Tidbits – Feb.27 – Reader Comments: Fighting the Coup; Support for Public Employees Rising; Trump’s Tax Proposals; Texas Measles Outbreak Was ‘Inevitable’; Trump/Netanyahu Crime of the Century; ‘Stand Up for Science’ Rallies March 7; Lots More;
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Musk's Email -- Cartoon by Nick Anderson
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Re: How To Organize Our Way out of the Trump-Musk Putsch (AFGE LOCAL 3343)
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Re: Democrats Appear Paralyzed. Bernie Sanders Is Not. (Veronica Knight)
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Re: Trump Sends Conflicting Medicaid Cut Messages (Dan Jordan)
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Cost Cutting -- Cartoon by Clay Bennett
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Government Partially Shuts Down -- Cartoon by Stuart Carlson
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Re: Trump and Netanyahu Have Devised the Crime of the Century (Lynn Hamilton; Roberto Rosario)
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Re: Trump’s Doubly Flawed “Invasion” Theory (David Benton)
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Re: Trump Saved Eric Adams’s Bacon—and Put the Country Up for Sale (Z Joyce McCollum)
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Chainsaw -- Cartoon by Rob Rogers
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Re: The Movement Supporting Public Employees Is Rising (TARA Houston Chapter)
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Re: The Democratic Capitulation Point (Wendy Anes Hirschegger)
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Re: Black Washingtonians in the Fight for Equality: An Interview With Maurice Jackson (Mike Budd)
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Re: The Great Resegregation (Mike Glick)
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ICE Rounds Up Execs Who Exploited Undocumented Workers -- Cartoon by Ed Bagley
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Re: Undocumented Workers Prepare To Clean Up L.A.’s Fires Amid ICE Raids (Tom Edminster)
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Re: Dispatches From the Culture Wars – February 25, 2025 (Ethan Young)
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Re: Why the Texas Measles Outbreak Was ‘Inevitable’ (Daniel Millstone)
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Measles Outbreak -- Cartoon by Gary Clement
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Re: A Palestinian Film Is an Oscars Favorite - so Why Is It So Hard To See? (Brian A. Hayes; Martha)
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Re: War of Words: From the Mekong Delta to Gaza (Mary-Alice Strom)
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Piece Plan -- Carton by JD Crowe
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Re: ‘Viciousness’ of Trump’s Climate Attacks Stuns Even His Critics (Pablo Millan-Sepulveda)
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Re: An Attack on Pregnant Workers at the 5th Circuit Could Unleash Chaos Across the Country (Dave Lott)
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Re: This Week in People’s History, Feb 26-Mar 4, 2025 (Virginia; Karen Lee Wald)
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Re: Anvil, the Forgotten Magazine of Heartland Marxism (Jose Luis Medina)
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Re: Inside the Labor Grammys: Joe Hill – Still Alive As You and Me (Michael Henry Starks)
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Resources:
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Impact Of Donald Trump’s Tax Proposals by Income Group (Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy)
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Announcements:
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‘Stand Up for Science’ Rallies Will Protest Trump Attacks on Research -- Washington, DC and Nationwide -- March 7 (Stand Up for Science via Scientific American)
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Book Launch and Discussion - 70 Years of Labor History - Labor's Partisans -- Washington, DC -- March 12 (Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor)
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Musk's Email -- Cartoon by Nick Anderson
Nick Anderson
February 24, 2025
Pen Strokes
Re: How To Organize Our Way out of the Trump-Musk Putsch
A plan to harness grassroots energy—and to hold Democratic leaders accountable. Our predecessors deposed a brain-addled king; they crushed the violent insurrectionists of a slaveholding confederacy; they forced the robber barons to contend with workers and unions; they kicked the Nazis’ asses throughout Europe; they broke the back of the southern segregationist political bloc; they fought back against the terrorizing forces at Stonewall.
We have planted ourselves in stubborn opposition to monomaniacal fascists of one form or another for a quarter of a millennium. No entitled reality-TV has-been backed by an addle-brained billionaire who cheats at video games is going to roll over us now.
AFGE LOCAL 3343
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Re: Democrats Appear Paralyzed. Bernie Sanders Is Not.
