Portside

The Portside moderators send our heartfelt thanks to our readers, for coming through in response to our annual appeal! We don't do a lot of fundraising -- just this annual appeal. We are grateful, and gratified, that the response allows us to keep to this bare minimum. Again, many thanks from the left side of the ship - the portside. Full speed ahead in the new year.

Reader Comments: Deportations and Anti-Latino Racism; Flint Poisonings - Ordered by Gob. Snyder; Attack on Public Sector Unions; Bernie; Oregon; Support BDS; Susan Sarandon Supports Bernie; Help Support UAW Local 2865, which democratically voted to endorse the BDS campaign; Robert Rhodes; Speaking Out Against the Madness - Ruth Horowitz; Concussions? - Drink Chocolate Milk; Lots of announcements - Lafayette (IN); New York; Washington, DC; activist scholarships...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Released Tuesday by Monmouth University, the poll found that Sanders has 53 percent support in the state, compared to 39 percent backing Clinton. Notably, the survey concludes that Sanders now has an edge over Clinton with women voters, at 50 percent to 44 percent respectively. This lead reverses Sanders' 37 percent to 56 percent deficit among women in an identical Monmouth poll taken just two months ago.

On Wednesday January 6, the library released more than 180,000 of its public-domain items — including maps, posters, manuscripts, sheet music, drawings, photographs, letters, ancient texts — as high-resolution downloads, available to the public without restriction.

In December of 2015 - the earth's hottest year since recordkeeping began -- 195 nations met in Paris to forge an agreement to combat global warming. The governments of the world acknowledged their individual and collective duty to protect the earth's climate -- and then willfully refused to perform that duty. What did they agree to, and how should the people they govern respond?