https://portside.org/2025-05-22/tidbits-may-22-readers-comments-after-tax-income-under-trump-gop-budget-one-brief

• After-Tax Income Under the Trump-GOP Budget  --  Meme by Robert Reich

• Don’t know much about history  --  Cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz

• Priced to Sell  --  Cartoon by Mike Luckovich

• Re: One Brief Shining Moment  (Daniel Millstone; Carol Hanisch; Ethan Young)

• Trump's New Refugee Acceptance Policy  --  Cartoon by Dr. James MacLeod

• Aggressive Cancer  --  Cartoon by David Cohen

• Re: How NOT To Run an Antisemitism Commission  (Will U. Buzzoff; Fitzhugh Corr)

• Re: The Fog of War  (Paul Cox)

• Back the Blue* - Unless...  --  Cartoon and Commentary by Nick Anderson

• Re: America’s Descent Into Authoritarianism May Have Started With Policing in Blue Cities. (Gayle Morrow; SB Loveless)

• Trump Dismantles Democracy  --  Cartoon by Peter Kuper

• Re: No, There Isn’t an Epidemic of Workless Medicaid Recipients  (Marilyn Albert; Aaron Stephens)

• He Sells Sea Shells By The Sea Shore  --  Cartoon and Commentary by Clay Jones

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Take Action:

• Petition to NYU Administration sponsored by the Coalition of Action for Higher Education in Defense of Student Logan Rozos

• Kroger - Overcharging Consumers, Also Selling Customer Data to Tobacco and Health Care Companies  -- Take Action, Sign Petition  (Consumer Reports)

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Announcements:

• Webinar - Panel Defending Civil Society, Civil Liberties, and Civil Rights  --  May 28  (DSA National Political Education Committee)

• How Can Academics Support Workers' Organizing at Amazon?  --  Online Seminar  --  May 29  (Sheffield University Management School)

• Cutting the Cord: Two organizations Share Their Experiences of Leaving Google Behind  --  Webinar  --  May 29  (May First)

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After-Tax Income Under the Trump-GOP Budget  --  Meme by Robert Reich

Their priorities couldn't be clearer.

 

 

Don’t know much about history  --  Cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz

 

Lalo Alcaraz
May 20, 2025
https://www.pocho.com/

 

Priced to Sell  --  Cartoon by Mike Luckovich

 

Mike Luckovich
May 15, 2025
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 

Re: One Brief Shining Moment
 

How did we get to place in which white South Africans fleeing the end of apartheid are refugees while people of color fleeing poverty, crime and chaos are shipped to detention centers financed by you and me? 

Part of the answer is the lost promise of reconstruction which coulda, would, shoulda resolved the issue of slavery and citizenship of non white peoples. The bad news is that slavery advocates, though they lost the war, won the peace. The scene was set for continued oppression of people of color, the Klan, lynching and Jim Crow. Here, via Portside, Adam Hochschild reviews an important new book, looking at our nation’s repeated failures to extricate itself from the vast injustice of slavery: The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860–1920 by Manisha Sinha (which I have not read yet.).

Daniel Millstone
Post on Facebook

      =====

As I started reading Adam Hochschild's review of Manisha Sinha's book, One Brief Shining Moment, I was wondering just why it had been printed in the New York Review of Books as it seemed too radical for the mass media in these times. The book even makes the case for the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in a comparable situation that many can understand, though of course it doesn't use the term. 

But then Hochschild attacks the book as poorly written after repeating in his own writing some of what he is complaining about. Worse, he dismisses its basic contentions and historical links to what has happened since, shrugging off the results of unscrupulous and self-serving political decisions as ultimately "inevitable". With liberal reviewers like this, Trump and Co. won't have to bother to burn the book.

Carol Hanisch

      =====

My continuing quest: the point where the rising postwar labor movement joined the consensus that Reconstruction didn't matter to the national memory. Were their exceptions to the rules. Where did Radical Republicans stand on militant strikes.

Ethan Young
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Trump's New Refugee Acceptance Policy  --  Cartoon by Dr. James MacLeod

 

 

Dr. James MacLeod
May 13, 2025
MacLeodCartoons

 

Aggressive Cancer  --  Cartoon by David Cohen

 

David Cohen
May 20, 2025
David Cohen

 

Re: How NOT To Run an Antisemitism Commission
 

The people who marched through Charlotte chanting "The Jews will not replace us!" and carrying Nazi and Confederate flags are opposed to antisemitism now.

