Portside

Although you still can’t get a decent sandwich in space (who knew?), plans are underway to develop a special dough for low-crumb bread and an oven in which to bake it on the ISS.

Americans think they live in a democracy. But their workplaces are small tyrannies.

The standoff in the deep South between a black working-class community and a global auto giant reflects a broader anti-Trump resistance emerging in the labor movement, fueled by frustration with the empty promises of neoliberal “development” policies.

Venezuela does not have the religious or sectarian divisions that have fueled the civil wars, mass slaughter, and chaos of Libya, Syria, or Iraq ― all countries where the US/major media narrative about the results of successful or attempted regime change turned out to be horrifically wrong. But the political polarization in Venezuela since Chávez was elected in 1998 has been overwhelmingly along class and therefore racial lines as the two are highly correlated.

The only reason we can exist, today, is because one tiny imperfection in the early Universe allows the stars to grow hundreds of times as massive.

Net neutrality is one of the defining workers’ rights and civil rights issue of our time. We all know the internet is driving changes in culture, politics and the economy. It is also one of the key spaces where workers can organize—and where mass movements for racial and economic justice blossom and build power.

There are no limits to which powers of privilege will not go to keep the workers in slavery. -Mother Jones

With friends in the White House, and a pending $49 billion merger, Big Tobacco is back. The US remains the “world’s largest tobacco profit pool” outside of China, with “exciting” prospects for “long term growth”. Mergers and acquisitions have allowed the deadly industry to squeeze huge profits from customers, increasingly the poor, less educated and marginalized, and the supply chain, contract farmers, and workers, including children, who work for poverty wages.

With its surreal twist on death, birth, and reincarnation, the poet Philip St. Clair reminds us that some memories we don’t ever want to hear again.

Because Republicans have been so successful in keeping many of their residents from getting insurance, they think the country should trust them to overhaul heath care.