Portside

Growing resistance to antibiotics now allows long-treatable diseases to once again become killers. Yet, pharmaceutical companies are sacking their antibiotic researchers. Even with the looming threat of drug resistant “superbugs,” there are now less than 1,500 researchers who know how to develop antibiotics. It’s a problem rooted in the market-driven nature of the pharmaceutical industry. Big Pharma makes more money by making expensive drugs and selling a lot of them.

This is not war as we once knew it, nor is it government as we once understood it, nor are these elections as we once imagined them, nor is this democracy as it used to be conceived of, nor is this journalism of a kind ever taught in a journalism school. This is the definition of uncharted territory. A new, more frightening America is emerging and we can’t blame it all on Donald Trump. For it is this new America-in-formation that has paved the way for him.

The Israeli mainstream newspaper Yediot Ahronoth held its first conference targeting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The Yediot Achronot conference attacking BDS has become a veritable carnival of hate. Everyone from delusional Hollywood celebrities (Roseanne Barr) to cabinet ministers, to the leader of the Opposition have pledged fealty to the cause. Two of the speakers are under criminal investigation for corrupt political or financial dealings.

If left leaning activists are serious about their characterization of Trump as a fascist, then they better get serious about the problem of unity...For better or worse, this is not Germany 1932, nor is it Nixon vs Humphrey in 1968. 2016 is unique. There is a political crisis, but nothing like the end of the Weimar Republic. To begin with, it's a stretch to compare the 2016 race to Germany 1932.

The Chicago Teachers Union’s strike today is a challenge to the rest of labor to break anti-union rules.

Martin Espada, “The Pablo Neruda of North American poets," according to Sandra Cisneros, turns his critical eye to the persistence of racist murders in our times.

The poet Martin Espada, called the North American Pablo Neruda, turns his eye to the continuing murders of non-white peoples and asks how people in the future will look back at our times, wondering "how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them."

Why is Europe disintegrating? And what can be done about it? What we should do now is what democrats should have done in 1930 to prevent a catastrophe that is now becoming imaginable once again. We should establish a pan-European coalition of radical, social, green, and liberal democrats to put the “demos” back into democracy.

The Democratic Party's special class of entitled and unelected VIP delegates helps explain what's wrong with the way we choose our presidential candidates.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” asked Watergate conspirator Ehrlichman. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”