Portside

The privatization of social services has in the past resulted in some spectacular failures.

Stopping the rightwing, anti-immigrant, poor-bashing Republican juggernaut won’t be easy.

The middle class, once the backbone of a strong American society, has been broken, beaten down, pushed further and further toward poverty levels. Here are five well-documented ways that this has happened.

“American exceptionalism” and “isolationism” are generally understood to be tactical variants of a secular religion, with a grip that is quite extraordinary, going beyond normal religious orthodoxy in that it can barely even be perceived. Since no alternative is thinkable, this faith is adopted reflexively.

Alex Lawson: “In this case,” he says, “it would be trying to substitute out the Obamacare cuts or delays, and substitute in some of these grand bargain approaches. These are ones that are non-controversial, that are seemingly agreed-upon. We think it’s really important to get out in front of any attempts to do that and show that no, these are highly controversial and there will not be support.”

The debt ceiling turns out to be unexploded ordnance lying around the American form of government. Only custom or moral compunction stops the opposition party from using it to nullify the president’s powers, or, for that matter, the president from using it to nullify Congress’s. To weaponize the debt ceiling, you must be willing to inflict harm on millions of innocent people.

Latin American leaders are reclaiming a right to differentiate their views from Washington's—and refusing to render it diplomatic tribute.

The members of the suicide caucus live in a different America from the one that most political commentators describe when talking about how the country is transforming. The average suicide-caucus district is seventy-five per cent white, while the average House district is sixty-three per cent white. Latinos make up an average of nine per cent of suicide-district residents, while the over-all average is seventeen per cent. 76 of the members are male. 79 are white.

To many Americans, the shutdown came out of nowhere. But interviews with a wide array of conservatives show that the confrontation that precipitated the crisis was the outgrowth of a long-running effort to undo the law, the Affordable Care Act, since its passage in 2010 — waged by a galaxy of conservative groups with more money, organized tactics and interconnections than is commonly known.

How is it that American corporations are paying a smaller share of federal income taxes when the rates paid by individuals dropped much further? It’s simple: ordinary American families don’t have teams of lobbyists to win them loopholes or armies of tax accountants and attorneys to exploit them.