Global Left Midweek — April 15, 2026 In Brazil, Xingu leaders raise concerns over land rights violations and exclusion from environmental licensing. | Amazon Watch 1. Democracy Itself 2. As the War Rages On 3. Kurdish Women Lead Throughout the Region 4. Hungary Ousts Orbán 5. Cuba and Climate 6. The Rights of the Sahrawi Republic 7. Irish Blogger: Is the Fuel Protest in the Workers’ Interest? 8. Brazil: Indigenous in New Land Defense Fight 9. Feminist Infrastructures 10. Africa: Cultural Front **__________** **Democracy Itself** _Ethan Young_ [Global Left Midweek moderator] / Portside Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail A recurring question in discussions in the fragmented global left is: what should our program focus on? Fighting fascism? Isolating Western imperialism? Life security? Propagandizing for socialism? Direct action to save the environment? Mutual aid? Protection of women and marginalized sectors from violence? There are many social movements and political projects, and most concentrate on at least one of these focuses. But one concern actually underlies all of the above: _democracy_. Yet it rarely comes up as a strategic concept or a long term goal on the left. The concept of democracy is trapped in a web of confusion. For some, democracy is something we have, but that is so compromised by capitalism that it’s easier to avoid trying to explain why defending it is necessary. For others, liberal democracy is invalid or worse. This position is also a permanent part of any fascist, far right, or right populist program. On the left, the nihilist position boils politics down to class against class, just preparing for the day of reckoning between good vs evil. Or it is used to justify lack of democracy in avowedly anti-imperialist states. From early childhood, we are taught that democracy is “majority rule.” But the term “majority” tricks us up. Only a minority of citizens actually vote. The actual majority, in class terms, comes down to people who sell their labor power to live. How many workers can truthfully say they rule? Before World War II, democracy was the alternative to monarchy, with elected representative bodies replacing royally ordained officials. During the Cold War, for imperialists, it meant the right to exploit, while for Soviet era Communists it simply meant ‘not fascism’. Discussion of the _content_ of democracy as a system, whether under capitalism or socialism, went by the wayside. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank An informal but widespread notion on the left has it that ‘real’ democracy can only come with ‘real’ socialism, and since the latter is not expected to arrive in the short run, the agenda is limited to social agitation and socialist propaganda based on ‘to each according to their needs’ — after seizing the state, one way or another. Or oligarchic, bureaucratic states are assigned the tag of a new type of democracy, regardless of actual internal power relations and access to democratic rights. So what kind of democracy does the left need to talk about? Representative democracy, or direct democracy? One source describes direct democracy as “a form of government where each citizen has an equal vote on laws and policies, directly participating in decision-making through majority rule.” According to the European Union-connected Democracy International, “In addition to representative processes such as elections, direct democracy and participatory processes are the tools that give citizens the power to shape their societies. By taking ownership of the democratic process, the citizens build trust in themselves and one another, creating a sense of responsibility and connection to [sic] democratic institutions.” (Disclaimer: I have no connection to this group whatsoever.) Direct democracy is extended liberal democracy, not intended to be inherently revolutionary. Yet, with the upswing of authoritarianism directly opposed to liberal democracy, direct democracy as implied here is both overtly antifascist and an inherent challenge to capitalist power. Scorning it as a Trojan horse for a capitalist mission is a big mistake. Like electoral politics, it is a means to securing more (if limited) power for the working class majority, especially through working people learning and practicing mass democratic political action. The real problem here is using democratic structures to enforce working class interests — and that’s how all the movement rights and concerns listed above can be realized, at least partially, in a period when the left is on the defensive. Furthermore, those rights and concerns are rooted in the desire for direct democracy. This is true worldwide, as more and more activated social sectors are targeting corporate ruination, corruption, authoritarianism in various forms, patriarchy, and military power in place of people power. We see it happening on every continent. Movements are constantly rediscovering that the direct involvement of disempowered, politicized civilians is what distinguishes democracy itself from all the wonderful wizards of Oz that are presented as the embodiment of popular power. This recent analysis by James Goodwin of the NGO Center for Progressive Reform explores what forms this could take. It comes from academics rather than activists, but it serves as a challenge to social movements and the political left to take up a serious discussion of means and ends, so sorely needed by forward-looking political leftists inside and outside social movements. All power to the people! **__________** **As the War Rages On** **Palestine** _Wael Omar_ / Transnational Institute (Amsterdam) **Lebanon** _Mehk Chakraborty_ / Waging Nonviolence (Brooklyn) **Iran** _Paolo Viganò and Arang Keshavarzian_ / il manifesto Global (Rome) **Israel** _Iddo Elam_ / +972 (Tel Aviv) **UK** _Feyzi Ismail_ / Tribune (London) **__________** **Kurdish Women Lead Throughout the Region** _Nazand Begikhani_ / Le Monde diplomatique (Paris) For a century, Kurdish women have been at the forefront of the struggle against patriarchal and state oppression. They continue to push boundaries and defend their gains against mounting pressure. **__________** **Hungary Ousts Orbán** _Sirantos Fotopoulos_ / posted on Facebook Magyar’s victory is not the arrival of an emancipatory future. It is the clearing of the ground on which that argument might eventually be made. It is the restoration of the minimum conditions required for political contestation to mean anything, for a judiciary to function without the thumb of the ruling party pressing on the scales, for media to exist that is not the property of the minister’s cousin. **__________** **Cuba and Climate** _Robert Hackett_ / Canadian Dimension (Winnipeg) Cuba contributes little to global emissions, yet faces some of climate change’s harshest impacts. Bob Hackett’s journey through Cuban farms and climate programs explores how farmers and communities are adapting with resilience and ingenuity, offering surprising lessons for Canada and the world in an era of crisis, scarcity, and rising storms. **__________** **The Rights of the Sahrawi Republic** _William Shoki_ / Africa is a Country (New York) The hollowing out of self-determination in Western Sahara is structurally consistent with how these concepts are functioning—or rather failing to function—across the contemporary global order. The gap between the formal recognition of a right and its material realization is not a malfunction; it has become something closer to the normal operating condition of international politics. **__________** **Irish Blogger: Is the Fuel Protest in the Workers’ Interest?** _Louth For Ever_ Irish truckers and farmers are currently staging major protests and blockades over record-high fuel costs, causing significant supply chain disruptions in April 2026. But it is not a fuel protest. It is a fascist audition with a diesel-soaked script. The politics are that someone else, someone browner, someone newer, someone with less power than anyone in that crowd, should be made to pay. **__________** **Brazil: Indigenous in New Land Defense Fight** **Belo Sun Gold Mine Project** / Amazon Watch (Oakland) **Video: Land Rights** _Eduardo François_ / Associated Press (New York) **__________** **Feminist Infrastructures** _Clarisse Sih and Bibbi Abruzzini_ / Global Voices (The Hague) In Pakistan, feminists are reframing social protection as democratic infrastructure. In Paraguay, digital rights activists are challenging the normalization of gender-based violence. Their struggles may look different — period poverty, policy reform, digital abuse — but they are united by a deeper truth: gender justice today is inseparable from economic security, digital safety, and institutional accountability. **__________** **Africa: Cultural Front** **Sudanese Resistance Theater** _Lital Khaikin_ / Waging Nonviolence **“** _**Musika na Kipaji**_**” Music Festival in Congo** _Justin Kabumba_ / Associated Press **Black History Month in Nigeria** _Salawu Oluwaseun Moses_ / The Guardian (Lagos) * democracy * direct democracy * Israel-Iran war * Iran * Lebanon * Palestine * Solidarity * Global South * Israel * zionism * Anti-Zionism * Kurds * Kurdish women * Hungary * Viktor Orbán * Péter Magyar * Cuba * Climate * Western Sahara * ireland * truckers * truckers protest * Brazil * Indigenous * Xingu * Amazon rain forest * Belo Sun Gold Mine Project * Feminism * Gender Violence * Africa * Sudan * theater * Congo * Musika na Kipaji * Nigeria * Black History Month Subscribe to Portside

Global Left Midweek — April 15, 2026 (portside.org/2026-04-15/global-left-m...

