Portside

Sens. Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz debated the future of health care in the US Tuesday night. CNN's Reality Check Team of reporters, researchers and editors vetted the claims, rating them true, misleading or false. And the winner is ...

It’s real; Gorsuch an ass; LGBT attack lurks; Cash against fash; Subway solidarity; Gaga sings Guthrie

Government officials know this power (capital strike) well, and invest great energy and public resources in staving off fits by malcontent capitalists. The profoundly rotten campaign finance system is just one manifestation of business’s domination over government policy. The real power resides in the corporate world’s monopoly over the flow of capital.

As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, the “slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” According to Douglas Blackmon, author of “Slavery by Another Name,” the choices made by Southern white supremacists after abolition, and the rest of the country’s accommodation, “explain more about the current state of American life, black and white, than the antebellum slavery that preceded.”

1. 5 Lessons for the Trump Resistance from Betsy DeVos Contentious Confirmation by Jefferson Morley 2. Betsy DeVos Confirmed Despite Massive Protests! by Diane Ravitch

Protecting Saudi Arabia is not new; it has been US policy since the discovery of oil in the desert nation in the 1930s. Despite evidence that the Saudi government was supporting ISIS and Al Qaeda affiliates, President Obama continued the cozy Saudi relationship, but when Obama signed the nuclear deal with Saudi’s nemesis, Iran, the relationship started to fray. It now appears that Donald Trump will be an even more staunch supporter of the Saudi regime.

Eight days after Donald Trump has been sworn into office, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) reflects on the significance of Holocaust Memorial Day. We hear echoes of the fascism and white supremacy of 1930’s Europe in the words and threatened actions of Trump’s administration. We see the racist, Islamophobic, anti-semitic, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, and ableist hate and violence Trump fuels and is fueled by.

No one is safe from the transition this country is undergoing. While many of us have faced hate, ignorance and greed in our daily lives, the period that we have entered is unlike anything that any of us has ever seen before.

Of the hatred and bigotry currently on display, Haitian-American physician Jonel Daphnis, said, “It’s always been like this. It’s just that instead of cursing us out quietly, now they’re emboldened to curse us out loud. Now we can’t keep up delusion as a way of maintaining our mental and spiritual well-being. It’s out in the open."

Social movements ought to place private military contractors at the center of a broader critique of authoritarian neoliberalism and America’s permanent war economy.