In the six months since Jorge Mario Bergoglio, an Argentine cardinal, became Pope Francis, it has become clear—particularly from his recent interview—that he is a reformer who intends to turn the Catholic Church away from some of the rightwing attitudes and elitist style of his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI.

                        During the war in Vietnam, I heard Frank Bardacke (honored recently for his wonderful book on union democracy in the Farmworkers), give a short speech at a rally laying out how all three national TV networks and major newspapers had carried exactly the same analysis of a battle.

Since school began again on August 19, tens of thousands of teachers have been engaged in strikes and demonstrations throughout Mexico—including seizing public buildings, highway toll booths, and border crossing stations, occupying public buildings and city plazas, and blocking foreign embassies—actions taken against the Education Reform Law and the new Professional Teaching Law and over local demands linked to wages and working conditions. While these are traditional tactics, these are the largest and most militant teachers’ union demonstrations in Mexican history.

That is the affirmative  conclusion one might reasonably come to by listening to the Democrats and their MSNBC and Nation magazine echo chambers. Far right monies bundled together by conservative “social welfare” groups are said to be defying a hapless public powerless to thwart the House Republicans from exercising veto power over the budget process, in their effort to impose more austerity and defund the Affordable Care Act.

The death of Marshall Berman—City University of New York political theory professor, author of books including the seminal All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Dissent editorial board member, and one-time professor of mine—caught me quite by surprise, as I’m sure it did many.  I’d last seen him in person at a Dissent holiday party and last talked to him on the phone some months ago.  Alth

                     One of the most glaring contradictions in policies being foisted on public schools (charter schools are generally exempt from these regulations) is that research on which they are based is fundamentally flawed. Ethan Pollock’s examination of “Stalin and the Soviet science wars” (Princeton University Press, 2006) teases out the complex relationship between science and ideology.

Update 9/14/13: There is now a petition available here!

Martin Comack is absolutely correct to recognize that I wrote a Leninist critique of his book Wild Socialism about the revolutionary shop stewards or council movement that existed in Berlin at the time of World War I and on into the early 192

[I blogged daily for The Indypendent from this week’s quadrennial AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles. This is my third blog. For my coverage from Days 1 and 2 of the convention, click here and here.] 

I would like to comment on the Leninist critique of my book Wild Socialism: Workers Councils in Revolutionary Berlin, 1918-21 by Dan La Botz on your website. His review contains several errors and misinterpretations.

With Jean Anyon’s death, the Left and education have lost a giant.

Brazil went to the streets in June this year with crowds never before seen in the history of the country. There were young workers and students who were demonstrating for the first time, but also sectors of the middle class and union members as well as social movement and left party activists who protested about a wide diversity of issues.