Portside

The Bernie Sanders show, which is filmed in the Democratic party’s DC-based studio, is atypical in ways beyond just presentation. Sanders has decided to bypass traditional media and broadcast exclusively on Facebook. And it is attracting – to borrow a Sandersism – a huge audience.

By reorganizing Science for the People, we aim to revitalize its legacy of documenting the use and abuse of science and to organize scientists to contribute to human liberation and transformative social change. As a coalition of progressive and radical science workers and supporters, Science for the People finds the alternatives of “science for science’s sake” and “science for the progress of capitalism” equally unacceptable.

Early results place left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon third, behind Macron and Le Pen. But his campaign, under the banner of France Insoumise, has succeeded in shifting the debate in France’s presidential election to the Left, forcing discussion of democracy and redistribution into a terrain previously dominated by the Right. What does it mean for France’s left?

How institutions gift a veneer of respectability to white nationalists who promote racist pseudoscience.

Appalachia, the federally defined region that consists of 490 counties in 13 states, is one of the poorest regions in the U.S., beset with unemployment but more importantly, with desperately low income levels among those with jobs. In 2016, 63% of Appalachian voters supported Donald Trump. And his proposed budget would reward them by making them even poorer, while eliminating the agency that compiles the statistics on Appalachian poverty, income, and employment.

The political war being waged against the right to science is challenging scientific evidence as a basis for policy-making, government funding for research, and scientists’ ability to convey their work. The right to science influences everything from freeing wrongfully accused prisoners to crop rotation. But to successfully defend the right to science, the scientific and human rights communities must more effectively articulate its unique value to human advancement.

“We have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide. For the conscious destruction of aspects of the environment: ecocide. But we don’t have a word for the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on, the world as humanity has known it. A possibility might be ‘terracide’ from the Latin word for earth. It has the right ring, given its similarity to the commonplace danger word of our era: terrorist." Tom Engelhardt, May 2013

Amid endless political cacophony in Washington, D.C., House Republicans are quietly advancing legislation that would drive a freight train through a central tenet of New Deal-era labor law: overtime. With Obama’s landmark overtime expansion blocked in the courts, conservatives roll out a plan that would undo overtime pay as we know it.