Skip to main content
Portside aims to provide material of interest to people on the left that will help them to interpret the world and to change it.

Designing a Wealth Tax for Today’s Robber Barons

Alex Hemingway Jacobin
A proposed wealth tax on Canada’s richest 0.6% could raise hundreds of billions of dollars — enough to tackle housing, transit, and care. The sheer scale of what a tiny slice of billionaire wealth could fund is staggering.

The Shame of Israeli Medicine

Neve Gordon, Guy Shalev, and Osama Tanous The New York Review of Books
Faced with the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and the systematic deprivation of Palestinians’ right to health, Israel’s medical establishment has disregarded the field’s most basic ethical principles.

How the First Black Bank Was Looted

Dale Kretz Jacobin
In the early days of the Gilded Age’s rush for profit, freed people’s savings were siphoned off by politically connected financiers. Justene Hill Edwards’s Savings and Trust uncovers how finance cloaked dispossession in the language of uplift.

The Past, Present, and Future of Left Jewish Identity

An interview with Benjamin Balthaser Jacobin
The kind of Jewish identity on display in Jewish-led Palestine solidarity demonstrations organized by groups like Jewish Voice for Peace is part of a long history of Jewish identity being bound up in leftist politics.

Why Did Israel Attack Iran Now?

Marc Lynch The Ghost of Abu Aardvark
Under any interpretation, Israel's attack is clearly illegal under international law, not that anyone seems to care anymore. Israel's attack on Iran is best understood as a continuation of its attempt to remake the Middle East through force.
Subscribe to Portside