Will U. Buzzoff
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

      =====

Will U. Buzzoff Yup. Upside-down world we're living in.

Fitzhugh Corr
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Re: The Fog of War
 

The Fog of War article asks: "Did Agent Orange put children's health at risk?" It thereby created a question where none exists. This strawman approach opens an article replete with "Gee, we just don't know." 

How much "rigorous" research is needed to understand that a fetus is susceptible to developmental disruption due to illness or environmental contamination of the mother? Is the author implying that in-utero children are immune to, say, the mother's alcohol or tobacco usage? If not, then certainly in-utero exposure to dioxin, the most toxic chemical known, would most certainly result in increased incidence of birth defects and developmental problems in children. Is more research into persistent organic pollutants needed? Sure, but to continue to delay assistance to those affected by the AO spray missions based on a reluctance by the US to study its effects is flatly irresponsible. 

The data capture by the VA is extensive. In addition, while the author may disregard work done by Vietnamese medical and social service personnel, the volume of increase in birth defects and disabilities post war has led their policy and practice efforts to confront this catastrophic use of chemical warfare. The US needs to greatly increase its assistance to the handicapped in Vietnam based on humanitarian grounds, now, not decades from now. It has been long enough. H.R.3051, recently introduced in the House, addresses this moral shortfall. 

Paul Cox

 

Back the Blue* - Unless...  --  Cartoon and Commentary by Nick Anderson

 

 

Rep. LaMonica McIver, a Democratic congresswoman from New Jersey, has been charged with assault after a tense encounter at an immigration detention center — a charge that conveniently emerged just as she tried to perform congressional oversight of ICE, the agency that treats "transparency" like a four-letter word.

According to video footage, McIver appeared to bump into an officer during a chaotic scene, which ICE and Homeland Security quickly spun into an “assault” narrative — because nothing says “threat to national security” like an elected official elbowing someone in a scrum of uniforms. No word yet on whether the agent suffered emotional trauma from the incident or just bruised authoritarian pride.

Meanwhile, charges against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who was arrested in the same event for daring to try and join the inspection, were quietly dropped — a move prosecutors framed as magnanimous, rather than wildly inconsistent. The U.S. Attorney’s office, now seemingly operating as an arm of Trump-era immigration nostalgia, insists this isn’t political, despite a Democratic lawmaker being criminally charged for doing her job.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on “X,” “No one is above the law. If any person, regardless of political party, influence or status, assaults a law enforcement officer as we witnessed Congresswoman McIver do, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

McIver has denied wrongdoing, calling the charge a political stunt meant to chill congressional oversight. House Democrats echoed the sentiment, slamming the prosecution as a blatant attempt to muzzle dissent and shield ICE from scrutiny. Republicans, on the other hand, seem more concerned with defending federal agents’ sacred right to avoid being touched by accountability — or elbows.
 

Nick Anderson
May 20, 2025
Pen Strokes

 

Re: America’s Descent Into Authoritarianism May Have Started With Policing in Blue Cities.
 

If "community based programs" work best, do they all look alike? In other words is there a formula to set them up, or will every city have a different look or direction, just like each city has a different architectural style or infrastructure set up?

Gayle Morrow
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

      =====

The problem with police is that they hire people that aren't culture compatible for the areas they're policing, so it becomes an "us vs. them" dichotomy.

They don't know how to interact with people, and they're indoctrinated to be asset & property protectors that ape a military presence rather than a civilian one.

SB Loveless
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Trump Dismantles Democracy  --  Cartoon by Peter Kuper

 

 

Peter Kuper
May 14, 2025
kuperart

 

Re: No, There Isn’t an Epidemic of Workless Medicaid Recipients
 

Disgusting rich grifter whose father would be ashamed.

Marilyn Albert
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

      =====

He must be insane. Both of them. So if you have an illness that warrants a doctors treatment. You somehow must work for your benefits? Insane.

Aaron Stephens
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

He Sells Sea Shells By The Sea Shore  --  Cartoon and Commentary by Clay Jones
 

86 doesn't mean what 47 thinks it does.

 

The number 86 doesn’t mean what Donald Trump thinks it means.

Former FBI Director James Comey tweeted an image of seashells forming the numbers 8647. What that means is replace Trump. But Trump and his cult freaked out and claimed that Comey was calling for the assassination of Trump.

But 86 doesn’t mean killing someone. It simply means to replace them, or get rid of someone or something. The term started in the restaurant industry way back in the 1920s or 1930s. The term meant an item on the menu was no longer available, so they would have to 86 it. Then it spread to customers they wanted out of their restaurant, so they would 86 a customer, NOT murder the customer.

