Portside

The democratically-elected president and parliament (let alone the media and ordinary citizens) have no prayer of checking the powers of the Supreme Leader. As a result, the system has remained opaque, blind to its own flaws, resistant to growth and incapable of adaptation to its evolving internal and external environments. These uprisings express the frustration of the people with that obdurate rigidity.

Christian Picciolini on his new book, "White American Youth: My Descent into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement—and How I Got Out."

The dominant role played by U.S. corporations in the international arms trade owes a great deal to the efforts of U.S. government officials. “Significant parts of the government,” notes military analyst William Hartung, “are intent on ensuring that American arms will flood the global market and companies like Lockheed and Boeing will live the good life.

Year-end lists; Bluegrass at the end of the world; Bass action

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." The German Ideology, Karl Marx

Just cause — a legal right to your job — should be an essential part of any package of reforms to restore workplace dignity and fairness.

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.