Portside

A group of Wisconsin lawyers plans Thursday to ask the state Supreme Court to increase the rate to $100 per hour, a raise that would place Wisconsin's rate among the highest in the country. The request would cost about $34 million more per year to cover the roughly 55,000 publicly appointed cases.

In these early days of the Age of Trump, there is an upsurge of interest in Margaret Atwood's 1985 harrowing dystopian novel. Jennifer Helinek reminds us why this book has become a modern classic.

"As a Jew, and even more as a human being, I feel morally comfortable and politically responsible in calling upon Israel to dismantle its apartheid regime." - Richard Falk

MSNBC leans backward; Adieu Ailes; Cloudflare; Wannacry; Internet freedom; And an interview… with Brooke

For half a century, the loss of the right to strike has moved in lock step with the increase in income inequality. According to an International Monetary Fund study of twenty advanced economies, union decline accounted for about half of the increase in net income inequality from 1980 to 2012. The following is the start of a Boston Review discussion on US workers' right to strike.

The fact that slavery caused the Civil War is troubling to people who like to ignore the long history of white supremacy in the U.S. Those in positions of privilege prefer to perpetuate myths about America as a place where people get exactly what they deserve, which is the underlying justification for social inequality in political philosophies throughout time, from the Protestant Ethic to meritocracy.

Last week, as New Orleans completed the controversial and long-awaited task of taking down Confederate monuments from its public spaces, Mayor Mitch Landrieu marked the occasion by delivering a speech that has since been lauded as "stunning," "incredible," "powerful," and "a clear-eyed view of our past as well as our present. "Many said the speech would go down in history.

Herbert presents an airtight case of structural racism in America — and it’s a case I’m laying out at length here in case you don’t see the film. If we are going to throw these words around, we better understand their meaning and use that understanding to inform the work that we — white people — must do.

Mothers who work full-time and have a high-school degree make 67 cents for every dollar made by a dad with a high-school degree. More staggering is that mothers have to earn a bachelor’s degree or more in order for their earnings to outpace fathers with only high-school degrees. At every education level and in every state, mothers are paid less than fathers. On average, a mother makes about 71 cents to a father’s dollar.

In effect, the Chinese government decides what work it wants done, draws on its own national credit card, pays Chinese workers to do it, and repays the loans with the proceeds.The US government could do that too, without raising taxes, slashing services, cutting pensions, or privatizing industries.