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Tidbits - February 2, 2017 - Reader Comments: Senate Dems Need Spine; Open Letter to Historic Women's March; Readers respond to Bhaskar Sunkara; Union Membership Continues Decline, Building Trades Makes Deal; How to Resist; and more...

Portside
Reader Comments: Whither the Resistance - Senate Dems Need Spine; Open Letter to Historic Women's March; And this is Just the First Two Weeks; Readers respond to Bhaskar Sunkara, "Our Alternative"; Union Membership Continues Decline, Building Trades Leadership Makes Deal, Undercuts Rest of Labor; Resources - How to Resist, What to Do;Announcements - Vito Marcantonio Forum; Igniting the Socialist Resistance Against Trump; Never Forget the Japanese Internment; and more..

Worldwide, School Choice Hasn't Improved Performance

Henry M. Levin; Steve Hinnefeld U.S. News and World Report
The experience of other countries suggests Betsy DeVos' voucher vision falls flat. Research led by an Indiana University professor confirms what school voucher critics have long argued: Voucher programs receive public funding yet discriminate on the basis of religion, disability status, sexual orientation and possibly other factors. Democratic political participation requires access to information, engagement in discourse and electoral activity to be effective.

California Just Threatened To Stop Paying Taxes If Trump Cuts Federal Funding Over Sanctuary City Status

Grant Stern Occupy Democrats
The State of California's elected officials are exploring ways to combat President Trump's Executive Order cutting off funding to sanctuary cities. National legal experts say that Trump's sanctuary cities order is unconstitutional because, at its core, the order is an attempt to commandeer state and local officials in violation of the 10th Amendment.

What Happens When All We Have Left is the Pentagon? - Trump's Vision of a Militarized America

William D. Hartung Tom Dispatch
Last Friday, Donald Trump made his first visit to the Pentagon where he spoke of signing an order to begin "a great rebuilding of the armed services of the United States." This will mean a massive surge in federal dollars pouring into the abyss of the Pentagon, which has shown itself quite capable of absorbing such moneys in the past and seems to lack the slightest ability to account for what's done with them. (The Pentagon has never even managed to pass an audit.)

The Challenges Facing the UN in the Age of Trump

Chloé Maurel Equal Times
The creation of the UN in 1945 was a victory for the spirit of pacifism, an affirmation of multilateralism, a beautiful progressive idea. This idea must be maintained in face of the pipe dream of unilateralism.

Poetry in a Time of Protest

Edwidge Danticat The New Yorker
Political language, like poetry, is rarely uttered without intention. When Trump said, unconvincingly in his speech, that “we are one nation, and their pain is our pain,” I knew that the They was Us, this separate America, which he continually labels and addresses as Other.

Reclaiming McGovern

Tom Gallagher Los Angeles Review of Books
This first of two projected volumes of a new biography of the South Dakota Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee takes his story to the end of 1968. It offers some surprises about this significant, and some would say underrated, politician.

‘Hidden Figures’ and Its Lessons for the Resistance

Brandon Tensley Pacific Standard
Theodore Melfi’s film about black women mathematicians is now the biggest movie in America — just in time to teach us crucial lessons for a Trump presidency. So what’s to be done? Hidden Figures offers a crystal-clear answer: Resist.