There are different theories as to why they used the number 86. Some believe it came from the word “nix.” Others believe it came from the address of 86 Bedford Street in the West Village of lower Manhattan during prohibition. An informant inside the police department would call the restaurant to warn of a police raid, and tell the restaurant that their customers needed to leave through the door on 86th Street. That became “86 the customers.”

I don’t know if those stories or theories are true, but 86 does NOT mean someone should be assassinated. It’s not a death threat or a call to kill somebody, like all the times Trump has tweeted insinuations for his goons to attack people.

A good example of 86 is when Trump fired James Comey. He 86’ed Comey. In 2020, the voters 86’ed Trump by kicking him out of office. Hopefully, in the midterms, we 86 Republicans from the House.

As we all know, Donald Trump is a hypocrite.

When MAGAts were chanting, “Hang Mike Pence” during the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, they weren’t trying to “86” Pence. They were trying to murder him.

When Donald Trump called for the death penalty for General Mark Milley, was he trying to 86 him? No, just kill him. Milley had retired, so he couldn’t be replaced.

When Trump posted a video of President Joe Biden hog tied in the back of a pickup truck, was he calling for Biden to be 86’ed or murdered?

When Trump Jr. tweeted a picture of a hammer after Paul Pelosi was attacked by a hammer-wielding lunatic, was he calling for him to be 86’ed or bashed in the head with a hammer?

What Trump is trying to do is 86 all criticism of him. The Secret Service is investigating Comey for his 86 post, which is bullshit.

In addition to howling about Comey, Trump is crying about Bruce Springsteen criticizing him, which he did from Scotland. Trump got all bent out of shape from the Boss’s criticism and went on the attack. Remember when presidents would ignore criticism from celebrities?

Trump threatened Springsteen, posting, “This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare.’ Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

Trump is threatening Springsteen for saying, “My home America, the America I've written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration.” That sounds about right.

Trump said, “Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy − Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden, a mentally incompetent FOOL, and our WORST EVER President, who came close to destroying our Country.”

If Trump never liked Springsteen or his music, then why did he steal it for his hate rallies? The Boss had to send a legal notice for Trump to stop playing Born in the USA.

Trump didn’t stop there, and on the same day he was filling his diapers over the Boss’ criticism, he attacked Taylor Swift, and posted on ShitSocial, “Has anyone noticed that, since I said 'I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,' she’s no longer 'HOT?'“

Are we still talking about Biden having dementia? Trump’s definition of “hot” is his daughter.

In case the Secret Service is reading, I wholeheartedly endorse 8647.

By the way, Springsteen, the “dried-up prune,” is younger than Trump, and his face definitely looks better than Donald’s dried-up face covered with orange pancake batter.

Clay Jones
May 18, 2025
Claytoonz

 

Petition to NYU Administration sponsored by the Coalition of Action for Higher Education in Defense of Student Logan Rozos

 

"Logan’s condemnation of the mass murder of more than 50,000 Palestinians, including more than 18,000 children, has resonated with thousands of people around the world who have watched his courageous Gallatin School address. Your decision to withdraw his diploma in retaliation for his freedom of speech is a shocking act of moral cowardice and academic malpractice. We also note that Logan was selected by his peers to be commencement speaker. You have made a mockery of that democratic process."

Please consider signing this important petition by clicking here.

 

NYU Admin – Your response to bravery is immoral and unacceptable

NYU Administration: President Linda Mills, Board Chair Evan Chesler, Provost Gigi Dopico, Gallatin Dean Victoria Rosner, Associate Dean of Students Craig Jolley

...

We write as members of the Coalition of Action for Higher Education, and for people of conscience everywhere, in solidarity with NYU student leader Logan Rozos for his brave, principled expression of moral courage and academic freedom.

Logan’s condemnation of the mass murder of more than 50,000 Palestinians, including more than 18,000 children, has resonated with thousands of people around the world who have watched his courageous Gallatin School address. Your decision to withdraw his diploma in retaliation for his freedom of speech is a shocking act of moral cowardice and academic malpractice. We also note that Logan was selected by his peers to be commencement speaker. You have made a mockery of that democratic process.

In effect, you have taken the side of genocide and mass murder, while sullying the good name of your students, faculty, and employees. You have also aligned yourself with an authoritarian U.S. state that continues to arrest, violently detain, disappear, and deport many of our best and brightest students. You have demonstrated that you would rather bully your students than stand up for the principles of academic freedom and free speech at a critical moment in our country.

