Portside

The Stansbury Forum is proud to publish organizer and labor attorney Peter Haberfeld’s diagnostic of the Bernie Sander’s ground game in Berkeley/Oakland in the run-up to the California primary in June of 2016. Haberfeld contrasts the “organizing” work that he and his comrades attempted to do with the “mobilizing” approach of many in the national Sanders campaign, and their over reliance on social media and barnstorming meetings.

"Imagine--a woman in the White House." As Florida poet Meryl Stratford implies about her pre-feminist mother--"It wasn’t worth the argument"-- of just how hard it is to change someone's mind when it comes to voting!

Rex Tillerson stands a good chance of being confirmed as Secretary of State. His statements about climate change adaptation, whether, hubris, ignorance, or deception talking-it's a dangerous view. It's playing with other people's lives. So why does Rex Tillerson want a job that could easily be seen as a step down in power and influence? He has unfinished business, particularly in Russia, which he likely does not trust the Trump administration to handle.

Occasionally entertainment and politics intersect. Sunday Meryl Streep tearfully addressed the stars assembled at the Golden Globes about her anxieties and distress at the advent of the Trump era in the United States. She made the powerful point, which is that no human experience is really foreign to us as human beings if only we can find the tools to understand it, emotionally and intellectually. And Trump does not.

Duterte's campaign to rid the Philippines of drug users and pushers through extrajudicial executions elicited shock even among the most hardened observers. And his now legendary cursing of President Obama as a "son of a bitch" - part of an angry farewell to a long-standing alliance with Washington and an embrace of China - upended Asian geopolitics.

Hit that old song again, loud and clear! "Over there, over there, Send the word, send the word, That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming." Yes, sirree! Shades of 1918 and the Battle of the Marne! Shades of 1944 and the beaches of Normandy! But no, not just shades and not just words have already been sent. The U.S. is sending significant military assets to Germany, and to countries bordering Russia.

Reader Comments: Protests Should Also be Used for Organizing; Another Extreme Trump Nominee to Run National Intelligence; Top Prosecutor in Leonard Peltier Case Urges Clemency; Hidden Figures; Black Women and Civil Rights; It's Time to #TeachResistance: A Toolkit for Educators; Announcements and more....

The form of political action that Clinton defenders in labor advocate is a suffocating loser. It seeks accommodation when confrontation is required. It is more concerned with the longevity of the union as an institution – an important consideration for labor, but one that demands a more courageous vision – than with the overall strength of its members vis a vis their employers, which in fact is the only guarantor of institutional survival.

The author argues that a key factor in unifying the fractious 13 colonies in opposition to British rule during the Revolution was the patriots' effort to link British oppression to extant colonial fears about insurrectionary slaves and homicidal Indians. America's founders were chief among those spreading tales of British agents inciting blacks and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion, making racial prejudice a foundation stone of the new republic.

Ahead of President Obama’s farewell speech in Chicago this week, the author of a celebrated book about the city explains how it works as a microcosm of the US, with its legacy of policies reinforcing ethnic and economic divisions.