Portside

When soldiers are idolized, respect for militarism and war grow accordingly. Military training, military expenditures, military intervention, and military escalation become ways to “support the troops” or, at the least, take on a friendlier glow.

Most people who die in US jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers remain invisible, with little and often no information shared with family, friends and the broader public. 

In the fall of 2014, word got around Pendleton, in Indiana, that a crew was coming to make a film, called “O.G.” It was to feature prisoners and guards as actors and extras. No one had ever attempted anything like it.

Bresha Meadows was 14 years old when she took the drastic step of shooting her father, after systems repeatedly failed her. We can learn from Bresha’s case that while she’s free, there is still an epidemic of criminalizing women and girls who fight back against domestic and family violence.

New Labor Forum’s “Working-Class Voices” columnist Kressent Pottenger interviewed Narbada Chhetri, former nail salon worker and director of Organizing and Advocacy at Adhikaar (a social justice organization based in New York City with approximately eight hundred members serving the Nepalese and Tibetan community), and Pabitra Dash, nail salon worker and organizer at Adhikaar, about the poor working conditions of nail salon workers in the United States. Highlights of the interview follow.

Happy birthday Open Source; FBI is reading this; SOS FOIA; Say it loud; Bitcoin bubble; Free speech and attacks on democracy

Bargaining for the common good campaigns are when union and community groups together leverage contract negotiations for broader, shared gains.

The Young Karl Marx is a nuanced and surprisingly accurate portrait of the revolutionary as a young man.

Amazon's high-tech sheen hides its abusive labor practices.

In the end, Trump’s infrastructure plan is simply another in the long line of policies designed to benefit the private sector, and keep the public sector sufficiently small and ineffective that it can be controlled and contained by plutocrats.