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Tidbits - April 27, 2017 - Reader Comments: Peoples Climate March; Science; Korea; Nuclear War Danger; France; Hawaii IS a State; GOP Health Plan; Single-Payer; Fascism Today; Resources; Announcements-MAY DAY; Labor Film Festival; and more....

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Reader Comments: Peoples Climate March and a Defense of Science; Korea; Danger of Nuclear War; Marine Le Pen is a Fascist, Not a Populist; Hawaii IS a State - Understand Jeff Sessions; GOP Health Plan - A Disaster; Attraction of Single-Payer; Airline Abuse, Profits and Deregulation; Fascism Today - Portside readers exchange views; Resources; Announcements-MAY DAY; Trump and the Left; Labor Film Festival; Left Forum; Oscar López Rivera is Coming to New York; and more...

A New Beginning

Clémentine Autain and David Broder Jacobin
Early results place left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon third, behind Macron and Le Pen. But his campaign, under the banner of France Insoumise, has succeeded in shifting the debate in France’s presidential election to the Left, forcing discussion of democracy and redistribution into a terrain previously dominated by the Right. What does it mean for France’s left?

Friday Nite Videos | April 21, 2017

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Bernie: 'Our Job Is to Radically Transform the Democratic Party'. John Oliver | French Elections. Ode to Joy in Nuremburg. Dirt and Deeds in Mississippi. A Message to Trump from Climate Scientists.

French Elections

The presidential election in France could determine the political future of Europe. John Oliver visits an excessively French bistro to deliver an urgent message to voters.

The Level of Support for Jean-Luc Mélenchon is Frightening the Powerful

by Henry Crapo L'Humanite
Rising rapidly in the polls, the candidate of ``France Insoumise" has become the main target for defeat by his opponents. The right-wing press is unleashed, and the head of state mingles his voice in the refrain ``Liberalism or Apocalypse", which seeks to discredit any alternative policy.

The Return of the Left

Cédric Durand & Razmig Keucheyan Jacobin
Mélenchon’s election campaign has galvanized the Left by doing what Hamon couldn’t — making a clean break with the political center. In France, history is back. Here as elsewhere, the social tectonics of the great economic crisis of 2008 are doing their work. The routine presidential stables are recomposing at great speed. They are realigning political forces around the three options (Three Monsters) nestled within the infra-world of our political modernity.

These Are the Elections That Will Decide Europe's Fate

Conn Hallinan Foreign Policy in Focus
While France teeters on the brink of the far right, left parties elsewhere are showing surprising strength. Predicting election outcomes is tricky these days, the Brexit and the election of Donald Trump being cases in point. The most volatile of the upcoming ballots are in France and Italy. Germany's will certainly be important, but even if Merkel survives, the center-right will be much diminished and the left stronger. And that will have EU-wide implications.

Sovereignty and the State of Emergency

Jean-Claude Paye Monthly Review
The U.S. government, following the 9/11 attacks, expressed no intention of reforming its Constitution. It was left free of any procedure for exception or emergency. This does not mean that the United States has remained a more democratic country than France. Attacks against privacy, civil rights, and, above all, habeas corpus have proven even more virulent in the United States than in Europe.

books

Sartre and the Birth of Radical Existentialism

Ray Monk The New Statesman
A granular review of three recent books on the the political and intellectual legacy of French Marxian existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. As the reviewer notes, if you want to know why 50,000 people showed up to pay their respects at the writer/activist's 1980 funeral, these new books may provide the answer.
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