This Week in People’s History, Apr 15–21, 2026 _**Going to War Without Declaring It**_ **APRIL 15 IS THE 165TH ANNIVERSARY** of the U.S. government’s first formal response to the opening shots in the Civil War, which had been fired three days earlier when South Carolina’s militia attacked and captured the U.S. Army’s Fort Sumter in Charleston. The government’s response was a Presidential Proclamation, calling upon the states to enlist an army of 75,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion in the Confederate states. The 1861 proclamation also called Congress to convene on July 4, much earlier than had been planned. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Considering that the northern army grew to more than a million men before the Civil War ended, the call for 75,000 volunteers might seem like a miscalculation, but Lincoln was simply obeying a 1795 law that capped the size of a federal militia at 75,000. To call for a larger military force, Lincoln needed the authorization of Congress. Congress could, and did pass laws increasing the size of the militia, and it also appropriated the funds needed to pay the cost of a larger army, but in the (good old) days before the imperial presidency, Lincoln didn’t take the law into his own hands. Of course, Lincoln’s proclamation did not include a declaration of war, because the Constitution was clear that only Congress could declare war. Even after Congress returned to Washington, no war declaration was produced because neither Lincoln nor most members of Congress wanted to declare war on the Confederacy. To do so would be treating the Confederate States of America as if it were a nation; Lincoln and almost all of his supporters insisted the confederate states could not be a nation because they were part of the United States, secession or no secession. The U.S. government never abandoned that position, with the result that the entire Civil War was fought without any declaration of war. Lincoln’s proclamation was met with nearly universal enthusiastic approval in the North. Within days, huge public meetings took place in cities and towns, where tens of thousands pledged support for the Union. Every state enlisted an excess of volunteers for the militia. One of the few somewhat critical responses to Lincoln came from leading abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who noted that the proclamation omitted any reference to slavery, leading Douglass to say (correctly) that the only ways the war could end would be with the destruction of slavery or the destruction of the Union. Douglass also called for the immediate inclusion of Blacks in the volunteer army, which did not come to pass until January 1863. _https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB11234_ If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank _**Support Our Troops. Bring Them Home.**_ **APRIL 16 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY** of a demonstration against the Vietnam war by more than 5,000 people in Manhattan’s Times Square. The 1966 protest was one of many organized on short notice all around the U.S. in support of huge anti-government protests that had shaken the military government of South Vietnam during the previous week. Leaders of the New York Parade Committee, which organized the Times Square protest, expressed satisfaction at the size of the demonstration, which had been organized very quickly in response to a sudden burst of protest activity in Saigon and other South Vietnamese cities. _https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_Uprising_ _**Sore Loser France Bullies Haiti into the Poorhouse for More Than a Century**_ **APRIL 17 IS THE 200TH ANNIVERSARY** of a French financial victory over the successful Haitian revolution. Thanks to France's naval superiority and the vampire squid of imperialism, Haiti received a financial setback from which it has never recovered. On this day in 1826, France agreed to recognize Haiti in exchange for Haiti’s promise to pay France 150 million francs. France literally had a gun to Haiti’s head when the Black republic agreed to pay that sum, the equivalent of about 1.5 billion of today’s dollars. If Haiti had refused, the French navy was ready to restore the yoke of French imperialism that Haiti had thrown off in 1801. Haiti had to borrow huge sums at high interest rates to make its debt payments on time, so in 1922 Haiti had yet to pay France the entire nut. France then sold the debt to National City Bank (now Citibank), putting U.S. banks in charge of continuing to turn the screws. After 25 years of additional payments, the ransom was finally paid off in 1947. _https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/10/05/1042518732/-the-greatest-heist-in-history-how-haiti-was-forced-to-pay-reparations-for-freed_ _**When Socialist Mayors Weren’t So Unusual**_ **APRIL 18 IS THE 110TH ANNIVERSARY** of Socialist Daniel Hoan taking office as Mayor of Milwaukee. He later won nine consecutive elections and remained Mayor for 24 years, making his administration the longest serving U.S. Socialist administration on record. Even though the U.S. Socialist Party was generally considered a revolutionary party when Hoan became Milwaukee’s Mayor in 1916, Hoan was part of a growing reformist faction in the party. In 1917, when the Socialist Party was totally against U.S. participation in World War I, Mayor Hoan ignored the party program and supported the war effort. Nevertheless, he remained a Socialist Party member for as long as he was mayor. Hoan led an administration that strongly defended civil liberties, public health, public housing, and honest government. He was a leading exponent of what was called “sewer socialism,” an advocate of exemplary public schools and municipal ownership of water and power systems. _https://socialistcurrents.org/?p=4032_ _**‘We Have Our Freedom; Give Us the Vote!’**_ **APRIL 19 IS THE 160TH ANNIVERSARY** of a giant celebration of the abolition of slavery by a tremendous throng in Washington, D.C., the vast majority of whom were African-Americans. The occasion was the fourth anniversary of signing the District of Columbia Emancipation Act, which freed more than 3,000 people who were the property of Washington residents. The former “owners” of the enslaved received $300 (the equivalent of about $10,000 today) for each of them. While the law was being debated in Congress, enslavers in Washington sold approximately two thousand slaves to slave-owners in nearby Maryland and Delaware, where slavery remained legal. The celebrants of the anniversary in 1866, who made “a dense mass of colored faces, relieved here and there by a few white ones,” according to a report in Harper’s Weekly, first gathered outside the White House to hear brief and patronizing remarks by President Andrew Johnson. Then “the swarthy column,” including two regiments of Black troops and six brass bands, filled Pennsylvania Avenue as they marched “with flashing bayonets and fluttering flags and waving banners” a mile-and-a-half to the Capitol, where they exchanged salutes with members of Congress who were standing on the Capitol’s steps. Next the “vast multitude” proceeded another two miles to Franklin Park, where a wooden seating area for dignitaries supported a banner reading, “Lincoln, the Liberator of millions: His great work is done, and he sleeps in peace in the great prairies of the West. This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.” Another banner: “We have received our civil rights. Give us the right of suffrage, and the work is done.” The District of Columbia celebrated Emancipation Day with a parade each year until 1901, when the tradition was abandoned due to the tide of racism that swept over the U.S. during the first part of the 20th century. In 2005 Emancipation Day became an official holiday in the District. _https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/emancipation-in-washington-dc.htm_ _**A Megalomaniac’s Birthday Party**_ **APRIL 20 IS THE 93RD ANNIVERSARY** of the 36-hour-long celebration of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday, which was marked with major events throughout Germany. In Berlin, the 1939 events included a 4-hour-long military parade of some 50,000 German soldiers, sailors and SS troops goose-stepping down “Via Triumphalis,” a brand-new 100-yard-wide avenue, past 20,000 official guests. Via Triumphalis, which didn’t live up to its name, is now Ost-West-Achse. _https://immermodern.de/en/strassen-von-heute/westachse_ _**Sipping-In Vindicates LGBTQ+ Rights**_ **APRIL 21 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY** of a successful act of civil disobedience against New York State’s anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination. At issue the State Liquor Authority’s rule that a bar could refuse service to gays because they were “disorderly” _**by definition.**_ In 1966, after Julius’s Bar in Greenwich Village refused to serve three members of the Mattachine Society, a leading LGBTQ+ organization, because they were gay, they sued the Liquor Authority. When the Liquor Authority declined to take action, the New York City Commission on Human Rights announced that refusing service to a gay customer was sex discrimination, which was a violation of city law. In order to avoid violating the city law henceforth, bars were required to stop regarding gay customers as disorderly by definition. _https://www.npr.org/2008/06/28/91993823/remembering-a-1966-sip-in-for-gay-rights_ For more People's History, visit https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/ * The Civil War * Vietnam antiwar movement * Haitian Revolution * municipal socialism * Emancipation * Adolf Hitler * LGBT Rights Subscribe to Portside

