Portside

The wage gap between men and women in the U.S. shrunk drastically in the 1980s and early 1990s, as women joined the workforce in increasing numbers and earned degrees at higher rates, but the gap has remained relatively stagnant since the mid- to late 1990s. There's one major detriment to financial equality that women can't seem to shake: motherhood.

The restaurant industry includes 7 of the 10 lowest paying jobs in the country. Half of the women in the minimum wage workforce are tipped workers. Segregation of women, particularly women of color, in these jobs is a major contributor to the gender pay gap.

Recently, US airstrikes have claimed the lives of 200 civilians in Iraq, dozens were killed in separate strikes supposedly aimed at Islamic State in Syria and several more women and children died in a raid gone awry in Yemen. Those are just a few examples of the many attacks – launched under the pretext of defeating Isis – that wreaked havoc on civilian populations as the US military ramps up its bombing campaigns in multiple counties.

Through a very clever and subtle weaving together of archival footages, interviews, stereotypic images from racist advertizing from the thirties and forties, and from contemporary TV, we are provided with a historical context and an incredible graphic depiction of the momentous civil rights movement that swept the American south in those years, the lunch-counter sit-ins, the courageous fight to integrate the educational system, the voter registration drives, ...

Mélenchon’s election campaign has galvanized the Left by doing what Hamon couldn’t — making a clean break with the political center. In France, history is back. Here as elsewhere, the social tectonics of the great economic crisis of 2008 are doing their work. The routine presidential stables are recomposing at great speed. They are realigning political forces around the three options (Three Monsters) nestled within the infra-world of our political modernity.

War whoops; Killing O’Reilly; Neutering net neutrality; Hacker power; Chipped; Net on the bubble

Director Larraín has stated that the way Latin Americans think is shaped by poetry, by metaphor, and that his film is partly concerned with the power of poetry to move and influence. We are shown Neruda’s huge influence, as a communist poet, over his natural constituency: the ordinary working man... But what we do not see in the film is the immensely moving capacity of poetry to break down barriers between people of diametrically opposed political beliefs.

The attack on public sector unions intensifies. Public sector unions must now form audacious, coalitions and alliances with private sector unions, and those secular and spiritual organizations.

Scaffolding for an assessment of the correlation of forces after the battles from Trump's inauguration through the GOP's failure to repeal Obamacare, and what the next year may hold in store. Note added April 7: This piece was finalized just before Trump's air strike in Syria. For updates on that extremely dangerous escalation, see the links added to the paragraph terming this "an aggressively militarist, war presidency" below.

"It’s a hard struggle when a member of your family passes away. But this Day of Awareness can mean that her memory will live on forever.”