The university should be a place where students are empowered to speak truth to power—not punished for it. The attempt to silence Logan for courageously naming genocide is not only a violation of academic freedom, it is a reflection of how higher education has been co-opted by corporate interests. When universities operate like businesses, truth becomes a liability and student voices are managed as PR risks instead of being uplifted as agents of justice. And we do not take lightly Logan’s positionality as a Black trans student—voices like his must be protected, not punished. The world doesn’t change unless the margins are heard at the center.

We pledge today to continue to amplify, celebrate, and respect the moral and intellectual courage of Logan Rozos. We the undersigned commit to standing in principled alliance with the hundreds of faculty and thousands of students at your University whose lives, reputations, careers you put at risk of violent recrimination and further repression. We believe your actions violate not just principles of free speech and academic freedom but also basic human decency.

We will continue to protest against the NYU administration until all charges, threats, and slander against Logan Rozos have been dropped. We urge you to act now.

Sincerely,

The Coalition for Action in Higher Education and the Undersigned:

 

Kroger - Overcharging Consumers, Also Selling Customer Data to Tobacco and Health Care Companies  -- Take Action, Sign Petition  (Consumer Reports)

 

Last week, we reported that Kroger, one of the nation’s largest grocery chains, has a pattern of overcharging customers at checkout because of expired sales price tags. Now, Consumer Reports has discovered that Kroger is profiling shoppers in its loyalty program and may be selling their personal data to more than 50 companies – including tobacco and health care companies – and making big bucks from it.

Our investigation of Kroger’s rewards program – which offers various discounts (digital coupons) to members it deems ‘loyal shoppers’ – revealed that the grocer made more than $500 million in profits last year not from selling food, but from selling consumers’ data. And it’s not just customers’ shopping habits that are being sold. It includes Kroger’s guesses about your income, your education level, if you’re likely to go on a cruise – to whether you have a dog or a cat.

Loyalty programs were once a way for retailers to reward consumers with discounts for their recurring patronage. But as our Kroger investigations show, these programs are now tools for retailers to share and sell extensive data about you, and give different shoppers different discounts based on that data.

Join us in demanding Kroger stop sharing and selling customer data. And let’s make sure every loyalty shopper gets the same discount offers.

Sign the Petition

In Kroger’s case, 95 percent of transactions are tied to a Kroger loyalty card, which offers discounts for members. But most Kroger loyalty shoppers likely don’t realize that by joining the program, their data is being shared and sold with data brokers that may sell their life details to companies that make critical decisions about them. And based on those data profiles, shoppers in the loyalty program are not all receiving the same discount offers.

"It’s bad enough that personalized grocery discounts could mean you pay more than your neighbor. It's especially unfair if those discounts are based on personal information you likely didn’t even know companies were collecting," says Matt Schwartz, Consumer Reports policy analyst who focuses on privacy issues.

Shoppers’ data profiles also aren’t always accurate, which can factor into whether they are excluded from discounts. By using Oregon’s privacy law that allows consumers to request their data profiles from companies, we found one Kroger loyalty member who was listed as a woman and a high school graduate making about $66,000 a year. But in reality, that shopper is a married man and college graduate with a six-figure income.

Sign our petition to Kroger to Make the Price Right, and stop sharing and selling customer data. And let’s make sure all loyalty program shoppers get the same discount offers.

Sign the Petition

Consumer Reports is launching its Make the Price Right campaign to stop Big Tech, retailers, and data brokers from using your shopping and internet browsing habits to decide what they think you’re willing – or able – to pay for certain products.

We’re working for more state and national laws like Oregon’s so you can see exactly what data companies hold and share about you – and to stop it. We’re also working to pass groundbreaking state laws that would ban the practice of using your data against you in the price you pay. And we’re pressuring companies to make sure this sharing of your data doesn’t impact the price you pay.

Thank you for taking action, and please share this with friends and family.

Angel Han
Consumer Reports

 

Webinar - Panel Defending Civil Society, Civil Liberties, and Civil Rights  --  May 28  (DSA National Political Education Committee)

 

Wednesday, May 28, 2025 at 8:00 PM ET

Click here to Register

The panel will focus on the character and depth of attacks by the Trump administration, their strategic direction and threat to the working class. The discussion will also focus on how to organize resistance, the role of socialists, social movements, and labor. And how to achieve unity of the anti-fascist majority. Additionally, the panel will address the key importance of defending civil society, how best to use our civil liberties, and why a commitment to the civil rights of minorities, the LBGTQ community and immigrants are essential to a victory over the fascist threat. 

