Portside

Depending on which media you consume, Donald Trump will either leave office in handcuffs or coast to a second term. Making sense of American politics has never been easy, but the extreme polarisation of the press and public has made it more difficult

This essay is excerpted from the introduction to Bob Wing's new book by the same title now available at www.lulu.com. Bob has also launched a website at www.bobwingracialjustice.org.

Vijay Prashad on Venezuela, Vietnam's New President, UK: Labour Party Meets, Pan-Africanism Conference in Ghana, Murder Wave in Colombia, Breakthrough for Québec Solidaire, Euro Left Seminar

Not so far back, those who opposed the Iraq War were smeared as supporters of Saddam Hussein, a charge that honest anti-war activists easily dismissed. Defending Syria from foreign aggression and advocating the right of Syrians to choose their own future apparently makes one an “Assad apologist"...

There is an old story about Marx: you throw him out the front door and he sneaks back in through the rear window. That is what happened once again.

Conor Lamb ran as an anti-establishment, labor-backed candidate who defended the welfare state. To keep winning, Democrats will need to embrace a bold, redistributive program. If anything, the problem is that the progressive efforts are too weak, not too strong.

Rebuilding the democratic infrastructure is too important to leave up to the consultocracy. Mobilizers only turn out people with whom they agree. Organizers engage these people in reaching out to other people with whom they don’t agree.

This is the question people left of center have been asking for some time now. In different ways, it is being posed in Latin America, in much of Europe, in Arab and Islamic countries, in southern Africa, and in northeast Asia. The question is all the more dramatic because, in so many of these countries, this follows a period when there were significant shifts leftward.

Quebec's broad party of the left, Québec solidaire (QS), congress opens May 19 in Montréal – the 12th congress in its 11-year history. The delegates face a challenging agenda: the final stage of adoption of the party's detailed program, a process begun eight years ago; discussion of possible alliances with other parties and some social movements including a proposed fusion with another pro-independence party, Option nationale; and renewal of the party's top leadership.