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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 Magazine
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.

Building Trades Leadership Undercuts Activists

Len Shindel The Stansbury Forum
When McGarvey, claiming to speak for all the trades, kowtows to a president who launched his political career attacking the legitimacy of the nation’s first black president and stereotyping Hispanics as “rapists and murderers,” he undermines the work and the morale of dedicated activists and potential members, the future of the U.S. labor movement.

The Goldman Sachs Effect - How a Bank Conquered Washington

Nomi Prins TomDispatch
Whether you voted for or against Donald Trump, whether you’re gearing up for the revolution or waiting for his next tweet to drop, rest assured that, in the years to come, the ideology that matters most won’t be that of the “forgotten” Americans of his Inaugural Address. It will be that of Goldman Sachs and it will dominate the domestic economy and, by extension, the global one.

Whither the Resistance?

Fran Shor Common Dreams
Already some are calling this vast movement the "resistance." Whether this label is warranted will depend on the degree to which these demonstrations actually challenge repressive power structures not only with public dissent but active disobedience.

Labor Unions Appear Set for More State-Level Defeats In 2017

Todd Bookman and Brett Neely NPR
If New Hampshire, Missouri and Kentucky succeed in enacting "right-to-work" bills, it would be the most states rolling back union power in one year since 1947, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Success in New Hampshire would also make it the first state in the Northeast with a "right-to-work" law. The bills are a further reflection of organized labor's falling clout. Just 10.7 percent of American workers belonged to a labor union in 2016.