Portside

Chicago area municipalities that witnessed sharp declines in white population between 2000 and 2010 have continued to lose population, lose jobs or lose both since 2010, particularly majority-black and majority-Latino suburbs

We'll either save or doom the planet during the Trump administration. Don't sit the Peoples Climate Mobilization out. Trump is either the end of the fight for a working planet Earth - or the moment when that fight turns truly serious. That choice is not up to him. It's up to the rest of us. See you in DC.

Anybody who is paying attention should be worried about the very real threat of climate change, but action on critical environmental issues is often set aside because of perceived immediate crisis: war breaking out on the international stage, racial injustice and inequality decimating our streets at home, threats of mass deportation, a growing healthcare crisis. With all of these vying for our attention, attending to the earth hardly seems high on the priority list.

Benchmarks to beat in order to claim policy-driven improvements to American wages and employment

These workers know from bitter experience that CEOs don’t have their best interests in mind. They know the problem with the TPP and NAFTA is that they were drafted by CEOs for the benefit of CEOs and 1 percenter shareholders. Workers never got an equal seat at the negotiating tables.They know that Donald Trump listened to 24 CEOs on Thursday but not one manufacturing worker.

It's not ok for corporations to pack up and leave. We should have some control over our economic lives and not leave all the crucial decisions to Wall Street and their corporate puppets. Trade deals are bad deals unless they enforce the highest health, safety, environmental and labor standards. The race to the bottom is real and must stop. We need to recapture the job outsourcing issue and rekindle the flames that ignited Occupy Wall Street and the Sanders campaign.

Until recently, any proposal to "save" Europe was regarded sympathetically, albeit with skepticism about its feasibility. Today, the skepticism is about whether Europe is worth saving. The European idea is being driven into retreat by the combined force of a denial, an insurgency, and a fallacy. progressives need to ask a straightforward question: Why is the European idea dying? The answers are clear: involuntary unemployment and involuntary intra-EU migration.

Time and again workers mention the same issue as to why they abandoned the Democrats: NAFTA. Feltner says, “The NAFTA bill is still fresh in people’s minds. The international was all, ‘Vote Democrat, Democrat, Democrat.’ Then they make an announcement about jobs going away and it’s because of NAFTA. The workers connect that to the Democrats, and Hillary was saddled with that.”

Honoring King's vision and legacy thus requires not simply remembering his most well-known dream: a racially inclusive society very different from the one that existed in his, or sadly, our own time. It requires recognizing the need to redistribute the power from the oppressive, exclusionary institutions, many of the same ones - housing, schools, criminal justice, the economy - he fought for until the day he was taken from us. What does honoring that vision mean today?

Bringing white voters who defected to Donald Trump into the fold would make the Democratic Party a formidable force, but not if it means marginalizing the concerns of people of color.