This Week in People’s History, Apr 15–21, 2026 (portside.org/2026-04-13/week-peoples-...

I Thought I Saw You There I thought I saw you there among the ruins, where smoldering trees cower in fear and blue birds with broken wings dive into burning rivers, where disembodied dreams wallow in self-pity and sunflowers wander aimlessly in the desert. I thought I saw you there among the debris, clawing at cement and shoes and dolls, assembling bodies from unrelated parts, sifting dead earth for bits of memories and finding only a heaving well of collective grief. There, in Empire’s arsenal, a bullet is born with a target and waits patiently for its time. There, on Empire’s killing fields, the number of dead is surpassed only by the number of tears. There, in Empire’s wake, we bury our morality deep and our redemption deeper. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail But there, among the ruins, wisps of life cling fiercely to hope. There, among the debris, pieces of possibility search for one another. I thought I saw you there among the disposable, hurling shards of rage against Empire’s walls, singing in seven thousand languages, harmonizing across borders, clinging fiercely to hope. There, among the ruins, I saw you look at me and smile, and I knew then that we would win. _Danny is a writer, a retired hydrogeologist, and a red diaper baby. With the love of his life, Maggie, who passed away in 2019, he raised two wonderful daughters and now basks in the glow of four grandsons and one granddaughter. He is the author of Thoughts-Letter (__thoughtsletter.substack.com_ _), his outlet for fictional and non-fictional musings._ If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank * empire * disappeared * resistance Subscribe to Portside

I Thought I Saw You There (portside.org/2026-04-10/i-thought-i-s...

This Week in People’s History, April 8–14, 2026 _**Slavery by Another Name**_ **APRIL 8 IS THE 115TH ANNIVERSARY** of a catastrophic explosion at the Banner Coal Mine, 50 miles northeast of Birmingham, Alabama. The deadly 1911 event resulted in a national outcry. The reaction was not just because the disaster killed at least 128 mine workers. It was provoked because 113 of the dead were Black men who were working under conditions that were indistinguishable from slavery. They had been convicted by Alabama courts of petty crimes and, as prisoners, had been turned over to the mining company, which paid prison officials for the right to force the convicts to work without pay until they had served their sentences. Five white prisoners were also killed, as were five white miners who were not under legal compulsion, but working for wages. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail The mine, which was owned by J.P. Morgan’s United States Steel Company, provided the coal needed to operate the company’s two steel mills in nearby Birmingham. The man who ran U.S. Steel at the time of the disaster claimed to have ordered an end to the mine’s use of forced labor four years before the explosion and to have been told that his orders had been carried out. The falsity of the steel magnate’s claim was only exposed in the 1990s by journalist Douglas Blackmon, who later wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning “ _Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II._ As Blackmon detailed, for nearly three decades after the end of the Civil War, all the states that had been part of the Confederacy leased convicts, the vast majority of whom were Black, forcing them to work for, and live under the control of private companies. The convicted criminals were forced to work without pay for the duration of their sentence. Even though the Thirteenth Amendment had abolished slavery, it included a major loophole; slavery or servitude was not illegal when used “as punishment for a crime.” By 1911, at the time of the Banner Mine disaster, only five states – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina and Texas – leased convicts. The last three states to end the practice were Florida in 1923, Alabama (1928), and North Carolina (1933). Convict leasing not only replicated the working conditions of enslavement, but the lease payments from the employers also provided a major portion of the revenue needed by state and local governments in the former Confederacy. In Alabama for example, 73 percent of the state’s 1898 budget came from convict-leasing income. The Banner Mine explosion’s death toll encouraged a national discussion of convict leasing, and may have hastened its end in Arkansas and Texas (in 1913 and 1914, respectively), but Alabama continued the practice – including in U.S. Steel’s Banner Mine – for another 17 years. https://www.pbs.org/video/slavery-another-name-slavery-video/ If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank _**Who Wrecked the Trains (and the Streetcars)?**_ **APRIL 9 IS THE 65TH ANNIVERSARY** of a dark day in the annals of corporate crime and a sad day in the history of public transportation in the U.S. The Pacific Electric Railway, a vast network of streetcars and electric trains that had made commuting quick and inexpensive throughout southern California’s mushrooming 4-county, 32,000-square-mile megalopolis known as greater Los Angeles, shut down its last line, forcing southern Californians to use either an automobile (if they had one) or an inadequate, slow, polluting bus network. The 1961 bankruptcy of the Pacific Electric Railway was no accident. It was the direct result of an eventually well-documented conspiracy by General Motors, Standard Oil, Firestone Tire, Mack Truck] Manufacturing and Federal Engineering to force commuters to drive by destroying cheap, efficient public transportation. [ _http://www.coachbuilt.com/bui/g/gm/gm.htm_ _**It Isn’t Easy to Get the Goods on Corporate Crime**_ **APRIL 11 IS THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY** of the announcement that the People’s Bicentennial Commission – the radical alternative to the official American Revolution Bicentennial Commission – was offering a $25,000 cash reward (worth $140,000 today) for “evidence that leads to the arrest, prosecution, conviction, sentencing and imprisonment of a chief executive officer of [any] one of America's Fortune 500 corporations for criminal activity relating to corporate operations.” The 1976 Campaign for Corporate Exposure made the offer in ten thousand letters mailed to highly placed secretaries at Fortune 500 companies. The effort was inspired by way the Nixon tapes and Watergate-related investigations had resulted in the admission by 17 major corporations that they had made illegal campaign contributions to Nixon re-election efforts and by the disclosure of other illegal corporate activities, including illegal foreign bribery schemes conducted by the Lockheed Corporation, the Northrop Corporation, the Exxon Corporation and by Tenneco Inc. The many corporate convictions had resulted in monetary fines, but no one had been sentenced to prison. The People’s Bicentennial effort was to uncover at least one case that would put a Fortune 500 boss in behind bars. _https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_convicted_of_felony_offenses_in_the_United_States_ _**‘Too Horrifying to Broadcast’**_ **APRIL 13 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY** of the premiere showing of pseudo-documentary film, The War Game, which is one of the most terrifying depictions of the effect of nuclear war imaginable. It was originally produced to be televised by the BBC in Britain in October 1965, but when BBC managers previewed it, they cancelled the broadcast, saying that it was “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.” After the 46-minute film, which was written, directed and produced by Peter Watkins, was released for theatrical showing the next year, it won the Academy Award for the Best Documentary Feature in 1967. _https://web.archive.org/web/20051016134931/http://www.filmint.nu/pdf/special/watkins.pdf_ _**A Great and Good Man, but No Saint (1876)**_ **APRIL 14 IS THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY** of Frederick Douglass delivering “An Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” the keynote address at the 1876 unveiling of the Freedmen’s Memorial Monument near the center of Washington, D.C. The day for the event was the 11th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, and Douglass used the occasion to express his enormous admiration for Lincoln’s success in leading the Union to victory over the secessionists and in also leading the United States to put an end to slavery. At the same time, Douglass expressed some frank criticisms of prejudices that Lincoln had held, making it clear that he considered Lincoln to have been “a great and good man,” but not a saint. For example, in his oration Douglas said that Lincoln “in his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man. He was preëminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country.” Douglass went on to say, “You [that is, the whites in the audience] are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We [Douglass himself and the Black members of the audience] are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.” In the end, Douglass emphasized how important it was “that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race [because] . . . . this unfriendly feeling on [Lincoln’s] part may [have been] . . . one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery.” According to Douglass, despite or rather, because of, Lincoln’s human imperfections “infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.” You can read the entire, rather brief, speech here: _https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/oration-in-memory-of-abraham-lincoln_ For more People's History, visit _https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/_ * Forced labor * Public transportation * corporate crime * Nuclear war * Abraham Lincoln Subscribe to Portside

