Portside

Throughout the twentieth century, liberal wisdom held that "socialism" or a social-democratic political formation could not be viable in America. Future historians may look back at the 2016 Sanders campaign as a great wave that swept away this old wisdom. But that new history will be written only if activists seize the opportunity before us to build, from the enthusiasm and activism of the Sanders campaign, enduring organizations.

Elected officials operate within the parameters of possibility. Movement politics is about redefining those parameters. Whoever is elected in November - even Trump - takes office in a country percolating with organized discontent at inequality, climate change, Citizens United, police violence. That's movement politics.

AFL-CIO leaders have reached out to union members in support of actions that can be taken to stop and prevent police killings of people of color. Racism plays an insidious role in the daily lives of all working people of color. This is a labor issue because it is a workplace issue; it is a community issue, and unions are the community. Philando Castile was a union member, and so his family is our family. Ideas of what you can do from labor activists.

The Council on Foreign Relations is a supercharged, highly connected establishment think tank. While producing reports and staffing varied policy working-groups, its recommendations are invariably market-based. CFR leaders and members pass through the revolving door of the federal government to high positions of authority, no matter which party holds power. The book under review, Wall Street's Think Tank, charts the council's key links to US imperial policy.

Sixty miles south of the Arizona border, the devastation from a toxic spill has led to an epochal battle between a transnational mining conglomerate and an alliance of miners and farmers.

Reader Comments: Sanders and the Democrats - Inside and Outside; #BlackLivesMatter - Baltimore, Freddie Gray, Police Incitement; Trump - the Myth of Working Class Support, Whiff of Fascism; Turkey and Nuclear Weapons; Black Athletes Speak Out; Zika; Israel; Announcing - Women's Boat to Gaza is Now a Reality; and more...

If unions find better strategic partners outside the labor movement on a particular issue, they should proceed on the basis of their analysis of what is needed, not hold back and wait for labor unity. Too often a particular union’s political stance may reflect a private employer’s growth plans, not the general good for working people.

There isn't any evidence that the U.S., or other countries that borrow in currencies they control, face some debt tipping point after which borrowing costs spiral out of control. There isn't even much evidence this is true of Europe's troubled economies. Borrowing costs fell for the PIIGS in 2012 (one year after Greenlaw & Co.'s sample ended), not because those countries reduced their debt burdens, but because the ECB promised to do "whatever it takes" to save the euro.

Absent an extremely large injection of government funding or further life extensions, the reactors currently operating are going to end their licensed lifetimes between now and the late 2050s. They will become part of an economics-driven US nuclear phase-out a couple of decades behind the government-led nuclear exit in Germany.

The share of American households with guns has declined over the past four decades, a national survey shows, with some of the most surprising drops in the South and the Western mountain states, where guns are deeply embedded in the culture.