Portside

The disgraceful history of voter disenfranchisement is no secret. For more than a century, African Americans (and other marginalized groups) were restricted or evendisqualified from voting. Today these practices are formally outlawed, yet we still see patterns in voter turnout that indicate that voting discrimination is alive and well. Non-voters also tend to be younger, less educated, and less affluent than their voting counterparts.

The struggle for independence upset the “politics of deference.” The colonial elites, explains historian Clement Fatovic, found it “more and more difficult” to reconcile “great disparities of wealth with the animating principles of the Revolution.”

Education disparities start early.

While there has recently been a push from advocates and policy -- makers alike to reexamine sentencing policy and practice, the negative impacts on former prisoners and people with felony convictions themselves and the economy as a whole will grow in scale unless the burgeoning reform trend continues and accelerates.

There goes the neighborhood.

The group’s pitch is this: Black workers are losing jobs, and Latinos are losing their rights. Only united can they hold temp agencies accountable.

“Songbook” frames its story through the memory of Lucy Parsons, the daughter of a slave who later becomes the widow of “anarchist martyr” Albert Parsons, a white man who had served in the Confederate Army, but then found his calling as a charismatic labor leader. There are unquestionably distant echoes of terrorist activity in our own time in this show, along with enduring issues of income inequality, police brutality, and a compromised judiciary and media.

Chicago’s democracy is being distorted by an overwhelmingly, white, wealthy and male donor class. But public financing provides a clear solution. The “Fair Election Ordinance,” introduced on January 13, 2016 would match all small donor contributions up to $175, increasing the influence of the most diverse small and mid-level donor pool.

The richest Americans now live 10-15 years longer than the poorest.

For the past three years activists have been fighting hard for unionization efforts for farmworkers supplying berries for Driscoll’s in the United States and in Mexico. In 2014, workers in Washington state went on strike after complaining that the piece-rate wage was set too low. Sakuma Farms allegedly brought in hundreds of guest workers under a H-2A visa program to replace the strikers, The Progressive reported.