This Week in People’s History, April 8–14, 2026 (portside.org/2026-04-06/week-peoples-...

Friday Nite Videos | April 3, 2026 To view a video, click on an image below Better To Die In Iran | Jesse Welles Day by day, we're in deeper and deeper. Could This Actually End Citizens United? Montana — yes, deep red Montana — has a plan to effectively neuter Citizens United. No Supreme Court ruling or constitutional amendment needed. Are Billionaires Leaving California? We Found The Truth. He's worth $222 billion, and doesn't want to 5% of that going to fund health care in his state. Right now he has a powerful ally — Gavin Newsom. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail The Most Insane Megaproject You Never Heard About Project Plowshare, an attempt to use atomic explosions for peaceful practical purposes, turned into an environmental disaster. Trump Drops in on SCOTUS | The Daily Show Desi Lydic tackles Trump's attendance at Supreme Court oral arguments on birthright citizenship as he pushes Trump Gold Card citizenship. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank * Atomic Bomb * Billionaires * birthright citizenship * California * Citizens United * comedy * Desi Lydic * Donald Trump * environment * gavin newsom * Jesse Welles * Money in Politics * Montana * Music Iran * Project Plowshare * Robert Reich * Sergey Brin * taxes * the Daily Show * wealth tax Subscribe to Portside

Friday Nite Videos | April 3, 2026 (portside.org/2026-04-03/friday-nite-v...

Sunday Science: How We’re Trying To Detect Dark Matter Particles, With Katherine Freese StarTalk Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail **Dogs Became Man's Best Friend Far Earlier than Thought, Scientists Find** **Pallab Ghosh** **BBC** March 25, 2026 If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank * Science * cosmology * physics * Dark Matter * dark energy Subscribe to Portside

Sunday Science: How We’re Trying To Detect Dark Matter Particles, With Katherine Freese (portside.org/2026-03-29/sunday-scienc...

2 Poems From the Iraq War Car with Contrails | Carol Lynne Knight A Partial Roll Call -— May 2004 Zach, Kyle, Matt Ken, Thom, Rob Brett, Ken, Nat Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Kerman, Aaron, Jason Kirk, Dean, Bill Ryan, Tim, LaMont Walter, William, David Brian, Pat, Sahib Jakub, Andrew, Bala Dominic, Doug, José Richard, Justin, Marlin Henry, Cedric, Hans _Jesus Jesus_ For Those Who Will Not Vote If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank -- Election Eve, 2004 Clouds like great ships cross the predawn sky. While you sleep, dark figures are securing the city. _In addition to 3 prose collections, including _Fifteen Florida Cemeteries: Strange Tales Unearthed_ , Lola Haskins has published 16 collections of poetry, most recently _Like Zeros, Like Pearls_ , about insects. Prior to that, _Homelight_ was named Poetry Book of the Year by Southern Literary Review, and _Asylum_ was featured in the NY Times. Past honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, two Florida Book Awards, a Florida's Eden prize for environmental writing, and the Emily Dickinson prize from Poetry Society of America. She has served as Honorary Chancellor for FSPA since 2016._ * Poetry * Lola Haskins * Iraq War * collateral damage Subscribe to Portside

