Portside

Acclaimed Native American novelist Erdrich's fifteenth novel is a "multigenerational tale," writes reviewer Round, that "stretches across two centuries of life on the Northern Plains."

Somebody's got to be the first state to free the weed through the legislature. Here are the most likely prospects.

A call for solidarity for justice for Walter Scott from Black Lives Matter-Charleston, South Carolina in response to the trial of former South Carolina police officer, Michael Slager, who shot and killed Scott ended in a mistrial this week.

How can we understand the 2016 presidential election in a broad context of American history? This is a question that many Americans, pundits, and historians have been thinking through for the past month. To address it, we assembled a panel of experts.

A day after the election, I heard a journalist on the radio speak of the vitriol between Obama and Trump. No, the vitriol was Trump’s. Now is the time to burn false equivalencies forever. Pretending that both sides of an issue are equal when they are not is not “balanced” journalism; it is a fairy tale—and, unlike most fairy tales, a disingenuous one.

We must include migrants and refugees in the people, politically and institutionally in the sense of full social and political rights but also ideologically in the terms of how we define the “us vs. them” in our societies. We need to redefine the people –or even the “nation”– as the unity in struggle of all the subaltern classes. This is an answer to “identity politics” than chauvinism in the name of “secularism," and an answer to neo-liberal cosmopolitanism.

At the top of Representative Virginia Foxx's agenda is the U.S. Labor Department rule that would extend mandatory overtime pay to more than 4 million workers. A federal judge in Texas blocked the rule last month before it took effect, but the Labor Department has challenged that ruling in a federal appeals court.

At this late date, what might a president frightened by his successor actually do, if not to hamper Trump's ability to create global mayhem, then at least to set the record straight before he leaves the White House? Unfortunately, the answer is: far less than we might like, but as it happens, there are still some powers a president has that are irreversible by their very nature. Here are nine recommendations for action by the president in his last 40 days.

When native American protesters sat down in front of bulldozers to try and protect ancestral graves, they were met with attack dogs – the pictures looked like Birmingham, Alabama, circa 1963. But it went back further than that: the encampment, with its teepees and woodsmoke hovering in the valley, looked like something out of an 1840s painting. But this was not just one tribe. The flags of more than 200 Indian nations lined the rough dirt entrance road.

Now, after the wave of new protests in the late Obama era, the Sanders campaign, and the post-primary mess that resulted in the election of Trump, there are signs of a new direction. As the shock of November 8 drives a turn toward left politics, many new converts are looking for orientation and training. The left has plenty of passion, but lacks a coherent organizing strategy or analysis of how power is defined by social relations from top to bottom.