Portside

Many Portside readers follow developments in the international socialist movement, including recent developments in South Africa. Here is the declaration from the recently concluded Congress of the South African Communist Party. Some readers may find it a hopeful sign of the SACP's returning to its role as a critical partner in the governing coalition with COSATU in the governing coalition. Others may feel that the SACP is not being critical enough. What do you think?

It was the left who diagnosed the ills of globalization. So why is the right eating our lunch? Today global capitalism is in a period of long-term stagnation following the global financial crisis. The newer protests represent a far broader disenchantment with capitalism than the protests of the 2000s. The building blocks of an alternative economic model are there - sustainable development, de-growth, and de-globalization.

Why should 20 million Americans working at full-time jobs (sometimes two or three jobs) receive such pitiful incomes that they are forced to rely on food stamps while their CEOs grow ever wealthier?

Democrats should be running on their own wedge issues and saying look, the Republicans want to take Medicaid away from your family, from your neighbors, from your friends. If you’re here in Appalachia and say you don’t know someone covered by Medicaid, that’s not true. Democrats should be using that issue like a damn cudgel and beating Republicans with it in 2018.

Sun-Times a great notion; FCC massacre; Protecting Junior; Harassing you; Angry men; Something fishy at Hawaii 5-0

Three Republican senators announced Tuesday afternoon they would not back GOP leadership's latest ploy to repeal Obamacare.

Failure to pass an Obamacare repeal could upend the entire Republican agenda. The party has spent nearly seven months on a health care overhaul, with hopes it would ease the path to tax reform. Now Trump and the GOP-led Congress are staring at an impending August recess with no major legislative achievements in hand.

Debs came to the conclusion that no strike or labor movement could ultimately be successful as long as the government was controlled by the capitalist class. Any advances made by an organized working class would be reversed once the capitalists regained absolute power, often by temporarily mollifying workers with a few reforms. Working men and women had to achieve political power, or they would forever be at the mercy of the bosses.

On July 13, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee held hearings on Trump’s two NLRB selections and his deputy labor secretary pick. All three of these men are expected to be confirmed.

Central America policy-making, hardly an open book to begin with, is set to become more secretive. What we do know is U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will be there, as will Vice President Mike Pence — and of course, General John F. Kelly, the director of Homeland Security and the previous head of SOUTHCOM.