Portside

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett's administration has decided to sign a 40-year contract to privatize the state's crumbling bridges, but there has been little to no media coverage of the deal and what it will mean for two generations of Pennsylvanians.

Open letter to Mayor de Blasio from prominent New York City Jewish leaders" "the needs and concerns of many of your constituents - U.S. Jews like us among them - are not aligned with those of AIPAC, and that no, your job is not to do AIPAC's bidding when they call you to do so. AIPAC speaks for Israel's hard-line government and its right-wing supporters, and for them alone; it does not speak for us." (The following letter was shared with Mondoweiss)

What happened in Atlanta this week is not a matter of Southerners blindsided by unpredictable weather. This snowstorm underscores the horrible history of suburban sprawl in the United States and the bad political decisions that drive it. It tells us something not just about what's wrong with one city in America today but what can happen when disaster strikes many places across the country. It's not an act of nature or God - this fiasco is manmade from start to finish.

Chicago's experiences with privatization make a textbook case for not deciding to privatize without carefully identifying costs. By failing to do so, Chicago has found itself locked into bad deals that will last for three to four generations.

President Obama is on the verge of cementing a shameful legacy as Deporter-in-Chief, presiding over what will soon be 2 million deportations – the most under any President in history.

Seeger is famous, of course, for making “We Shall Overcome” a civil and human rights anthem. The story of where he found that song is told below by historian Christopher Phelps. It is excerpted, by permission, from Christopher Phelps, "Lefts Old and New: Sixties Radicalism, Now and Then," in A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times, eds. Howard Brick and Gregory Parker (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).

Stateside Communists were the underdogs, fighting the establishment for justice - the victims of censorship and police repression, not its perpetrators.

Anti-labor forces in Tennessee and elsewhere are leading a fight against both Volkswagen and the UAW to prevent unionization. These right-wing forces see a successful unionization drive as opening the door to the UAW in other southern states.