Portside

The American people deserve and require leadership from Washington amid this horrific pandemic and economic meltdown. In this unprecedented moment in American history, we need an unprecedented legislative response.

Government action is essential to save lives and to rescue our economy. Front-line workers, including health care, transit, farm, grocery, domestic and delivery workers, are putting their lives on the line to keep America functioning.

When this is all over, will we be able to patch up the economy and get things back to normal? Trump certainly claims so. But he's wrong. The pandemic is exposing just how dysfunctional our economic system was to begin with.

Portside readers respond to two articles on the elections, and how best to remove Donald Trump from the White House and the GOP from controlling the Senate, and defeating Republicans at the state level - the down-ballot races.

Reader Comments: The Right to Vote...or Die; COVID Makes Clear, Healthcare is Human Right; Coronavirus and African Americans, Attacks on Asian Americans, York City, Farmworkers, Climate Crisis; Paul Robeson; Immigration; Resources; and more....

A deep, translucent dive into Marx's capacity to take Hegel's comservatizing worldviews and turn them into elements of revolutionary theory and practice.

Policy makers can start thinking now about how to prepare for the reopening of businesses and the rehiring of workers. Care must be taken to ensure that older workers, displaced due to COVID-19, can reenter the workforce.

Most liberals continue to pay lip service to unions and their importance to the Democratic coalition. But in private, many will tell you that they have little use for them. Julian Zelizer, a Princeton political economist, argues that the marriage between liberalism and organized labor “took a terrible turn starting in the 1970s,” when global competition moved manufacturing jobs from the unionized Northeast and Midwest to the non-union South and, ultimately, abroad.

Rubble Bucket Challenge; Kids' artist hits profiling; White Ferguson betrays itself; Race/class in Silicon Valley; Cooper Union - Cooper vs. $; Klein's latest

The crisis shows that realpolitik remains relevant -- and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.