Portside

Virtually every state tax system is fundamentally unfair, taking a much greater share of income from low- and middle-income families than from wealthy families. The absence of a graduated personal income tax and over-reliance on consumption taxes exacerbate this problem.

If not, we must stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership before it does more damage to our country.

An editorial on the upcoming elections in Greece by the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF) The Greek elections offer a potential breakthrough, but to carry out their program a government of the Left will need massive understanding and support abroad. Unions should be in the forefront of building that support.

A new House rule creates a legal obstacle course that would make it harder to shift funds from the Social Security retirement account, which has a big surplus, to the smaller disability account. Such transfers have been done routinely in the past under both Republican and Democratic presidencies, including four times under President Ronald Reagan.

I'm going to make me a good sharp axe, Shining steel tempered in the fire, Ill chop you down like an old dead tree, Dirty old town, dirty old town.

A compilation of articles by Richard Steier, the "best full-time reporter on the New York City labor beat." He is the editor of the Chief where these articles first appeared. This is the book to read if you want to know what was happening on the municipal labor scene since the mid-1990's.

Anti-union forces can taste the blood in the water, and their offensive is only getting broader. Between efforts to pass right-to-work laws at the state and local levels and legal challenges like Harris v. Quinn and Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, the legal-institutional basis of US trade unions is being dismantled. And once that’s lost, it will probably be impossible to bring unions back as they were before.

It is bitterly ironic that Muslims are being asked to prove that they believe in the same values from which they were historically excluded. The Republic has always had a darker side, and the civil liberties that are now idealized emerged in a colonial context where they excluded the Republic’s Muslim subjects.

“We’ve now got tangible figures of the quantities and locations of fossil fuels that should remain unused in trying to keep within the 2C temperature limit,” said Christophe McGlade, at University College London (UCL), and who led the new research published in the journal Nature.

Centcom hacked; Blind on blind; Every IP address in the world; What David Cameron Wants; iBeacon reinvents libraries & museums; Scared media; ISIS goes glossy