Portside

Grace Lee Boggs died yesterday at the age of 100. Boggs' love for humanity ran strong and deep, serving as a generative force for creating change. She was not a part of an elite intelligentsia. She lived in a modest little house on an even more modest income. She never held a tenured university job. She believed that ordinary people, not academics, had the power to understand their lives and to change the world with that understanding.

The decision to release 6,000 federal prisoners before the end of their sentence is a sign of the failure of the "war on drugs." But it’s no substitute for systemic reforms that cut off the cycle of mass incarceration. Congress still needs to pass comprehensive criminal justice reform," said Michael Collins, policy manager with the Drug Policy Alliance.

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.

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.

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.

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."

Two twenty-first century phenomena have changed the way moving pictures are made and perceived. The first is the accelerating use of digital technology and the inexorable rise of a cyborg cinema that, by combining animated and photographic images, compromises the direct relationship to reality that had long been the medium’s claim to truth. The second is the trauma of September 11, 2001, which for many provided the ultimate movie experience that was more than a movie.

School policy ripped out of time and history: In many ways that is Arne Duncan’s gift to us. School policy focused on disparities in test scores instead of disparities in opportunity; a Department of Education obsessed with data-driven accountability for teachers but preferring “game-changing” innovation for itself and paying inadequate attention to oversight; ...

Day; Rosenberg; Davis; Purple; Coates

Negotiators may have reached agreement, but that does not mean the process is complete. TPP is not a done deal until it is signed by heads of each country and and their respective legislatures agree to it. In the United States, both the House and Senate will have to vote on the TPP after a 60-day period of review during which the public is supposed to have access to the text of the agreement.