Portside

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jefferson Cowie on the deep, twisted roots of American oppression

While Republicans threaten to bring the government to a halt, Democrats are caving in to the austerity measures they demand.

The increase in poverty reversed two years of large declines.

The federal minimum hourly wage is just $7.25 and has not increased in 14 years, the longest period of congressional inaction in the history of the minimum wage. The real, cost-of-living-adjusted value of the minimum wage has fallen by 30%.

The Court has spent the last several years claiming the other two branches’ powers for itself.

Regardless of whether economic conditions are good or bad, Black jobseekers are less likely to find work.

Democrats were ready to throw railworkers to the wolves, letting even Republicans outflank them on labor rights. But thanks to a last-minute legislative push by Bernie Sanders and his allies today, railworkers may be getting the sick leave they’re demanding.

Being a leftist — or worse, a child of leftists — in the mid-20th century meant constant harassment from the FBI. From my childhood in the 1940s and ’50s through the upheavals of the ’60s, I only told them one thing: take a hike.

On Tax Day, there’s more than one elephant in the room, and they’re all in mansions.

The Gulf of Mexico is littered with tens of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells, and toothless regulation leaves climate warming gas emissions unchecked.