Portside

What can anti-Trump liberals and progressives actually do? With his party in control of the White House and Congress, and with Trump about to tip the balance of the Supreme Court, it’s easy to despair over how little leverage the Democrats seem to have. One episode from history reveals reasons to hope. In 1850, like the Democrats and their allies in 2016, the abolitionists took a terrible hit...

“Standing Rock is a call to all of us to protect what we love.”

This book, says reviewer Cass Sunstein, "might well be the best book ever written on the founders and their handiwork." It is the kind of book that helps provide useful context for this complex political moment. Readers interested in this topic might also look at America's Constitution: A Biography, by Akhil Reed Amar (Random House, 2005).

We need a reconstructive politics that would link opposition to the far-right to a nationally embedded Green New Deal, sustainable reindustrialization, new budget priorities to cut military expenditures and fund job creation and integration, and the development of economic democracy.

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Hiring freezes, an end to automatic raises, a green light to fire poor performers, a ban on union business on the government’s dime and less generous pensions — these are the contours of the blueprint emerging under Republican control of Washington in January. these are the contours of the blueprint emerging under Republican control of Washington in January.

As we enter the new era of Donald Trump, amid a welter of conflicting signals, only one thing seems clear when it comes to the U.S. military. Whatever extreme figures end up in key posts in the Trump version of the national security state, as TomDispatch regular William Hartung indicates today, yet more money will be sent swirling down the Pentagon's drain.

The debate about an exotic new kind of drug delayed the trade deal for years, thanks in part to relentless advocates who stood up to big pharma.

Trump and journos shame themselves; Twit tweets; New normal; Fake-out 1, 2 and 3

Tony often observed, regarding capital’s revanchist attack on working people that has steadily intensified over the last four decades, that what we would now call the neoliberal Democrats had nothing to offer those who have been or fear being ground into the dust by the juggernaut. He cautioned that, if the left and the labor movement didn’t find ways to connect with that growing population of those hurting, ... other, nasty and dangerous tendencies would.