Portside

Remember that public school employee Paul Ryan liked so much who could now pay for her Costco membership?

University of Illinois graduate student workers went on strike Monday after last-minute negotiations over the weekend failed to end a protracted contract dispute that has lasted nearly a year.

On February 21st, the District Attorney's Office announced the initial phase of their bail reform efforts in Philadelphia. Across the country momentum is building and cities, municipalities and states are ending cash bail.

A Review of Chocolate Cities: the Black Map of American Life by Marcus A. Hunter & Zandria F. Robinson, University of California Press. Chocolate Cities is an ode to agency. A work of truth-telling without polemics, this book almost literally breaks new ground, revising our most basic ideas of US geography while questioning the truth claims of social science itself.

This timely piece of work reminds us that the rights we sometimes take for granted have not always been available to all.

Brazil ignored inequality and injustice for decades, and failed to enforce proper gun controls, allowing a daunting situation to become truly terrifying. In the United States, inequality is skyrocketing. Economic inequality, coupled lax gun control laws, could prove to be a formula that makes the United States more closely resemble Brazil with every passing decade.

Union organizers in states like Tennessee are hoping to change that. Since 2010, the number of union members in Tennessee has grown from 115,000 to 155,000. Still, only 5.7 percent of Tennessee workers are members of a union.How To Patrick Green, even one new member is a big deal. Green is a president of Local 1235, which is part of the Amalgamated Transit Union in Nashville, Tennessee. In the three years that he has been leading the union, the local’s membership rate went up by 36 percent, despite being in a right-to-work state.

Dennis Magnasco said he’s a combat veteran, a gun owner and a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment. And he’s ready for gun reform. “I recognize the power of firearms. I’ve seen what they can do,” Magnasco said. “And it makes me sick to know that we have high school kids seeing this in their schools.”

Why is Chavismo still so popular amid Venezuela's worst economic downturn in decades?

Donald Trump’s retrograde policies on immigration, women’s rights, racial justice, LGBT rights, and economic inequality have spawned an impressive and growing resistance. It remains to be seen whether his generous treatment of the Pentagon at the expense of basic human needs will spur a similar backlash.