Portside

Unions historically have supported minimum wage and occupational safety laws that benefited all workers, not just their members. But they also have recently begun investing major resources in organizing drives more likely to yield new laws than new members. Some of these campaigns seek to organize workers who, rightly or wrongly, aren't even designated as employees or lack a common employer, such as domestic workers and cab drivers.

Persnickety about Picketty; ALEC’s anti-choice clone; Rolling Stone’s rape story, two takes; Geeks reek; We are how we eat

In 2006, Congress passed the "Pension Protection Act", which had a devastating effect on single-employer defined benefit pension plans. Now Congress is looking to do the same to multi-employer pension plans.

The Zionist message to the Jewish population of Israel is this, Zionism is your only guarantee against another holocaust. The opposite is the case. Jews can have a homeland in the Middle East, but their safety can only be achieved by dismantling the Jewish state, Mamdani said. His speech was a political challenge to Jewish anti-Zionists, now just a splinter, to launch a political struggle inside the Jewish community to liberate it from Zionism.

Carried interest allows hedge-fund and private-equity managers, as well as many venture capitalists and partners in real estate investment trusts, to treat their take of the profits as capital gains — taxed at maximum rate of 23.8 percent instead of the 39.6 percent maximum applied to ordinary income. So why didn’t Democrats close it when they ran Congress?

Power To The People: What Protesters Need To Know About Their Rights And What Cops Can Do. Advice and reminders from experts for citizens protesting abusive policing.

The Silicon Valley-based network Shareable dispatched Nathan Schneider to write a report on the growing movement to experiment with new forms of economic democracy online. Schneider states that "A popular mantra among sharing-economy boosters has been "sharing is the new owning." What I found is the opposite." Given concerns about the sharing economy, Schneider examined cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and more.

“We want democracy, but we don’t have the theory or skill to do it”

On December 4, 1969, Chicago police raided Hampton’s apartment and shot and killed him in his bed. He was just 21 years old. Black Panther leader Mark Clark was also killed in the raid. Authorities claimed the Panthers had opened fire on the police who were there to serve a search warrant for weapons, evidence later emerged that told a very different story: the FBI, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and the Chicago police conspired to assassinate Fred Hampton.

A new book and film highlight the story of four brilliant teenagers who try to chase the American dream