2 Poems From the Iraq War (https://portside.org/2026-03-27/2-poems-iraq-war

This Week in People’s History, Mar 25–31, 2026 John Sloan, The New York Call, March 27, 1911 _**Never Forget the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire!**_ **MARCH 25 IS THE 115TH ANNIVERSARY** of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, which killed 146 garment workers, 123 of whom were women or teenage girls. It was one of the worst industrial disasters ever in New York State, certainly the worst such disaster that was over in less than a day. (Long-term disasters in New York State workplaces, such as those caused by exposure to asbestos and PCBs, have had many more victims, but over the course of years, not minutes.) The Triangle Shirtwaist fire victims were killed by a fast-moving fire in a crowded high-rise factory where most of the fire exits were locked, forcing the victims to choose between being incinerated or jumping to certain death from windows 200 feet above the street. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail The deadly 1911 fire in Greenwich Village had both immediate and long-lasting effects. It gave nascent labor unions the opportunity to organize an extraordinary demonstration, a solemn 3-mile-long memorial parade through the middle of Manhattan by more than 120 thousand workers and their supporters. More than 400 thousand people lined the parade route, meaning that more than ten percent of the city’s population was actively involved. Even though it took place on a workday, many workplaces were left nearly empty, turning the memorial event into an unprecedented general strike. Garment workers' unions saw a major membership surge, and the rage and revulsion at working conditions that caused such carnage gave the state legislature the courage to appoint a Factory Investigating Commission, which held hearings all around the state and drafted more than 40 bills to improve working conditions, almost all of which became law. March 25 is marked with a solemn annual ceremony by workers’ organizations, occupational safety and health advocates, and the New York City Fire Department, which fills the street outside the building where so many were killed. This year’s commemoration will begin at 11:30am at Washington Place and Greene Street. _https://portside.org/2025-03-27/triangle-shirtwaist-factory-fire-commemoration-march-25-1911_ _**Vietnam War Opposed Worldwide**_ If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank **MARCH 26 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY** of the second day of protest demonstrations that took place in 30 countries, orchestrated internationally by the 8-month-old National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam. It was the largest concerted world-wide action for peace that had ever taken place. In the largest of the 1966 actions, which took place in New York City, more than 50,000 marched down Fifth Avenue to a 3-hour rally in Central Park. Demonstrations took place in at least 100 U.S. cities. In Los Angeles 8,000 joined a teach-in; 6,500 marched in San Francisco; 5,000 in Chicago; 2,000 in Detroit; 1,200 picketed the White House. Ten thousand marched in Paris and there were more than 70 smaller actions in France. 20,000 joined a rally in Rome. Large demonstrations also took place in Toronto and Ottawa, as well as in London, Stockholm, Oslo, Beijing and Tokyo. The New York City demonstration, which was the largest of its kind in the city ever, was organized by a committee that included representatives of widely differing political tendencies, so disparate that the weekly Guardian newspaper remarked that some were “usually so antipathetic to the others that they conceivably might object to being in the same subway car with them, much less the same room.” Among others, the committee included War Resisters League, Women Strike for Peace, Students for a Democratic Society, Communist Party U.S.A., Socialist Workers Party, Catholic Worker, Young Socialist Alliance, District 65 of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Workers Union, Youth Against War and Fascism and Workers’ World. _https://cdn.wisconsinhistory.org/turning-points/1048.pdf_ _**Andrew Johnson Puts His Racism on Display**_ **MARCH 27 IS THE 160TH ANNIVERSARY** of President Andrew Johnson’s decision to veto the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which had passed the Senate by 33 votes to 12 and the House by 111-38. It had passed both houses by such large majorities that Congress was amazed Johnson had decided to veto it, despite the near certainty his veto would be overridden, which it was. Johnson’s written veto message displayed a blatant racism that surprised many. He rejected the idea of “equality of the white and colored races.” He insisted that the formerly enslaved were less deserving of citizenship than immigrants because “the avenues to freedom and intelligence have just now been suddenly opened” to the former, when an immigrant has “familiarized himself with the principles of a Government.” He invoked the threat of racial intermarriage as the logical consequence of the bill. When Congress overrode the veto, it was the first time ever that Congress ever enacted a major piece of legislation without the President’s signature. _https://emergingcivilwar.com/2023/10/28/echoes-of-reconstruction-veto-of-civil-rights-act-1866/_ _**Lieutenant Calley Gets His Wrist Slapped (1971)**_ **MARCH 29 IS THE 55TH ANNIVERSARY** of the 1971 conviction of Lieut. William Calley on 22 counts of premeditated murder of Vietnamese civilians. The killings took place in Sơn Mỹ, a village about 75 miles south of Da Nang. Most people in the U.S. call the village Mỹ Lai. In 1968 Calley and the 30 U.S. Army troops under his command killed at least 347 (and possibly more than 500) unarmed, unthreatening civilians, including many women and children. The Sơn Mỹ massacre is largest known massacre of civilians by U.S. ground troops in the 20th century. The massacre remained a secret for more than two years, but when news of it leaked out, the Army charged Calley and 25 others of having committed crimes. Calley, who was the only one convicted, could have been sentenced to life in prison, but he served only 42 months under house arrest. _https://portside.org/2015-03-25/scene-crime_ _**Centuries of Caring for the Poor and the Sick (1736)**_ **MARCH 31 IS THE 290TH ANNIVERSARY** of the founding of the first public hospital in what later became the United States when, in 1736, the Common Council of New York City established a 6-bed infirmary on the second floor of the city’s Public Work House, located on what was then the City Common, now City Hall Park. In 1798 the infirmary moved to the city-owned Belle Vue Farm on the East River, where it acquired the name Bellevue Hospital. It remains at the same location more than 225 years later. _https://archive.org/details/anaccountbellev00carlgoog/page/n10/mode/2up_ For more People's History, visit _https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/_ * Triangle Fire * Vietnam antiwar movement * Andrew Johnson * My Lai Massacre * hospitals Subscribe to Portside

This Week in People’s History, Mar 25–31, 2026 (portside.org/2026-03-23/week-peoples-...

Contra RFK, Jr., Independent Science Autism Committee Meets WASHINGTON, D.C.—A “shadow committee” of autism researchers and science advocates met in the nation’s capital for the first time on Thursday. Called the Independent Autism Coordinating Committee (I-ACC), the group rapidly came together as a response to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., overhauling of the federal government’s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), which provides guidance on autism research. Kennedy’s 21 new appointees to the committee include several who have promoted a disproved connection between vaccines and autism and who have promoted non-evidence-based and potentially dangerous therapies for the condition. Other similar “shadow” organizations have been created to fill in the public health gaps left by changes under the Trump administration. Medical organizations have put out their own vaccine guidelines, for example, after Kennedy overhauled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail The federal autism committee now has a “striking absence of scientific expertise,” said Craig Snyder, policy lead at the Autism Science Foundation, during the rival group’s meeting on Thursday. “It disproportionately represents the small subset of families who believe, contrary to scientific consensus, that vaccines cause autism while excluding the overwhelming majority of autistic individuals, families and advocates who support evidence-based science.” The independent group plans to review autism science and recommend research priorities to improve the lives of autistic people—something that many of its members worry the federal committee will no longer prioritize. “There are some grave concerns that the federal IACC will not be able to continue to do what its true mission is,” said Joshua Gordon, who chaired the IACC when he was director of the National Institute of Mental Health, on Thursday. Gordon is now a member of the independent committee. At Thursday’s kickoff meeting, members of the new group took turns sharing what gaps in research could be filled to improve the lives of autistic people. These included funding more rigorous trials for therapies and improving communication devices. Several members highlighted the need for research to answer long-standing clinical questions, such as whether certain antidepressants should be prescribed to autistic children with anxiety. Notably, the federal autism committee was meant to meet on Thursday, too, but postponed its own meeting after the independent group announced it would convene on the same day. The federal IACC’s overhaul is just one of many actions Kennedy has taken to roll back vaccines and muddy long-standing consensus around vaccines and autism since he was appointed to the Trump administration. Under Kennedy, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its website to state that “studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism,” which is not borne out in evidence, autism researchers say. The Food and Drug Administration has also removed warnings on its website about non-evidence-based and potentially dangerous therapies for autism. These include chelation and hyperbaric oxygen therapies—both of which have been promoted by current IACC members. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank “The current committee has been stacked to represent a narrow ideological agenda,” Snyder said at the independent group’s meeting on Thursday. “It sidelines rigorous evidence-based inquiry and thus has great potential to stall scientific progress, to distort research priorities and to squander very scarce taxpayer money—and ultimately, therefore, to harm people with autism and all those who love and support them.” The federal committee was created in 2006 through the Combating Autism Act, later renamed the Autism Collaboration, Accountability, Research, Education, and Support (CARES) Act. This law passed amid the first big wave of the antivaccine movement, says Jim Greenwood, a Republican and a former representative of Pennsylvania, who sponsored an early version of the bill when he was a congressperson. Fears about vaccines had become tied to rising autism rates, and the government had to dedicate the proper attention and funding to autism science, he adds. “We [needed] to bring together people who really know the science and [could] provide information that overrides these bad, pseudoscience conspiracies,” says Greenwood, who is a member of the independent autism committee. The federal IACC has historically tried to balance the perspectives of different factions of the autism community, including researchers, families and autistic people themselves. Sitting at the same table fostered understanding and discussion rather than division, according to Gordon. It showed that “working together was better than splintering,” he said at the meeting. Now “what is at stake is trying to keep this community together,” he added. In 2019 the federal committee began to include a larger number of autistic people as members. Now the federal group has less representation from autistic people than before, and the independent group has only one autistic member. Neither group includes representatives of autism self-advocacy organizations. “At present autistic people are losing ground on political representation,” says Ari Ne’eman, co-founder of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network and a health policy researcher at Harvard University. “I don’t think either [group] can be meaningfully said to represent our community at this moment.” The independent group plans to expand to better represent the autism community and is taking suggestions in public comments. “I think it’s a no-brainer that we must urgently take up adding more autistic people to our group,” said Helen Tager-Flusberg, a professor emerita at Boston University, who leads the Coalition of Autism Scientists, at the Thursday meeting. _**Allison Parshall**_ _is associate editor for mind and brain at Scientific American and she writes the weekly online_ _Science Quizzes_ _. As a multimedia journalist, she contributes to Scientific American's podcast Science Quickly. Parshall's work has also appeared in Quanta Magazine and Inverse. She graduated from New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute with a master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting. She has a bachelor's degree in psychology from Georgetown University._ _Founded 1845,___Scientific American__ _is the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. It has published articles by more than 200 Nobel Prize winners._ __Scientific American__ _covers the most important and exciting research, ideas and knowledge in science, health, technology, the environment and society. It is committed to sharing trustworthy knowledge, enhancing our understanding of the world, and advancing social justice._ __Sign up__ _for the Scientific American daily newsletter._ * Science * autism * Robert F. Kennedy Jr * vaccines Subscribe to Portside

