Portside

There's a difference between 'right-to-work', which limits agreements between workers' unions and employers, and First Amendment restrictions on government in matters of religion, speech, expression, association and so on. For conservatives, though, rights are rolled up into one, giant "freedom" ball aimed at imposing individual beliefs at the expense of democracy right down to the duties of a job. Who then are the prisoners of conscience?

Many food and beverage marketers have started playing the clean label and sustainable card. Such terms as “artisan,” “clean,” “earth friendly,” “local,” “pure” and “simple” are being used on product packages and web sites. Avoiding ambiguity is a key issue for staying out of legal trouble.

Elaine Brown, who led the Black Panther Party from 1974-1977 and ran for president in 2008, dismantles Nelson’s documentary ‘The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.’

Systemic problems require systemic solutions. Police alone cannot stop urban violence; it requires action on every front. Rising poverty in the nation's capital has been experienced primarily by black and Latino residents. The average white family's income is $110,757, according to Census estimates. For black families it's $39,081. There's a growing income gap nationwide. This kind of disparity breeds hopelessness, which drives people to acts of desperation and violence.

The worldwide cultural revolution initiated by the invention of records and record players has been vast and helps define what it has meant to be both "modern" and "post-modern." In this new book, Michael Denning surveys the scope and breadth of this revolution. Noise Uprising, says reviewer Tim Barker, "offers an ambitious, if somewhat speculative map of the connections" between the dizzying array of styles and genres of modern popular, vernacular music.

The number of deaths is probably greater than the number who perished with the sinking of the Titanic, The passengers on the Titanic included scions of wealthy families — people whose passing was deemed important enough to memorialize in books and movies. By contrast, the five thousand workers at Hawk’s Nest were poor, predominantly Black, and considered expendable in the early years of the Great Depression.

The Tuesday decision to strike—made with what the union describes as "an unprecedented, thunderous unanimous vote," closes schools on what would have been the first day of school for roughly 50,000 students. The problems the public school teachers say are driving the strike include those teachers across the nation have also cited, including an over-reliance on standardized testing and flawed methods for evaluating educators.

Across Europe, people are fed up with a monetary union that is inefficient because it is so profoundly undemocratic. This is why the battle for rescuing Greece has now turned into a battle for Europe’s integrity, soul, rationality and democracy by setting up a Pan-European political movement, inspired by the Athens Spring, that will work toward Europe’s democratization.

With disproportionate financial support from Orthodox and politically conservative Jews, much of the American Jewish establishment has aligned itself with Netanyahu against not just the Iran deal but also President Obama and American liberalism, too. In the process, it has also aligned itself against a clear majority of American Jews.

Formed in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense remains misunderstood and poorly represented – especially on film. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution tries to sort the fact from fiction.