Since Donald Trump’s election, his opposition party hasn’t acted much like one. The same cannot be said of Bernie Sanders, who hit the road this weekend in red states in an effort to stoke pushback to Trump’s slash-and-burn plutocratic governance.
Veronica Knight
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Re: Trump Sends Conflicting Medicaid Cut Messages
Republicans are getting worried about how much they’ll have to cut from the popular health safety-net program, and whether the president will protect them from political blowback.
Republicans of course would not want to cut Medicaid. Oh wait, unless Trump can protect them from "political blowback" then hey, it's all systems go. They only care if they themselves are not harmed.
Dan Jordan
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Cost Cutting -- Cartoon by Clay Bennett
Clay Bennett
February 22, 2025
Chattanooga Times Free Press
Government Partially Shuts Down -- Cartoon by Stuart Carlson
Stuart Carlson
Week ending October 2, 2013
The Comic News
[Stuart Carlson, was the editorial cartoonist for the Milwaukee Sentinel and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel from 1983 to 2008. He died June 10, 2022.]
Re: Trump and Netanyahu Have Devised the Crime of the Century
Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented an imperialist horror show. An American and an Israeli, each with his own criminal indictments, decided to determine the future of the Palestinian people.
Lynn Hamilton
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
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On the lives and money of the American people.
Roberto Rosario
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Re: Trump’s Doubly Flawed “Invasion” Theory
The President claims unprecedented authority to ignore and override Congress and the Constitution whenever he proclaims an “invasion,” real or metaphorical. He president is wrong about what an invasion is—and what powers it triggers
David Benton
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Re: Trump Saved Eric Adams’s Bacon—and Put the Country Up for Sale
The quid pro quo deal between the president and the mayor of New York City will throw open the foreign corruption floodgates. As the Trump administration moves to drop the case and gut any remaining independence out of the DOJ, damn the consequences
...we have perhaps arrived at the logical endpoint of these arrangements. Trump is, as everyone is fully aware, the American president with far and away the most foreign financial entanglements....
Z Joyce McCollum
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Chainsaw -- Cartoon by Rob Rogers
Rob Rogers
February 25, 2025
Rob Rogers
Re: The Movement Supporting Public Employees Is Rising
(posting on Portside Labor)
Thousands of workers across the country hit the streets this week to declare their opposition to Trump and Musk who, under the guise of “efficiency,” are slashing and burning public services.
TARA Houston Chapter
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Re: The Democratic Capitulation Point
(posting on Portside Labor)
I was on board until I hit this shameful and demeaning sentence: "So far, Democratic leadership has acted like a bunch of teachers reading aloud the school handbook to an active school shooter."
Teachers and teachers' unions are essential to the fight back against the vile #trumpregime and that writer's dismissive and unwarranted insult to teachers is completely unacceptable. Shame on Hamilton Nolan! AFT NEA Today
Wendy Anes Hirschegger
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Re: Black Washingtonians in the Fight for Equality: An Interview With Maurice Jackson
Interview with Dr. Maurice Jackson about his new book on the use of sport and music. Traditionally not fields touched on extensively in intellectual history, the book builds on both of these to create a rich tapestry of life in Washington, D.C.
How did sport and music alike provide new avenues for Black people to be activists, community builders, and thinkers?
Mike Budd
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
The Trump administration’s attacks on DEI are aimed at reversing the civil-rights movement.
Mike Glick
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
ICE Rounds Up Execs Who Exploited Undocumented Workers -- Cartoon by Ed Bagley
Ed Bagley
August 8, 2019
The Salt Lake Tribune
Re: Undocumented Workers Prepare To Clean Up L.A.’s Fires Amid ICE Raids
As fear of ICE raids and deportation mounts, day laborers risk arrest to help the Los Angeles rebuild and to support their families.
Tom Edminster
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Re: Dispatches From the Culture Wars – February 25, 2025
friends whose work relies on grants should check here
Ethan Young
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Re: Why the Texas Measles Outbreak Was ‘Inevitable’
As vaccination rates fall, outbreaks of disease follow. Trump's layoff of disease detectives and his anti-Vax secretary of illness threaten us all. Here, via Portside, an account of the background to the Texas measles outbreak.