Contra RFK, Jr., Independent Science Autism Committee Meets (portside.org/2026-03-20/contra-rfk-jr...

Growing Resistance in Trump’s USA Credit: Pete Price We Americans inhabit two wildly different nations. In one variant, life goes on as before. We cheer for sports teams, drive children to school, shop for food, go to work. Another world of horror, though omnipresent in the news that shows immigrant communities being torn apart by masked armed thugs, seldom impinges on the daily lives of most citizens. In Minneapolis in January, Renée Good and Alex Pretti were abruptly catapulted from that world into the inverted world. Like tens of thousands of other US citizens acting as legal ICE observers or “verifiers“ across the country, Renée Good dropped her daughter off at school on January 7 before responding to an alert that agents of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) were raiding the neighborhood where George Floyd was murdered in 2020, triggering the Black Lives Matter protests. Following a confusing instruction from an ICE agent, she attempted to comply by slowly backing her car out of the traffic lane. The ICE agent shot her three times in the face. Within hours of her summary execution, loudspeakers in the MAGA arsenal, including President Trump himself, declared that Renée Good had earned the death sentence. She was accused of using her vehicle to assault the agent, of being a radical antifa, and perhaps even a lesbian. The ICE agent, who was recorded as calling Renée a “fucking bitch”, was not charged with any crime; rather, he rapidly accumulated donations of over $1 million from MAGA supporters. The Department of Justice has focused on investigating the background of Renée and her wife, while state and local authorities have been barred from seeking evidence about the killing. Numerous federal and local legal officials have resigned in protest. As tens of thousands of Minnesotan citizens took to the streets to call for removing the ICE agents from Minneapolis, Trump threatened to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to suppress the largely peaceful protests with federal troops. His tame Republican-led Congress sent subpoenas to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, not to ICE. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Trump has long spewed venom on Minnesota, especially on its large Somali community. He has also called for the impeachment and even execution of Minneapolis Congresswoman and Somali immigrant Ilhan Omar, calls which arguably provoked the vinegar attack on her late in January. Trump claims to have won the state of Minnesota and been unfairly deprived of its electoral votes by cheating. Within a few days, “Abolish ICE” protests were organized in several hundred US cities. Several Minnesota labor unions called for a one-day strike/stayaway on January 23, which was largely successful as between 50 and 100,000 demonstrators braved the sub-zero cold. Support rallies in nearly 100 cities across the USA, often organized by labor federations, supported the Minneapolis strike. On January 24, Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse and another verifier, was executed in the same neighborhood of Minneapolis by ten shots from Border Patrol agents while recording one of their raids. Across the USA, verifiers have been videoing and recording ICE arrests on their smartphones. In Massachusetts, the immigrant-led LUCE coalition mobilizes some thousand such ICE verifiers in nearly 20 hubs, committed to observing and documenting, not interfering with ICE arrests. For safety reasons, verifiers are US citizens like me. We can all imagine what it would be like to be summarily shot like Good and Pretti for engaging in this totally legal verification. National polling indicates that a small majority of US citizens support abolishing ICE, rising to 77% of Democrats. However, the official Democratic Party leadership has not been convinced. National Democratic legislators have routinely approved massive increases in spending for hiring more ICE agents and funding more ICE detention camps, which passed the House of Representatives. Following the murder of Alex Pretti, Senate Democrats have another opportunity to block the latest budget bill that includes more increases for ICE. Under pressure from their constituents, many may grow spines. Until recently, more fundamental opposition to cruel anti-immigrant policies was left to democratic socialist elected politicians, like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, AOC, Bernie Sanders, and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Armed, masked and camouflaged ICE and Border Patrol agents have become the visible face of American fascism, and recruitment propaganda openly stresses militarization, white American nationalism, and other MAGA themes. The rush to recruit agents to carry out Trump’s ambitious deportation quotas has bypassed basic policing training, including de-escalation. This dramatically sums up the current clash of culture and morality in the USA. I am painfully reminded of the Brownshirts of Mussolini and Hitler. Trump himself may be too narcissistic and self-referentially undisciplined to achieve a full authoritarian takeover, but within the MAGA camp, the likes of Homeland Security Advisor Steven Miller and Steve Bannon are scheming to do so. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank Will the traditional institutional barriers to a collapse of American democracy, political parties, media, legal courts, or universities (many of which are already genuflecting to the Mad King) block Trump’s authoritarian coup? I trust more in the thousands of Renée Goods and Alex Prettis, confronting ICE and rallying across the nation. Elsewhere, the Greenland crisis is a symptom of the disorder the Mad King is spreading globally. It is hard to do justice to the overweening insanity of Donald Trump. If the kidnapping of Maduro was more about oil than about drugs or democracy, what is Greenland about? Not military security, for which the USA already has full access by agreement with Denmark, not the rare earths, which can be bought through trade, nor the rights of the Inuits. What madness compels Trump to threaten Europe and NATO with no rational purpose? His tweets keep calling Greenland “huge” and claim that he “needs” it for psychological reasons. Could he be dazzled by the Mercator projection of a huge landmass looming over North America? In his delusory speech in Davos, he referred four times to Greenland as Iceland. We in DSA – Democratic Socialists of America – are helping mobilize the resistance to the Mad King’s designs. We are in touch with democratic socialist parties in Denmark and Greenland for mutual assistance. The rapidly growing DSA chapter in Minneapolis, at the core of the current struggle against ICE, is receiving full political and financial support from DSA. A national call organized for January 21 by the DSA International Committee drew more than 250 participants, building upon a full year of steadily growing immigrant rights and anti-ICE organizing in coalition with immigrant-led groups. Another Abolish ICE call organized by New York City DSA drew 4,000 participants and raised money for Twin Cities DSA and a community organization in Minnesota fighting evictions that further expose immigrants. Our often-fractious DSA “big tent” is becoming better aligned and less ridden with sectarianism. DSA member Zohran Mamdani becoming the Mayor of New York City has enabled DSA to place itself more firmly at the center of the anti-MAGA movement. His victory is accelerating the rate of democratic socialists running for office at all levels, and could lead to a DSA member like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez running in the Democratic presidential primaries in 2028. But 2028 is far down the road. Although the congressional elections in November 2026 may push MAGA back for a while, the longer-range prognosis for US democracy depends primarily on the grassroots mobilization of the widest possible spectrum of the American population. As organized labor finally begins to join the fray, the chances of success for the resistance are growing. _Paul Garver is a member of the streering committee of the DSA International Committee_ _Chartist is the bi-monthly political magazine of the democratic left. In honouring the Chartists of the 19th century, our idea of democratic socialism is as much about the political movement and means of mobilisation used to advance political ideas as it is about the ideas themselves. Chartist seeks to provide a space for those who subscribe to this broad ideal._ * resistance * MAGA * ICE * Minneapolis * DSA * grassroots opposition Subscribe to Portside