The panel will feature Harmony Goldberg, Michaela Brangan and Bill Fletcher. Harmony and Bill are well known and deeply experienced organizers with well established roots in the working class. Michaela is a DSA member and a faculty member at Cornell. They will have 15 to 20 minutes for their opening statements to be followed by a moderated discussion. The panel will be for 1.5 hours.

Speakers

Harmony Goldberg has provided political education for social movements in the United States for over 25 years. She co-founded and led the School of Unity and Liberation in Oakland, CA. Since then, she has worked closely with the domestic workers movement and with People’s Action. She is currently the Director of Praxis at Grassroots Power Project. Harmony has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the City University of New York. Her research focused on the promising forms of worker’s struggle and class politics that were emergent in domestic worker organizing in New York City. At GPP, Harmony works closely with People’s Action, and she leads the development of strategic education programs. Harmony has been driven by her family’s struggles with downward mobility and her standing rage at racial injustice, which have motivated her to search for ways to build meaningful multi-racial class power. Harmony is grateful to be able to count Leith Mullings, David Harvey, and the educators of the Movimiento Sem Terra’s Escola Nacional among her most formative teachers, and her thinking has been profoundly shaped by the work of Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, WEB DuBois and Robin D.G. Kelley.

Bill Fletcher Jr. Upon graduating college Fletcher went to work as a welder in a shipyard, and over the years has been active in workplace and community struggles, as well as electoral campaigns. He has worked for several labor unions in addition to serving as a senior staff person in the national AFL-CIO. Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; a member of DSA, and in leadership of several other projects. He is co-author with Peter Agard of “The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941”; co-author with Dr. Fernando Gapasin of “Solidarity Divided: The crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice”; and the author of “’They’re Bankrupting Us’- And Twenty other myths about unions.” Fletcher is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the web.

Michaela Brangan is a member of North New Jersey DSA and a member of DSA National Poli Ed Steering. She joined DSA in 2017, during the first organizing drive for Cornell Graduate Students United which she helped start in 2014. She is part-time faculty at Amherst College in the department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, where she has taught and researched in the intersections of civil rights and constitutional law, social and political policy

 

How Can Academics Support Workers' Organizing at Amazon?  --  Online Seminar  --  May 29  (Sheffield University Management School)

 

 

Learn more in this online workshop: 

Thursday, May 29, 2025
12:00 - 2:30 PM (EST), 9:00 AM - 11.30 PM (PST), 5:00 PM - 6.30 PM (GMT)

The International Labour and Logistics Research Network (ILLRN), based at the Centre for Decent Work (CDW) at the University of Sheffield, will host a follow-up online event exploring how academics can support workers’ organising at Amazon.

The event will involve both academics and trade union activists. 

Confirmed speakers include:

• Antonio Rosario - Organizer, Teamster's Amazon Division
• Stuart Richards - Regional Secretary, TUC Midlands
• Paul Blundell - Amazon organizer
• Garfield Hylton - Amazon Coventry GMB
• Ben Fong - Associate Professor and Honors Faculty Fellow, Associate Director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University

The workshop organizing committee includes:

• Gabriella Cioce
• Katy Fox-Hodess
• Kirsty Newsome
• Peter Olney
• Rand Wilson

The event is free. To register, please use the Eventbrite registration link here

 

Cutting the Cord: Two organizations Share Their Experiences of Leaving Google Behind  --  Webinar  --  May 29  (May First)

 

Webinar Thursday, May 29th, 2:00 pm NY time.

Register here!

Change your language preference / Cambia tu preferencia de idioma

After nearly a year in the works, May First is happy to announce the release of our publication Cutting the Cord, documenting the obstacles movement organizations face when moving off of Google's services. Please check out the booklet (and help us get the word out).

We also invite you to discuss the report at our webinar on Thursday, May 29th, with Palestine Legal and Climate Justice Alliance. Both organizations are making significant moves to reduce their dependence on Google and will be sharing their reasons for this work and their experiences.

We will provide simultaneous interpretation between Spanish and English.

Register

Cutting the Cord: Thursday, May 29, 11:00 am Los Angeles/12:00 PM Mexico City/1:00 pm Chicago/ 2:00 pm New York

May First / Peoples Link
440 N BARRANCA AVE #4402
Covina, CA 91723