Portside

The Working Families Party has pushed the political debate to the left in the states where it's already active. Now-in the era of Occupy and Bernie Sanders-it's ready to take that fight nationwide. The WFP's agenda-frankly redistributionist and devoted to social equality-targets a class of Democratic elected officials who, in the view of many liberals, seem to listen more to their moneyed donors than to the left-wing rank and file.

The idea of Israel has long been an integral part of Jewish-American identity. But with a generational change among American Jews and increasingly stark political differences with Israel's leadership, could this be the dawn of a new era?

"The proletariat of each country must, of course, first settle matters with its own bourgeoisie," Marx wrote, but the corporate class formatively battles internationally, including locating fake corporate headquarters to low-tax nations, in effect bleeding their home sovereign nations of tax dollars, starving state services and aiding in turning both governing and opposition parties into austerity regimes. This book and film chart the practice and ways to combat it.

Since the early 1970s, the right has conducted a sustained drive to gain power and set policy in the 50 states. The left, by contrast, has been far less effective at the state-level. The sustained determination on the part of the conservative movement has paid off in an unprecedented realignment of power in state governments.

The justification for an academic boycott — which targets institutions, not individual scholars — stems from the peculiar relationship between Israel's educational system and its broader structures of racism.

Can public-employee unions charge a fee in order to represent all their workers? The Supreme Court heard the case on Monday.

As polls show Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) erasing Hillary Clinton's lead in Iowa and maintaining a healthy edge in New Hampshire, the former secretary of state is slamming Sanders from the right over his plan for a government-funded universal health care system.

The idea that some cultures are unchangeably “backward” and hence inassimilable is the basis for the new concept called “cultural racism.” And it is cultural racism, not the diversity of cultures, that threatens the aspirational democratic values that are often articulated yet too rarely achieved in the United States.

"David Bowie Is," an exhibition that started its international tour in London in 2013, garnered a lot of attention for its surprising diversity and depth. One of the exhibition's most interesting features was a selection from the musician and pop star's library. As a tribute to him, we present that book list as first published by Open Books Toronto when the exhibition reached that city.

On Dec. 31, the University of California (UC) finished selling all of its direct investments in private prison corporations concluding the university’s recent divestment from the GEO Group and the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), two major for-profit businesses funding and maintaining American prisons. This decision to divest was in response to pressure from the African Black Coalition (ABC). Read ABC's press statement issued last month.