Growing Resistance in Trump’s USA (portside.org/2026-03-14/growing-resis...

This Week in People’s History, Mar 11–17, 2026 _**When Willful Negligence Kills, It’s No ‘Accident’**_ **MARCH 11 IS THE 15TH ANNIVERSARY** of a magnitude-9 earthquake off Japan’s east coast and resulting tsunami that caused the world’s second largest nuclear “accident” when three Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors melted down, causing an enormous, uncontrolled release of highly radioactive material into the environment. The 2011 catastrophe, which is frequently characterized as an accident, was not accidental. The meltdown-causing tsunami had been widely predicted. Only its timing, not its magnitude, was a surprise. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail The decision to build the Fukushima reactors mere yards from the Pacific Ocean and 33 feet above sea level flew in the face of detailed, irrefutable, geological and historical knowledge. As one of the most earthquake-prone regions on earth, all construction in Japan must be designed on the assumption it will someday need to withstand a large earthquake. In addition to the need to withstand intense shaking, anything built near the Pacific (on the east) or the Sea of Japan (on the west) must be built to either withstand a large tsunami or far enough above sea level to avoid inundation. Exactly how far above sea level is difficult to predict, but there was no question when Fukushima Daiichi was built in 1967, that it should have been at least 100 feet (not 33) above sea level. The knowledge that it could not be safely built at such a low elevation was not speculative. It was based on recent historical experience. Coastal Japan is subjected to tsunamis so often that Japanese authorities keep detailed records of tsunami locations and height above sea level. It happens that along the stretch of coast where Fukushima Daiichi was located, a 1933 tsunami inundated land as high as 95 feet, killing thousands of people. The warnings embodied by the records of past tsunamis were not legal bans on construction, but surely the knowledge that a 95-foot tsunami had hit the region in 1933 was more than sufficient information to prevent the government from approving the construction of three nuclear reactors just 34 years after the region was inundated by a flood three times higher than the Fukushima Daiichi site. _https://www.nucnet.org/news/fukushima-was-man-made-disaster-caused-by-wilful-negligence-report-finds_ If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank _**Tom Paine, Heroic Journalist**_ **MARCH 13 IS THE 235TH ANNIVERSARY** of the publication, in London, of Tom Paine’s book, Rights of Man, a detailed defense of the ongoing French Revolution and all that it represented – democracy, an end to hereditary government, free public education, progressive income tax, and a collective responsibility for public welfare. Paine’s 1791 book was enormously popular and quickly became a foundation text for the growing working class movement in Britain. As a result, the government banned it and attempted, without success, to suppress it. When Paine was charged with having committed seditious libel, he fled to France, but he was tried in absentia and sentenced to death. Paine, who never returned to England, died of natural causes in Manhattan when he was 72. _https://jacobin.com/2015/03/thomas-paine-american-revolution-common-sense_ _**‘God Is Germany’s Only Judge!’**_ **MARCH 14 IS THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY** of Adolf Hitler’s delivery of a speech to some 300,000 Germans in Munich in 1936. He said, "Germany acknowledged as judges of her actions only herself and God," and "If in London or elsewhere men meet to sit in judgment upon us, then I can only say that above every earthly judge stands Almighty God. He is the eternal judge. He alone has the right to decide what is right and wrong, and God's voice is in this case the voice of the people." _https://agingandmentalhealthlab.uccs.edu/sites/g/files/kjihxj1911/files/2020-07/DSM-Assessment-of-Hitler-IDR-2007.pdf_ _**Bad Blood Between U.S. and Iran Has a Long History**_ **MARCH 15 IS THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY** of an event that lies at the root of the decades-long deadly antagonism between the U.S. and Iran, which is once again resulting in hundreds of deaths and threatening to turn into an unmitigated catastrophe. On March 15, 1951, the democratically elected legislature of Iran voted to take over the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The Iranian decision had been a long time coming. Nearly half a century earlier, Iran had agreed to allow the British to drill the country’s first oil wells and to keep most of the profits from refining and selling the extracted oil. At first, the Iranians considered the arrangement to be a good deal, because the British were putting up all the capital needed to drill the wells and refine the oil, but as the industry grew and the British needed to spend less and less, the Iranians said they wanted a bigger percentage of the industry’s profits. Despite the fact that the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was enormously profitable, it would never agree to alter the original bargain. The struggle over the division of the profits dragged on for years until finally the Iranian government decided to exercise its sovereign authority and take the company over. As soon as the nationalization took place, all of the world’s oil markets boycotted Iranian oil. The boycott was almost totally effective, with the result that the Iranian economy was deeply depressed. As the economic crisis grew, the U.S. State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency began to plan to stage a coup that would install a new regime that would give up the nationalization program. The successful coup took place in August 1953 and installed a new government, one that would agree to a new division of the profits from the sale of Iranian oil, not to give Iran a bigger share, but to cut the U.S. in on the deal. Few people in the U.S. know or care anything about this history, but it is not nearly so obscure to its Iranian victims. _https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/media_mentions/2019-10-30_the_united_states_overthrew_irans_last_democratic_leader_mohammad_mosaddeq.pdf_ _**A Catastrophic Day in Court**_ **MARCH 17 IS THE 140TH ANNIVERSARY** of the premeditated 1886 attack by a large mob of white men on a smaller group of people of color who were attending a trial in the Carroll County Courthouse in Carrollton, Mississippi. At least 23 people of color were killed and many more were wounded. None of the whites was hurt. No one involved was ever charged with a crime. _https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/mar/17_ For more People's History, visit _https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/_ * Fukushima * Thomas Paine * Adolf Hitler * US-Iran confrontation * white terrorism Subscribe to Portside

This Week in People’s History, Mar 11–17, 2026 (portside.org/2026-03-09/week-peoples-...

