Portside

About 39,000 Minnesota workers suffer from wage theft each year, resulting in $11.9 million in wages owed, and that's only what goes reported. The union-backed Wage Theft Initiative proposes policy changes to give the state Department of Labor and Industry more enforcement tools and an increased budget.

During the Depression, a loose coalition of Progressives set out to remake the American diet. Milk was regarded as the perfect food. This tension between scientific advice and traditional preferences can be traced back to the Great Depression, suggest Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe in “A Square Meal.”

Anti-war, immigrant rights and communities of color, environmental rights, LGBTQ and women's rights -- all and more are linked to real justice and peace.

Instead of demonstrating outside of Planned Parenthood, Joyce Arthur, executive director of Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC), suggests demonstrating outside a "crisis pregnancy center" -- one of the fake clinics run by ideologically extreme religious groups -- or at the office of a local anti-choice group. Also on her list are public areas like city hall.

Why we should not forget the role our endless wars over the last sixteen years have played in creating the refugee crisis we now so earnestly decry.

A moment of stinging clarity is now upon us. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to set in motion the process of building a wall along the US-Mexico border, stripping federal funding from sanctuary cities, increasing the size of US Border Patrol forces and increasing deportations. In response, we must plunge even more urgently into the hard local work of building sanctuary.

Medicaid spending exceeds half a trillion dollars, and the program represents more than half of all federal funds spent by states. Medicaid has changed dramatically from its beginnings as a program largely for women and children on welfare. It now has more than 70 million beneficiaries, and its reach is so broad that almost two-thirds of Americans say that they, a family member or a friend have been covered by Medicaid at some point.

I was among more than 400 people who attended a Protect RP organizational meeting Monday night, an extraordinary display of how hungry people are to Do Something.

Marx wrote these passages nearly 150 years ago, and he was certainly not infallible: in the same letter he suggested optimistically that independence for Ireland might hasten "the social revolution in England." But a great deal of his analysis sounds remarkably contemporary.

The civil rights pioneer and scholar is most famous for his book The Souls of Black Folk, but his use of data to show inequality is still profound today