Portside

There are no limits to which powers of privilege will not go to keep the workers in slavery. -Mother Jones

With friends in the White House, and a pending $49 billion merger, Big Tobacco is back. The US remains the “world’s largest tobacco profit pool” outside of China, with “exciting” prospects for “long term growth”. Mergers and acquisitions have allowed the deadly industry to squeeze huge profits from customers, increasingly the poor, less educated and marginalized, and the supply chain, contract farmers, and workers, including children, who work for poverty wages.

Because Republicans have been so successful in keeping many of their residents from getting insurance, they think the country should trust them to overhaul heath care.

One of the world’s best-performing economies, Sweden, has already adopted a carbon tax. And the Swedes have simultaneously sustained their strong growth without US-level emissions.

“We thought that building a Trump Tower next to an Agalarov tower [in Moscow] — having the two big names — could be a really cool project to execute”

If presidents could self-pardon, they could engage in monstrously wrongful and criminal conduct with impunity.

Why Donald Trump Jr.'s Emails Change Everything. Neil Young | Children of Destiny. Capitalism Will Eat Democracy -- Unless We Speak Up | Yanis Varoufakis. Why Are We The Only Humans Left? Vladimir Putin Regime Marked By Graft And Corruption | On Assignment with Richard Engel.

Reader Comments: Trump's Revisionist History - Poland; Ransacking the Public Sector; Democracy in Chains; Paul Robeson; Chile then, Venezuela Today; Beatriz at Dinner; San Francisco Labor Against Cuban Blockade - Example for labor; Painters Union Calls for Release of Two Union Members from ICE Detention; New Book on Baseball's Radicals; Reality Winner Defense Launched; Global Platform for the Right to the City; National Screening: Arc of Justice-July 20th; and more...

Airline travelers are willing to compromise on personal comfort and convenience in return for lower fares and regularly scheduled flights. But I doubt the flying public would agree to deeply discount their own safety by letting the government hack away at an essential industry standard designed to protect flyers from inexperienced pilots.

Victor Grossman reports from Germany, giving a European left perspective on the recently concluded G20 Summit in Hamburg. Was anything accomplished in polished conference rooms and luxurious hotel suites carefully protected from the wild, fiery street scenes? Was it worth hundreds of injured police officers and arrests and millions in damage? His answer: maybe.