Tidbits- Oct. 9 -Readers Comments: “Anti-Capitalism” As Political Pre-Crime; Enemy Within; 94 Million Pounds of Food Aid Canceled; Palestinians Are Going Nowhere; the Case for Universal Social Policies; Trump Coin a Violation of Federal Law;

Readers Comments: “Anti-Capitalism” as Political Pre-Crime; Enemy Within; 94 Million Pounds of Food Aid Canceled; Palestinians Are Going Nowhere; The Case for Universal Social Policies; Trump Coin a Violation of Federal Law; Announcements; Cartoons..

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Tidbits - Reader Comments, Announcements AND cartoons - Oct 9, 2025,Portside

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Announcements:

 

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Re: “Anti-Capitalism” as a Political Pre-Crime

Anything that opposes him is violence. Any harm inflicted by his people is justice.

Ethan Young
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

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A far more serious and disturbing move, around the same time, attracted far less notice. Trump signed a national security policy memorandum called “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” known as NSPM-7. Such national security directives are far less common than executive orders. Where the latter tend to direct day-to-day government operations, the former can set sweeping new policies across the federal government’s military, law enforcement, and intelligence bureaucracies. As the name NPSM-7 indicates, this is only the seventh such directive Trump has issued since taking office.

As journalist Ken Klippenstein reports, NPSM-7 “directs a new national strategy to ‘disrupt’ any individual or groups ‘that foment political violence,’ including ‘before they result in violent political acts.’” Deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, who’s long been one of the most zealously authoritarian members of the Trump administration, crowed that the moment marks “the first time in American history that there is an all-of-government effort to dismantle left-wing terrorism.”

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In explaining exactly why this is so bleak, Klippenstein references the dystopian science fiction movie Minority Report, where people are arrested not for anything they’ve done but for “pre-crime” predicted by people with psychic powers. In this real-world case, the “indicia” (indicators) of future political violence listed in the report are:

anti-Americanism,
anti-capitalism,
anti-Christianity,
support for the overthrow of the United States Government,
extremism on migration,
extremism on race,
extremism on gender
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality."

John G Mason
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

This one's for making it through Trump's rambling blather at Quantico  --  Cartoon by Bill Bramhall
 


 

Bill Bramhall
September 30, 2025
New York Daily News

 

Enemy Within  ---  Cartoon and Commentary by Rob Rogers

 


 

Trump keeps warning us about the "enemy within" while he systematically dismantles our democracy, takes away our basic freedoms and destroys the economy for everyone but the rich. I think we all know who the "enemy within" really is.

Rob Rogers
October 4, 2025
Tiny View

 

Re: Trump Canceled 94 Million Pounds of Food Aid
 

Why!  Is this level of cruelty what MAGA voters wanted?  If so, the joke is on you as I’m sure you are going to feel the pain also.

Bill Audette
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

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Psychopath.

Judith Anderson
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

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An urgent survival strategy for states must be implemented. It must go beyond politics to enshrine citizens' rights to responsible distribution of their tax dollars.

Given that the GOP-run government is intent on bankrupting the nation to facilitate tax cuts for billionaires, it now falls on individual states to make up for illegitimate redistribution of the national treasury. A coalition of affected states can help each other to weather the shortages, obviously starting with those most willing to work around Trump's cruelty, but later could include others -- once they've peeked out from under their respective veils of Trump cult worship. Reactions which force the White House to reverse painful cuts to food programs, health services, housing, and sustainable energy projects must be supported in numbers difficult for this president to ignore, or, for that matter, be quelled by a few hundred National Guard troops.

Though it's good to see thousands protesting, people must also be willing to strike directly at the profits of billionaires in order to disrupt Trump's privatization plans for government. Billionaires depend on wealth derived chiefly from American consumers. National, rotating general strikes by  influential sectors, along with product and services boycotts, will lighten those purses and get the elites complaining to the White House. States are surely capable of withholding taxes paid to the federal government when federal funds to which they've contributed (and were Congressionally assigned for specific State projects) continue to be axed or withheld. Each state could consequently direct and fund its own prioritized projects, swap with other states for food, raw materials, and labour -- just like, well, they used to -- as a largely-functioning government, before Trump's disastrous time in office.

Conservative SCOTUS judges and Trump's legal teams dig deeply into old laws still on the books to justify certain decisions; the states should do the same to thwart current executive branch corruption.

Surely, Americans don't wish for their tax-payer dollars to be wasted on 24K glitter in the White House ballroom; as another ICE detention facility; or worse still, as human and infrastructural ash in Gaza.

Respectfully,

Natalia Kuzmyn
Vancouver Island

 

Stephen Miller has had it!  --  Cartoon and Commentary by Lalo Alcaraz

 


 

Shadow President and man who keeps the mass deportation trains running on time, Stephen Miller, is just fed up with being accurately labeled a fascist and a Nazi. Do not mock his looks, or his height, or the fact that he IS A FASCIST AND A NAZI. Incredibly, he went to local school, Santa Monica High, and learned his hatred for Latinos and other minorities in one of the most multicultural cities in the world. The World's Smallest Mariachi Violin is playing him a sad song.