Daniel Millstone
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Measles Outbreak -- Cartoon by Gary Clement
Gary Clement
Re: A Palestinian Film Is an Oscars Favorite - so Why Is It So Hard To See?
It is unusual for a film like “No Other Land,” which has garnered critical acclaim and has been recognized at various film festivals and award shows to be unable to find a distributor. Would even a win at the Oscars be enough to break through?
Brian A. Hayes
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
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Thanks for your coverage of "no other land" https://portside.org/2025-02-21/palestinian-film-oscars-favorite-so-why… and its film distribution woes. One of the unique elements in this film is that it depicts a years long history of textbook political non-violence by a Palestinian community collective and filmed together by a Palestinian and Israeli. Is the blackout so complete that there is no way to publicize the powerful efforts at non-violent resistance of Palestinians so that their cause is completely unknown or distorted (BDS is such a movement but support is demonized and obfuscated).
Capital hill lawmakers "on the fence" say that they need evidence of mass non-violent resistance, yet they cannot be influenced by this resistance if they cannot see it.
Any thoughts on how Portside might help?
Many thanks
Martha
Re: War of Words: From the Mekong Delta to Gaza
It is the Palestinian’s people’s refusal to disappear, to hang on to their land, that has led so many Israelis to deploy the racist imagery of “human animals.”
Dehumanization of Palestinians and disregard of Israeli lawbreaking is morally and intellectually reprehensible. In the 1930s and 1940s, the U.S. stood up, finally, for the oppressed: the Chinese against Japanese expansionism, the Ethiopians against Italian imperial ambitions, Europeans against the terror of Nazi Germany. Today, American policies shrink from defending the values upon which the U.S. was founded. Instead, as concerns the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the U.S. defends, assists, and upholds aggression against the weak and vulnerable, denying what the United Nations declared and promised in 1947, a Palestinian state. President Trump’s recent plan to expel the Palestinians of Gaza, then rebuild and repopulate it with others, is just the latest example of mismanaging a tragedy of epic proportions created by racism and ignorance.
Mary-Alice Strom
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Piece Plan -- Carton by JD Crowe
JD Crowe
February 21, 2025
JD Crowe
Re: ‘Viciousness’ of Trump’s Climate Attacks Stuns Even His Critics
¿Que esperaban? Van a levanter una serie de restricciones ambientales para satisfacer a unos magnates del petróleo. Con la idea de drill , drill, drill no van a poder ni siquiera tomar agua pura. Va a apuntarse más cadavers que los que se apuntó en la pandemia. A la ciencia ni le importan los politicos ni las opinions, ni los consentimientos.
What did they expect? They're going to lift a series of environmental restrictions to satisfy oil tycoons. With the idea of drill, drill, drill they won't be able to even drink pure water. More dead bodies are going to be signed up than the ones that were signed up in the pandemic. Science doesn't care about politicians, opinions, or consents.
[Translation by Google]
Pablo Millan-Sepulveda
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Re: An Attack on Pregnant Workers at the 5th Circuit Could Unleash Chaos Across the Country
(posting on Portside Labor)
A bad ruling here would have an enormous impact on
Excerpt:
The law is a boon for maternal health, women’s labor-force participation, and the fight against poverty. Without the PWFA, gaps in the law meant that pregnant workers—especially Black and brown laborers in low-wage, physically demanding professions like retail, service, and warehouse work—were being systematically forced out of their jobs after they requested basic accommodations to protect the health of their pregnancy. The kinds of accommodations the PWFA provides can range from a stool to sit on, breaks to drink water, a change in schedule, or time off to attend a prenatal appointment or recover from childbirth—modifications that are often easily provided at little cost to business but that make a world of difference for families’ ability to survive and thrive, as A Better Balance and March of Dimes explained in an amicus brief submitted to the court.
Dave Lott
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Re: This Week in People’s History, Feb 26-Mar 4, 2025
How delightful reading about the Montgomery bus boycott and the birthday of Antonio Vivaldi in the same email, This Week in People’s History! Really need it in these times.
