Portside

Are the machines coming for our jobs? Dean Baker argues that we need to get beyond the fear of robots and address the real causes of inequality, low wages and changes in the labor market.

Manning’s latest Guardian op-ed: We're citizens, not subjects. We have the right to criticize government without fear. The American public needs more access to what the government is doing in its name. That requires increasing freedom of information and transparency.

Claudia Krich, longtime Davis resident and retired teacher, attended a Sacramento screening of the documentary “Last Days in Vietnam” and was moved to write this essay. The documentary rekindled memories of the unique experience she and her husband Keith Brinton shared from 1973 until July of 1975,when they co-directed a civilian rehabilitation program and hosted visiting journalists and officials near My Lai. They stayed in Saigon and saw what happened April 30th.

May 7 the Women’s Court on war crimes against women during the war in the 1990ies formally started in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Women have come together from all the corners of the former-Yugoslavia to participate in the Women’s Court in Sarajevo, to demand justice for the crimes committed against them during the wars and the enduring inequalities and suffering that followed.

Guy Carawan's music became the unofficial anthems of the Civil Rights movement. For over 50 years, Guy was the music director of Highlander Center, an inter-racial training center for labor, civil rights, and environmental activists, located in rural Tennessee. Guy graduated in 1949 from Occidental College, where he majored in math, played on the basketball team, and was a member of ATO fraternity - an unusual background for someone who would become a civil rights icon!

New report detailing status of garment worker access to child care and related issues in Los Angeles.

Anchored by powerful performances from Oscar nominees Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard, Empire features unapologetically black characters operating in a mostly black world. Nielsen says 7.5 million of them are African-American.But that's where the other controversy about Empire emerges. Because some critics say the show has earned its success by trafficking in "badly written dialogue and ham-fisted stereotypes."

"Right to Work" laws are all about removing unions as a political check on the power of corporations. But that will have real costs for working families in Illinois. And the costs will be highest for blacks and Latinos.

Till now, NYSNA has negotiated separate hospital-by-hospital contracts for its entire history—while Service Employees (SEIU) mega-local 1199 was winning high standards and industry-shaping political power through master contracts with the same facilities. Now the nurses union is putting common demands on every table. At most hospitals it’s conducting open bargaining, with as many as 200 members showing up to participate in negotiations.

This is a national problem. Across the United States, most of the people incarcerated in local jails have not been convicted of a crime but are awaiting trial. And most of those are waiting in jail not because of any specific risk they have been deemed to pose, but because they can’t pay their bail. In other words, we are locking people up for being poor. This is unjust. We should abolish monetary bail outright.