Portside

President Biden should do “whatever it takes” to avoid an economic catastrophe. House GOP-led efforts are to blame for the impending debt crisis. In 2011, the GOP’s demands for massive spending cuts sabotaged the Great Recession recovery.

The Inflation Reduction Act would not have happened without the movement for a Green New Deal, but it shouldn’t be confused for one. The climate left now faces a novel problem: how to deal with having won something—and keep fighting for more.

The 19th century origins of Mother’s Day differ vastly in spirit and purpose from celebrations of it in the 20th and 21st centuries. The first public “Mother’s Day for Peace” rally was in New York City on June 2, 1872, and has only grown more urgent.

Neither CNN nor its host was able to take control as the ex-president played steamroller, to the audience’s delight. It began and ended in a way that absolutely everyone could have predicted.

Reader Comments: GOP Defends Sex Offender; Debt Crisis; Child Labor Laws, Population Decline; Yes, I Am Latina. And No, I Am Not Mexican -An Exchange; Vietnam 50 Years Later; Charlene Mitchell Memorial Livestream Link; Yuri Kochiyama; more

“Unless and until the Debt Limit Statute is amended or revised to allow Congress to determine the priority of payments among specific programs once the limit is reached, members of Plaintiff NAGE will suffer irreparable injury from layoffs, furloughs, and loss of employment that are taken without any legitimate authority by the President"

Turkey’s major trade unions called for a one-day strike on 29 December to protest the government-led military operations against the Kurds. Union representatives declared that they would persist in struggle against those who are trying to destroy the hope of both peoples [Turks and Kurds] to live together and build a common future.

A recently released secret U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) file can be justifiably termed “Stranger than Strangelove”, the 1964 film that satirically captured the madness of the Cold War. It reveals for the first time the scale of the holocaust that would have been unleashed in a nuclear war. The U.S. planned to attack more than 1,200 “Soviet bloc” cities, killing an estimated 520 million people. Even “friendly forces and people” would be radiated.

In one of the largest U.S. natural gas leaks ever recorded, Southern California Gas Company’s Aliso Canyon plant outside of Los Angeles is leaking harmful methane gas at a rate of 110,000 pounds per hour, and according to the company, it may take more than three months to plug it. The single leak, which has been called the worst environmental disaster since the BP oil spill in 2010, accounts for a quarter of the California's entire methane emissions.

Although there were many horrible developments in 2015, there were some goods ones too -- and let these encourage us to bring in the new year truly striking back at the injustices of the empire.