Lalo Alcaraz
October 6, 2025
CALÓ NEWS

 

Re: Mamdani, Randolph, Rustin, King: Their Case for Universal, Rather Than Particularistic, Social Policies
 

I understand the logic of 'it's the economy, stupid.' But assuming that because workers have a common concern with life security, divisions among working people are illusory, will make unity in struggle tenuous at best. De facto segregation is a reality in housing, education and jobs, and the reasons for it are too embedded in our history to ignore.

Ethan Young
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Re: The Israeli Right’s ‘Time of Miracles’ Is Over. The Palestinians Are Going Nowhere
 

I wonder if anyone more informed than myself can write something about the larger historical and global significance of the struggle to save Palestine. In the post-Vietnam-1989 world it is more obvious (again)  that there are two paths, two tendencies, one struggle: between the dehumanizing forces of capital/power accumulation in which the peoples of the world and their environment are mere sources of extraction and the resistance to those forces that refuses to tolerate the violently enforced reduction of the majority of our species to bare existence and servitude.

There is no International, but there is an international struggle, of which Palestine now is the burning center. Their persistence and refusal to be exterminated has now become that of all of us. I feel and think this needs to be said in every possible way, at every moment, the more so as our own struggle in America is, though less violent and catastrophic at the moment, the same one.
Perhaps this has been articulated (in a sense it has by Petro) but I'd like to see it here.

Jessica Benjamin

 

Peace  --  Cartoon by Dr. James MacLeod

 

Dr. James MacLeod
October 4, 2025
MacLeodCartoons

 

Re: The Underground Railroad’s Stealth Sailors
 

Great book!! & damn fine review!!

Tom Edminster
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Trump Coin a Violation of Federal Law

Federal law prohibits depicting a living person on regular United States currency, though exceptions have been made for special commemorative coins. An ongoing debate concerns a potential coin featuring former president Donald Trump to commemorate the nation's 250th anniversary in 2026.

General Prohibition: An 1866 law, passed to prevent the appearance of a monarchy, dictates that only deceased individuals can appear on U.S. currency.

Commemorative coin precedent: Special commemorative coins, which do not circulate widely, have previously featured living people with congressional authorization.

Other countries have put living people other than monarch on their countries coins, such countries and their coins have been:  Italy issued coins featuring a portrait of dictator Benito Mussolini, between 1936-1943; Germany issued four coins for Adolf Hitler between 1936 and 1939, which were also then used in countries occupied by the Third Reich.

Maybe this is just the first coin for our "Great Leader"?

Jay Schaffner

 

Forgotten: The Murder at the Ford Rouge Plant Oct 11 in Detroit  (Michigan Labor History Society)

 


 

FORGOTTEN : The Murder at the Ford Rouge Plant

In this jazz opera, twenty-five actors, singers, dancers, and musicians tell the story of how Detroit became a union town.

FORGOTTEN includes 22 original songs that trace historic events including the Ford Hunger March, Battle of the Overpass, and the Flint sit-down strike. A central character is the Rev. Lewis Bradford, who hosted the Detroit radio show “The Forgotten Man’s Hour,” and who was found dead in 1937 on the Ford Rouge shop floor, leading to an investigation forty years later. Other historic characters include Henry and Clara Ford, Harry Bennett, and Father Charles Coughlin.

Oct. 10 - SOLD OUT
Oct. 12 - SOLD OUT

HURRAY - Saturday Oct. 11 tickets are still available - Click here

 

National Coming Out Day Rally and Celebration  --  New York  --  October 11

 

Saturday, October 11, 1:30pm 
NYC AIDS Memorial @ St. Vincent’s Triangle 
76 Greenwich Ave, New York, NY 10011

Join G4Z in celebration of National Coming Out Day! 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

We’re rallying LGBTQ+ New Yorkers and allies to commemorate the history of our communities and struggles, and to push us into a progressive future, honoring the Zohran Mamdani for NYC campaign. 🗽

Hear speeches from queer community leaders and elected officials, then connect with LGBTQ+ organizations, communities, and allies across generations, cultures, and identities in support of a better future!

gaysforzohran

Gays for Zohran🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

 

Book Talk - Working Class Politics with Michael Zweig and Amy Goodman  -- Brooklyn  --  October 15  (Brooklyn for Peace)

 

 

Join us for a book talk with Michael Zweig in conversation with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. Michael Zweig is professor emeritus of economics at SUNY Stony Brook, where he was the founding director of the Center for Study of Working Class Life and received the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. In addition to the book under discussion this evening, he is the author of The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret. and continues to be active in his union (UUP-SUNY, AFT 2190).

Wednesday, October 15, 6:30 pm

Brooklyn Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)
1100 Schermerhorn St.
Brooklyn, NY 11201 (2nd floor)

Wheelchair accessible 

IN PERSON ATTENDANCE REGISTER HERE
RSVP REQUIRED! Donations optional.  

If you cannot make it in person - we'll be streaming on Zoom, REGISTER HERE.

Co-Sponsors: Peace and Social Action Committee of the Brooklyn Monthly Meeting, United University Professions, Peace Action New York State, United for Peace and Justice, Peace Action Bay Ridge, New York Poor People's Campaign