Portside

The movement for labor to endorse Bernie Sanders is part of an effort to bring political decision-making back to the rank-and-file.

This is the first part of a multi-part series in The Outlook. One morning as I scanned the news-horror in the Middle East, Russia and America facing off in the Ukraine, I thought of Edward Snowden and wondered how he was holding up in Moscow. I began to imagine a conversation between him and Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war). And then interestingly, in my imagination a third person made her way into the room-the writer Arundhati Roy.

Dozens of citizens were planning to protest the auction Tuesday morning in Salt Lake City. Instead, they will celebrate the Bureau’s decision to postpone the auction of 73,000 acres of publicly owned oil and gas in Utah — which harbor an estimated 1.6 – 6.6 million tons of potential greenhouse gas pollution. The planned protest had been led by elders calling on the BLM to act to prevent catastrophic climate change and to ensure a livable future for generations to come.

Many of 20th-century conservatism’s tricks were honed in 1930s agribusiness’s fight against farmworkers

Bad news for consumers and workers: This year has already seen $4 trillion worth of mergers and acquisitions deals.

Burgers and fries have nearly killed our ancestral microbiome.

My recent Nobel peace prize win for my contributions in Tunisia shows that giving working people a say is the best path toward a more equal and just world

The recent U.S. deployment of special operations forces to Syria expands a global U.S. battlefield that is at a historic size. This year, special ops have been sent to a record 147 countries—75 percent of the nations on the planet. It’s a 145 percent increase from the days of George W. Bush. And it means that on any given day elite U.S. forces are on the ground in 70 to 90 countries.

While Henry Kissinger is not responsible for the evolution of the U.S. national security state into such a monstrosity, his strategies, the use of bombing as an instrument of “diplomacy” in Southeast Asia, the militarization of the Persian Gulf, and the violation of the sovereignty of neutral countries to destroy so-called enemy “sanctuaries,” has created the conditions for the endless wars started by Bush’s neocons and waged by Obama’s liberal hawks.

Albert Einstein's take on this question was surely influenced by the general crisis of 1914 to 1945, which profoundly shook the faith in inexorable progress and the belief in universal schemes of history. The lessons of that crisis still mark our present moment: historical determinism, outside of the academic cloisters of analytic Marxism, has very few adherents today. The question of why socialism remains as pressing for us as it was at the time of Einstein's writing.