Portside

Mother Jones Senior Reporter Shane Bauer has previously reported on solitary confinement, police militarization, and the Middle East. Here he writes about his four months as a private prison guard.

“The Sympathizer,” which is narrated by the unnamed spy, begins with the Communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975 and then continues in Southern California among a group of die-hard exiles whose motto is “Always resent, never relent.”

"Our action was in the tradition of resistance that is Pride. We didn’t halt progress; we made progress."

Much of Anne Fontaine’s blistering film “The Innocents” is set within the walls of a Polish convent in December 1945, just after the end of World War II. What at first appears to be an austere, holy retreat from surrounding horrors is revealed to be a savagely violated sanctuary awash in fear, trauma and shame. The snow-covered, forested landscape of the convent is photographed to suggest an ominous frontier that offers no refuge from marauding outsiders.

The Airline Deregulation Act was signed into law by President Carter, but the liberal role in this legislation certainly isn’t limited to the 39th president. Its legislative history is a case study on the birth of a new kind of Democratic politics, one that disowned the Keynesian near-consensus of the 1960s in favor of supply-side economics.

James Green, 71, UMass Boston Labor Historian and Writer, Boston Globe Obituary The Loss of Dr. James (Jim) Green, by Bill Fletcher

Unfortunately, both the release and the new order fall far short of the standards for transparency and accountability needed to ensure that the government’s targeted killing program is lawful under domestic and international law.

 As #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Alicia Garza said explicitly at the Roosevelt event in conversation with Melissa Harris-Perry and Nobel Prize–winning economist Joe Stiglitz, “any policy that we develop needs to have an intersectional lens.”

MSM/GOP; More ears on us; Those darn kids; Black-owned media disappearing; Brexit: old media's last hurrah?

While candidates and political parties use mostly volunteers to get the public to help them optimize ad spending, Working America aims to shape attitudes in face-to-face conversations, usually standing on a front stoop with a cracked screen door or a barking dog between a canvasser and a malleable voter. Over the past 12 years, the labor group has held repeat conversations on their front porches to advance progressive policies and candidates.