Portside

The US trade deficit is the result of a conscious globalization strategy by large multinational corporations. This strategy has greatly paid off for them. They have been able to use their mobility to secure lower wages, reduced regulations and lower taxes.

The new Opportunity Zone program created by last year's tax bill, it offers investors tax breaks in exchange for investing in high-poverty communities. Depending on how the funds operate, the program could end up serving as a tax subsidy for gentrification.

In this era of law-and-order politics,...we do not need more incarceration. It does not make people safer, it tears communities apart, and many people, including incarcerated people themselves, have argued that incarceration actually produces mental illness.

On this one there is no ambiguity. Trump’s naming John Bolton as National Security Adviser is a clear declaration that Washington will intensify its current wars and do its best to start new and bigger ones.

Reader Comments: Iraq War - 15 Years Later; Labor, Industrial Policy, Tariffs, Teachers(West Virginia, Florida, Arizona); Prisons; Iran War?; Readers Debate Churchill, Stalin; Capitalism and Racism; Puerto Rico; Resource-Social Movements; Announcements; Remembering Sharpeville; and more....

Some on the left are still waving away the inconvenient facts that don’t fit with their politics.

Proto-Fascism - seeding of the political ground for full-born fascism, tends to move from threat to reality when principal segments of finance capital no longer consider parliamentary democracy, their preferred form of rule, to be a guarantor of their hegemony. That tendency is increasingly global.

Reader Comments: Slavery and Modern Capitalism; Stopping Gun Violence, Stopping the NRA; PA18; West Virginia Teachers; Puerto Rico - Crisis Deepens; Viola Desmond; Venezuela; Soviet Union, Fight Against Hitler...and Stalin; My Lai: Never Again; Global Call for Peace; and more...

To the U.S., steps toward denuclearization have been the starting and ending point for negotiations with North Korea. But for the North Koreans, it has always been about trying to secure a guarantee to merely exist.

For the past year, AlterNet has reported on ICE's notable cruelty since Trump's inauguration. Now the numbers are in, and they confirm that the stories of ICE targeting non-criminal individuals aren't just one-off aberrations.