Portside

For those of us in the public banking movement, used to holding up the Bank of North Dakota (the nation’s only public bank) as an example of how promising public banks are, the recent news that Dalrymple and an emergency spending panel voted to add $4 million in additional credit onto a $10 million line from BND, to fund law enforcement expenses at Standing Rock, is troubling.

In the face of Nov. 8th election's knock down, we all have to come together to get back up and decide how to navigate this new reality and win for our communities. While nationally we need to rethink our strategy, there is much to celebrate across California. Our work and wins in California give us an opportunity to show how our state can be a model for the rest of the country as it relates to inclusion, opportunity, protection, and investment in our families.

For many years, the U.S. — like the U.K. and other Western nations — has embarked on a course that virtually guaranteed a collapse of elite authority and internal implosion. From the invasion of Iraq to the 2008 financial crisis to the all-consuming framework of prisons and endless wars, societal benefits have been directed almost exclusively to the very elite institutions most responsible for failure at the expense of everyone else.

“[DAPL] brings to the surface all the issues dealing with treaties," says Bald Eagle. "It brings up all the wrongdoings that have been happening in the past. The American government has repeatedly shoved all of their wrongdoings underneath the rug, and the issue with the Dakota Access Pipeline has pulled that rug off, and now we have to look at everything that’s been done wrong.”

Trump has empowered narratives that would otherwise have no place in electoral politics. Trump also forced America to see these threats in the light of day. That could be their undoing. Exposed, these guises of bigotry have been (or for progressives, must be) recognized, decoded and even classified – as the “alt-right” – by the press and public.

The research of Duke political scientist Ashley Jardina shows that White identity more strongly affects opinions when whites perceive themselves as under threat.

About one in every five election-related tweets from Sept. 16 to Oct. 21 was generated by computer software programs called “social bots.”

In the Trump era it is the movement that Sanders was part of coalescing that becomes key in building a resistance with a positive vision. One of the weaknesses of the Sanders message was its failure to unify matters of class with race and gender. This is about telling the right story about the United States. It is also a matter of tapping into significant social movements—Occupy; immigrant rights; LGBT, environmental justice; Black Lives Matter. This is where hope lies.

Ellison has pushed policies strongly backed by the left (some of which overlap with Trump's) — reworking major trade deals to benefit American workers, a $1 trillion infrastructure package, protecting entitlement programs, raising taxes on richer Americans, universal health care, stronger environmental protection, drastic cuts in defense spending, background checks for gun sales and a big boost in health and welfare programs.

Leading tobacco control expert Stanton Glantz analyzes how a big public health push in California defeated Big Tobacco and resulted in a two-dollar cigarette tax increase. The first tax increase on tobacco in 18 years has the potential to reduce smoking prevalence from today’s 9.4 percent to 7.1 percent by 2020. Yet Glantz adds a note of caution: with diminishing cigarette profits, Big Tobacco could find a place in the marijuana market, as more states legalize marijuana.