Portside

2017 saw artists, performers, athletes, politicians, cultural workers, faith-based organizations, students, academics, unions and activists grow the movement for Palestinian rights.

Five ways the administration has waged war on Muslims at home and abroad in its first year.

On a wide range of issues, high schoolers across the United States opposed the Trump agenda this year, both directly and in principle. At the end of a bleak political year, here are ten stories about awesome high schoolers who led the charge in 2017. Plus five youth organizing victories in 2017 in California.

The question posed by the Vietnam War experience remains: how to navigate a world in which the US is no longer the pre-eminent power. Trump offers an unequivocal, aggressive, national chauvinist response.

This is the question people left of center have been asking for some time now. In different ways, it is being posed in Latin America, in much of Europe, in Arab and Islamic countries, in southern Africa, and in northeast Asia. The question is all the more dramatic because, in so many of these countries, this follows a period when there were significant shifts leftward.

Calorie counts make a difference! Listing them on menus influences consumer choices.

Ten private-sector union pension funds have applied to the U.S. Treasury Dept. for the green light to slash retiree payouts, the Pension Rights Center says Among them are labor organizations affiliated with the auto industry, several from the trucking industry and others from the iron workers and bricklayer unions. Sixty-eight plans are listed as having “critical and declining status,” meaning they too will soon have to apply for permission to cut retiree payouts.

Preemption is a legal term that allows corporations to boost their profits by suppressing local government power, community groups and citizens.

Let me take this opportunity to thank J Street for the bold voice that they’ve provided in support of American leadership in the Middle East and efforts towards peace between Israelis and Palestinians. I understand that, given the political climate in this capital, that has not always been easy. I also applaud them for being part of a broad coalition of groups that successfully fought for the historic nuclear agreement between the U.S. and its partners and Iran.

Ultimately the only long-term solution to the problem of national leaders launching a nuclear war is to get rid of the weapons. This was the justification for the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, which constituted a bargain between two groups of nations. Under its provisions, non-nuclear countries agreed not to develop nuclear weapons, while nuclear-armed countries agreed to dispose of theirs.