Portside

The bloody history of mine workers in West Virginia is truly as dark as any dungeon, but the recent indictment of a mine owner suggests that maybe the tide has turned.

A new report argues persuasively that the history of 'racial terror lynching' needs to be properly commemorated and more widely discussed before the United States can fully understand the causes and origins of the racial injustice that hobbles the country to this day.

Instead of confronting the truth, we scrubbed the record clean—and we’re still paying for it in Afghanistan and Iraq today.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/09/how-the-little-guys-beat-the-monopolists-on-net-neutrality.html

Anti-austerity rallies in solidarity with the new Greek government, including one in New York City

Can Chicago’s black and brown communities come together to elect a new mayor?

Inherent Vice is perhaps the most brilliant depiction of the construction of neoliberal hegemony and the harsh end of the dreams of the 1960s generation. It speaks powerfully to the here and now, indicting the nostalgic escapism that yearns for “the sixties” and showing that this epochal world as commonly imagined never existed.

The over-emphasis on test scores and other quantifiable outcomes – often at the exclusion of other kinds of data – distorts just about every aspect of American society.T hat, in part, is the view of “The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America,” a new book by Harvard law professor and civil rights authority Lani Guinier.

Anti-union laws don’t help the economy, don’t create jobs and don’t end ‘compulsory union membership’. They can only kill off unions

Cyber contraband; Get ready for the Internet of Things; Your TV is listening; Troll hunters; Return of the little magazines; URLs as clickbait