Portside

Trump evokes America’s sins not to challenge them, but to apologize for those of the Russian president and, preemptively, his own. But to insist that the United States is, in fact, on a higher moral plane than Russia serves to legitimize our government’s crimes.

Presidents have thought before that they could roll those wimpy-looking nerds with their gavels and robes. It usually doesn’t work out all that well.

The marches will be not just for scientists, but for “anyone who believes in empirical science,” the organizers emphasize on the March for Science web page. The demonstrations are meant to be a celebration of science, they say, as well as “a call to support and safeguard the scientific community.”

For Valentine's Day, Philadelphia poet David Moolten's poem--for better or worse--says it all.

She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted...Last night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) spoke out against the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) for attorney general, reading a letter from Coretta Scott King. In a highly unusual move, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) led a vote to silence Warren?-?a rebuke not extended to several of her male colleagues. It follows an old and very sexist playbook.

Donald Trump's draconian immigration enforcement efforts face a basic challenge: the United States operates within an economic system that profits off immigrant labor. Immigrant labor is more vital to many industries than it's ever been before. Today, about 57% of the country's entire agricultural workforce is undocumented. But the list of other industries dependent on immigrant labor is long.

Hope belongs to the left. Social hope entails searching collectively for public solutions to our public problems rather than pretending that everything is up to the solitary individual. Hope creates action, but it is equally true that action creates hope. It is the action of movements, rooted in people's needs and longings, attempting to change the world in small ways and large.

The danger of Donald Trump resorting to military action to prop up his failing policies cannot be over-looked. National Security Advisor Michael Flynn threatened retaliation against Iran, which for those of us of a certain age sounded like the Gulf of Tonkin incident (used as justification for War in Vietnam) - later proved to be a fabrication. What really is Iran with a population of 82 million people? Here is a report on what is actually happening in Iran today.

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Labor sould figtt the proposed National RIght to Work Law. But it is more imortant to continue to build alliances among other progressive groups to fight other reforms that have a serious chance of passage. In particular, labor should put its resources into organizing government workers who are under attack on all sides.