Portside

Hundreds of Los Angeles teachers have been put on leave and in limbo. It’s been called “teacher jail,” and it’s not far off from the “rubber rooms” New York City tabloids have made famous. In both places, the tactic is used to scapegoat teachers and unions.

Even though the four counts do not include cold blooded murder, we in West Virginia and the rest of the world know that the big man is on trial for the deaths of those men just as the nation knew that Al Capone’s trial on tax evasion was for his part in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. There will be no one in the courtroom or on the jury that doesn’t remember that morning. There is no one in Raleigh County that doesn’t know who ran Massey Energy.

The boundary separating white Anglo upscale school districts from the burgeoning non-white and non-Anglo populations in downscale communities is fast becoming a flashpoint inside America.

If anyone can overcome the hurdles for a Latino mayoral candidate in Chicago, it's Garcia given his lifetime commitment to a multiracial coalition—not just talking the talk, but 30 years of walking the walk.

In the 1960s, the agency sought to fight Communism through the students’ rights movement. There’s little reason to think its tactics have changed.

Although it was not programmable in the modern sense, some have called it the first analog computer.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), emboldened by the mid-term success of conservative Republicans at the state and federal levels, will be meeting December 3-5 in Washington, D.C. to develop its policy agenda for 2015 and beyond. ALEC will be seeking, among other things, to "preempt" state and local level minimum wage increases, promote local "right to work" legislation, forestall shareholder activism, and increase school privatization.

African-Americans are disproportionately likely to be poor, they are only a quarter of Americans living in poverty; whites make up about 41% of the poor. Those white Americans who don't want to help the poor because they'd be helping people of another race are actually screwing over white people big time. The wealth gap between /white and African-American families tripled between 1980 and 2009.

The U.S. War on Terror campaign has done nothing to reduce world terrorism, but it has expended more than four trillion dollars in its global efforts, creating the "oligarchs of 9/11," war profiteers who are now wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. According to a new book by journalist James Risen, the U.S. War on Terror is responsible for “one of the largest transfers of wealth from public to private hands in American history.”