Portside

Against the self-serving behavior of the elite, we are seeing the rise of two currents. One of them bases its decisions on fear. They want us to direct our anger downwards, to spit on the unemployed, refugees, people who have things even tougher. It’s a trick. By spitting on those below, they are protecting the elite above. In doing so they avoid the question of power. But there is also another current. It is led not by fear but by hope.

Michael Yates has produced a primer on inequality for our times. Steve Early takes a look.

According to the article AFSCME would agree to a four-year wage freeze in an attempt to get get the Rauner administration back to the bargaining table". AFSCME Council 31 Executive Director Roberta Lynch said, "Employees would pay more for health insurance in three of the four years...".

Taken together, these sitcoms remind us of the centrality of race, not just to our conversations but to policies around income inequality.

The question is whether public schools owe disabled children “some” educational benefit — which courts have determined to mean just-above-trivial progress — or whether students legally deserve something more: a substantial, “meaningful” benefit.

Ahead of President Obama’s farewell speech in Chicago this week, the author of a celebrated book about the city explains how it works as a microcosm of the US, with its legacy of policies reinforcing ethnic and economic divisions.

The author argues that a key factor in unifying the fractious 13 colonies in opposition to British rule during the Revolution was the patriots' effort to link British oppression to extant colonial fears about insurrectionary slaves and homicidal Indians. America's founders were chief among those spreading tales of British agents inciting blacks and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion, making racial prejudice a foundation stone of the new republic.

La La Land is not, in the end, so very different from Whiplash (an earlier Chazelle film) for all their tonal differences. Above all, the vision they paint of the artistic life is masculine. In Damien Chazelle’s movies, men have power, and they get (almost) everything they want... And women? All they get to do is listen.

Trumpsters against Jews; Trumpsters against Trumpsters; Jews against Jews; Trumpsters against Intellectuals; Intellectuals against Trump; Alt.Right and Guilt.Left

Senator Sessions’ record suggests a remarkable consistency in support of policies that contradict and subvert the Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantee citizenship, equal protection under the law, and the ballot to all Americans.