Love you, Portside,
Virginia
(mother a Freedom Rider, father Ulysses Kay, composer)
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Thank you. Sharing with my grandchildren
Karen Lee Wald
Re: Anvil, the Forgotten Magazine of Heartland Marxism
Printed out of a cattle barn in Missouri, Anvil published some of the biggest leftist writers of the 1930s, including Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. Its popular vision for multiracial socialism in the heart of the US could hardly be more urgent.
Jose Luis Medina
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Re: Inside the Labor Grammys: Joe Hill – Still Alive As You and Me
Let’s begin with what "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night" is not: It is not a song that simply complains in vague terms about long working hours; it does not simply moan about poor working conditions. Rather, it names names—a specific worker, copper bosses, Salt Lake City. It is a song about a real man and a real incident in American labor history. It is a song that turns the tragic tale it begins with into a veritable shout, for it concludes not as a somber dirge for one fallen fellow worker but as a soaring call for collective action and for all working people to stand up for their rights. As the man Joe Hill cabled IWW co-founder Big Bill Haywood on the eve of his execution, “Don’t waste any time in mourning—organize!”
If you've never heard "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night", go here
Michael Henry Starks
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
Impact Of Donald Trump’s Tax Proposals by Income Group (Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy)
The Republican House just passed their plan to give $4.5 TRILLION in tax cuts to the wealthy, while stealing basic services (Medicaid and food aid programs).
If these proposals were in effect in 2026, the richest 1 percent would receive an average tax cut of about $36,300 and the next richest 4 percent would receive an average tax cut of about $7,200. All other groups would see a tax increase with the hike on the middle 20 percent at about $1,500 and the increase on the lowest-income 20 percent of Americans at about $800.
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President Trump has offered several tax proposals, which are all included in these estimates:
President Trump has offered several tax proposals, which are all included in these estimates:
- Extending the temporary provisions in Trump’s 2017 tax law that will otherwise expire at the end of 2025, except for the $10,000 cap on State and Local Tax (SALT) deductions, which Trump says he would not extend
- Exempting certain types of income from taxes (overtime pay, tips, and Social Security benefits)
- Reducing the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 20 percent and then further reducing it to 15 percent for “companies that make their product in America”
- Repealing tax credits enacted as part of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that provide incentives for the production and use of green energy
- Imposing a new 20 percent tariff on imported goods, with a higher rate of 60 percent for goods from China
Amid President Donald Trump’s attacks on government scientists and science funding, researchers are arranging rallies to “Stand Up for Science” in Washington, D.C., and nationwide on March 7
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By Meghan Bartels
February 25, 2025
Scientific American
Among the slew of actions that President Donald Trump has taken during his first weeks back in office has been a barrage of attacks on federal scientists and scientific funding. The administration’s science agencies have fired thousands of employees, attempted to freeze research disbursements and proposed new policies that would reduce funding into the future.
Against this backdrop, a team of early-career researchers is organizing nationwide rallies on March 7 to “Stand Up for Science”—a call for people across the U.S. to demonstrate to show their appreciation of science and its benefits to society. Rallies will take place in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Nashville, Tenn., Austin, Tex., and many other places across the country. The network of stationary rallies is set to take place eight years after the March for Science protests that met Trump’s first administration—which Stand Up for Science’s organizers hope helped prepare scientists to wade into politics.
To learn about Stand Up for Science’s plans and goals, Scientific American talked with three of its lead organizers: Colette Delawalla, a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology at Emory University, Emma Courtney, a Ph.D. candidate in biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and Sam Goldstein, a Ph.D. candidate in health behavior at the University of Florida.
Wednesday, March 12 · 4:30 - 6:30pm EDT
3600 N Street, NW
Washington, DC 20007
On March 12, at 4:30 pm we will be welcoming Jules Bernstein, Michael Kazin, and Ruth Milkman to discuss Labor's Partisans, a new publication on the many articles that have made up Dissent magazine over the past 70 years.
The tradition of activists and writers that created Dissent continues today during an era just as crucial as the one that created it. We will discuss some key points from this exciting new anthology, Dissent including the most pressing issues in the world of workers' rights today.
Sign up on Eventbrite to get updates and reminders!
Zoom link available upon request. Please reach out to Alexis Harper ah1802@georgetown.edu
The Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University engages questions of workers’ rights and the future of the labor movement.