demographics alone would hand them victory. What then determines whether workers respond to economic grievances with nativism or solidarity? In a word, organization.

Ta-Nehisi Coates explores President Barack Obama’s journey to the White House

It’s not enough to know the science (or history). You have to know the pseudoscience (or pseudohistory) inside and out. You have to know how science has been twisted, the studies that pseudoscientists will reference, and how they will misrepresent them. It takes a special skill set to combat pseudoscience and science denialism, and few academics have it.