Portside

Last week SEIU and adjunct professors launched a national campaign calling for $15,000 per course.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback wants to make a decades-long bet that pension-fund returns will exceed current interest rates for taxable municipal bonds. “The use of pension bonds impugns an issuer more than a downgrade, because it shows they’re willing to saddle future generations with risk in order to make current budget discussions easier,” says Matt Fabian, a partner at Concord, MA-based research firm Municipal Market Analytics.

Greece needs a viable exit option, both because it may actually want to go this route and also because it needs greater bargaining power with the troika.

Does the public have the right to be protected, or is corporate power going to run roughshod over the public?

Foner wanted to document his last time teaching the course, and he's teamed with edX to present it as three online classes. The themes running through his work—race in America, the influence of radicals on history, and economic oppression as a force of white supremacy—have never felt more relevant.

North Carolina’s protest movement has galvanized the state’s progressives, but couldn’t stop 2014’s Republican tide. Its leaders say they’re only just beginning.

Death rates of African Americans living with HIV dropped 28% between 2008 and 2012. Still, Black people with HIV were 1.5 times more likely to die in 2012 than white people with the virus. They were also 3.2 times more likely to die that year than Latinos with HIV. All of the biomedical interventions in the world will not end the AIDS epidemic in this country unless the people on the frontlines understand them, believe in them, and know how to use them.

We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge—from climate change to vaccinations—faces furious opposition. Some have doubts about the moon landing. Industry PR, however misleading, isn’t enough to explain why 40 percent of Americans accept that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts.

Charlie Sifford, the man characterized as the Jackie Robinson of golf for his heroic efforts to break the racial barrier in this country's most segregated sport, died at 92 on February 3rd. Sifford rose from being a caddy in his home state of North Carolina to become the first Black player to gain membership in the Professional Golfers Association of America (PGA), which wasn't forced to drop its "Caucasians only" clause until 1961.

In exceedingly expensive housing markets like San Francisco and New York, even the tools supposedly designed to preserve affordability for average working families, such as Below Market Rate set asides for supposedly “affordable housing,” are being used to benefit the upwardly mobile. San Francisco and other cities are effectively subsidizing upper-middle-class people to move in, paving the way for gentrification of historically low-income neighborhoods.