Portside

Many taxi drivers love the entrepreneurial nature of the work but they still want and need security and protection. Recent developments of the gig economy in the states of Washington and California are breakthrough moments for the potential to organize workers against companies like Uber. We can't wait for the courts to figure out the gig economy: we have to be organizing now, despite the challenges.

If you say you’re on the freedom side, then that means you will join us in asking the rich to pay their fair share; calling on the city and state to stop the attacks on public and higher education; in asking the banks to end their predatory deals that strip vital dollars from our schools; in fighting for stronger neighborhoods and job creation, and access to health care and not just health insurance.

The renewed focus, particularly on the left, on precariousness constitutes a recognition of the harsh reality of capitalism, and particularly of today’s globalized monopoly-finance capital. More than a century of Marxian political-economic critique allows us to appreciate the extent to which the conditions that Marx described, focusing on a small corner of Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, are now global, and all the more perilous.

The richest Americans now live 10-15 years longer than the poorest.

Despite the mixed impact that big-money groups have had on the presidential contest so far the biggest surge of cash is likely to come this fall, when millionaires and billionaires aligned with both parties fully engage in the fights for control of the White House and Congress.

Experts say listing cannabis among the world’s deadliest drugs ignores decades of scientific and medical data. But attempts to delist it have met with decades of bureaucratic inertia and political distortion

If well organized and militant union members at Verizon—who have gone on strike against the company and its predecessors in 1983, 1986, 1989, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2011 and now—can’t stop the outsourcing and destruction of decent jobs, unorganized workers spread across the planet in industries like telecommunications will find the task insurmountable.

Le Carré's 1993 novel comes to life in a six-part AMC series. John Powers says the show, which jets from Egyptian streets to posh Alpine lodges, is one of the most enjoyable thrillers he's seen on TV. Over the years, le Carré's anger at those in power has become less ambiguous and more sharply focused, whether he's going after drug company profiteering or America's approach to the War on Terror.

Corruption is not the cause of the effort to oust Brazil’s twice-elected President, Dilma Rousseff, merely the pretext. Brazil’s elite and their media organs have repeatedly failed to defeat Rousseff and her Workers' Party at the ballot box. So the plutocrats are now attempting, through a bizarre mélange of evangelical extremists, far-right supporters of a return to military rule, and non-ideological backroom operatives, to simply remove her from office.

On this month’s 50th anniversary of one of the all-time edgiest Beatles tracks, our super rich have a special reason to look back fondly on the lads from Liverpool.