Portside

In an election concluded in November, contingent faculty at Fordham University have voted overwhelmingly to form a union and bargain collectively.

The chaos surrounding last week’s presidential elections in Honduras reflects a rightwing consolidation of power in the country, abetted by the United States.

The race between Cyril Ramaphosa and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma as to who will succeed Jacob Zuma as ANC president remains too close to call. The divisions between the candidates reflect the divisions within the revolutionary alliance that brought an end to South African apartheid.

The tax bill will compound the warfare on human rights that the Trump administration continues to perpetuate with its regressive policies.

“What we’re really seeing is a targeted effort by the GOP to not just attack education, but working-class students’ access to it.”

Trump’s dangerous and provocative move regarding Jerusalem—like so many of his reckless policies both abroad and at home—requires strong, broad-based opposition. It is unfortunate that, at least in this case, there is no real opposition party.

It may seem as if Christian conservatism, as a social movement, has always been with us. However, as Kim Phillips-Fein observes in this review of Kevin M. Kruse's history of the phenomenon, much contemporary conservative Christian discourse reflects "specific politics of the post-New Deal era, and the effort to shore up Christian commitments to capitalism as opposed to the welfare state."

The TPP is still secret and according to the terms in this year's fast-track legislation it will remain secret for 30 days after the president formally notifies Congress that he will sign it. That could be a while still, as the agreement's details need to be "ironed out." After that 30-day wait the full text has to be public for 60 days before Congress can vote. Expect a massive and massively funded corporate PR push. The biggest corporations very much want TPP.

In a speech challenging both national and global inequality, with a particular focus on France and South Africa, economist Thomas Piketty concluded with calls for taxes on wealth, and a public global registry of financial assets to make that possible. The speech evoked a frenzy of comment - from praise to denunciations of Piketty's analysis as Marxist or alternately, unrealistic, to those who criticized him for having a flawed analysis that disregarded Marxist insights.

According to the Cult of the Second Amendment, opponents of gun measures have every right to fire back, literally. There’s no point in progressives seeking any “compromise” with them on gun issues. They can only be defeated by a true mass social movement supporting reasonable gun regulation.