Portside

Snowflake, Los Espookys, and other media breakthroughs you should know about

FCC Beats Back Net Neutrality; Making Journalists Beg; The State of Cable News in Trump's Crisis; iPhone Exploits; Egypt's Rising Movement Finds a Cartoon Rallying Point

When the polls close, a new battle will begin – to resist a racist climate denier, or to force a centrist Democrat to deliver genuinely progressive change

The “white working class,” like the “black community,” is an abstraction that does not exist anywhere in the real world. The U.S. working class is broad and diverse. It’s not even all that white any more and certainly not all that male. Its conditions are determined by its position within a political economy but, like everyone else, the experience and consciousness of individual workers is formed by a whole series of contingent relationships and experiences.

Ultimately, the blame for the state of American electoral politics can be laid at the feet of both major parties. Most ordinary Americans are frustrated with the status quo, evidenced by the majority of voters who call themselves “independent.” It should not surprise leaders from either party that voters are rejecting establishment candidates. But given the perils of Trump’s politics, the stakes are higher than they have ever been.

You want war crimes? Post-9/11, Washington could have sported the logo: War Crimes "R" Us. If you want to understand what this sort of impunity means in terms of the politics of 2016, then read on.

"If we don’t have a responsive democracy, all the debates [on progressive issues we care about] aren’t real debates. When elections are not democratic, even the most populist discussions become superficial, disconnected from real power; they are theatre."