For Liam Conejo Ramos In the time it takes to read the photo We will have taken in the light that fell from the bare branches of our backyard maple tree which stands as a winter messenger Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail rooted to everything we love Like a small flag of trust in the hand of a five-year-old who reaches up for the hand of his father Who is now handcuffed as punishment for that same trust both taken in the same breath That we can no longer share without visible acts of courage If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank _Beau Beausoleil is a poet and activist based in San Francisco, California. His most recent chapbooks are, Poet as Naturalist (Raven and Wren Press), How Love Sustains Us (Barley Books, U.K.) and War News (daily poems responding to the first three months of the genocidal war in Gaza), which appeared as a free online ebook published by Agitate! Journal. Published in 2025 is a second volume in the War News series, War News II (12/9/23 - 6/3/24), published by fmsbw press in San Francisco._ * ICE * unlawful detention Subscribe to Portside

For Liam Conejo Ramos (https://portside.org/2026-03-06/liam-conejo-ramos

Is the U.S. Tax Code Anti-Feminist? Illustration: Eleanor Davis / New York Times For many Americans, taxes are a chore to complete once a year. But if you reflect on the tax code long enough, you may see it differently — as a reflection of values, or even a national anthem. In some places, it may also sound anti-feminist. Bridget J. Crawford, a professor at Pace University’s Elisabeth Haub School of Law, has analyzed the tax code through all of these lenses in her academic work, which has a recurring refrain: The tax code is not neutral. She has long believed that it reinforces power imbalances and gender inequality in particular, which led her and a colleague to chase after a question: What would the tax code look like if it were reimagined through a feminist framework? Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Professor Crawford and Anthony C. Infanti, her co-author and a fellow law professor, edited a book several years ago in which a group of experts rewrote tax-related judicial decisions through that filter, using the law as it existed at the time the cases were decided. But they took a more expansive view of feminism. “It certainly has its historic roots in the feminist movement and women’s rights, but our version is much broader than that — and it’s for everybody,” Professor Crawford said. “Feminism is, at its core, the effort to ensure that our legal and economic systems allow everyone to live with equal dignity, autonomy and economic security.” The tax code underwent yet another round of revisions in the sweeping tax and policy law — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — that Congress passed last summer. With tax season upon us, we asked Professor Crawford to reflect upon the tax landscape today, and what she’d rewrite if given the chance. _This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity._ **What’s the most anti-feminist thing about our tax code?** If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank The tax code often assumes that economic resources within a household are shared equally and that caregiving has no independent economic value. Both assumptions obscure the realities of inequality and disproportionately disadvantage women. **So child care, for example, or perhaps an aging parent.** One at the top of mind has to be child care. The child and dependent care tax credit covers just such a small portion of actual child care costs, and it phases out for middle- and upper-income households. So it neither fully supports the poor nor does it really incentivize participation for professionals who are balancing high-cost care and high taxes. The fact that child care is treated as a personal expense rather than a work-related necessity is a huge issue. Caregivers who are unpaid are not contributing to Social Security and other tax-related benefits, and that leads to longer-term economic inequalities. **We know that some married couples filing jointly might be****penalized****and pay more in taxes than they would had they filed individually, while other couples benefit from a marriage bonus, paying less. Is there a better way?** There isn’t a perfect system. Joint taxation can benefit some couples and disadvantage others, depending on how income is distributed between spouses. In dual-earner households, the second income is often taxed at a higher marginal rate. Historically, that’s more likely to be the wife, not the husband, and that higher rate of taxation can disincentivize her labor force participation. So there’s a good argument to me that the joint return itself discourages women’s employment and reinforces traditional gender roles. But individual taxation has the advantage of neutrality — it avoids rewarding or penalizing people based on marital status and treats each taxpayer as economically autonomous. **The American tax code is progressive, at least in part, because higher earnings are taxed at higher rates. But in practice, there are plenty of regressive features. Warren Buffett famously said he****paid a lower rate****than his secretary. That seems pretty anti-feminist.** The gap between tax rates on labor and tax rates on capital is one of the most important drivers of inequality. Gender inequality and wealth inequality are deeply intertwined, so when the tax code privileges capital, it often indirectly privileges men. Feminist tax analysis helps make those structural effects visible. **Also very visible:****the growth****of the billionaire class. They can have an outsize influence and power on electoral politics and policymaking. How large of a role does the tax code play when it comes to wealth concentration?** The tax code makes it easier to build and sustain wealth than to earn a living through work. That structural choice has profound consequences for inequality. **Was there a time when the tax code was more equitable? It probably wasn’t more feminist, at least in the traditional sense.** The mid-20th-century tax system did more to limit extreme wealth, even if it did not fully address gender inequality. Progressivity alone is not sufficient, but it is an important foundation for equity. The estate tax once reflected a democratic commitment to preventing permanent economic aristocracies. Its decline means we’ve embraced the inequalities of a new Gilded Age. **How does the sweeping tax law passed last summer — and that takes partial effect during the****current tax season****(for tax year 2025) — fit into the big picture?** I think it’s the ultimate example of technocratic changes being a veil to what’s really going on. And what’s really going on are continued tax benefits for the wealthy, minor reform at the margin for people like tipped workers, but extraordinary cruelty toward families and people living in poverty. **If you could rewrite a piece (or pieces) of the tax code, what would you change?** Tax law is not just about raising revenue. It communicates whose work and whose lives the law values. A feminist tax code would be attentive to how tax rules shape economic independence, caregiving and bodily autonomy. We need to stop privileging wealth over work. __[_**Tara Siegel Bernard**_ _writes about personal finance for The Times, from saving for college to paying for retirement and everything in between.]_ * Feminism * Women * women workers * caregivers * caregiving * taxes * tax code * household resources * economic value * Child Care Subscribe to Portside

Is the U.S. Tax Code Anti-Feminist? (portside.org/2026-03-05/us-tax-code-a...

Friday Nite Videos | February 27, 2026 To view a video click an image below We Uncovered the Most Infamous Secret Society They're billionaires, politicians, judges and more. They meet at private camp Bohemian Grove. The membership is secret, but Daniel Boguslaw came to us with a full list of everyone involved. Welcome the Stranger | Zohran Mamdani Mayor Mamdani's speech at the NYC Interfaith Breakfast | Feb 6, 2026. This city is home to people of countless faiths. But no matter what you believe, one thing unites us: we are all New Yorkers. We will not allow ICE to terrorize our neighbors. The Uncomfortable Truth About Ozempic Just how widely should weight loss drugs be prescribed? What is the health tradeoff between these medications and obesity? Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Come to Jesus Moment | The Midnight Republic Matthew 25 reminds us: what you do to the least of these, you do to Him. This song holds power accountable to that standard. The Story of Capital | David Harvey Over the decades, David Harvey has won the acclaim of students and academics for his teaching of Marx’s work. Now in The Story of Capital his work becomes accessible to the general reader. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank * Bohemian Grove * David Harvey * health * Karl Marx * Marxism * Music * Obesity * Ozempic * political economy * protest music * religion * Religion and Politics * Science * secret societies * Zohran Mamdani Subscribe to Portside

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Pro-Palestine Super PAC Brings Multimillion-Dollar War Chest to Midterms A new super PAC is throwing its weight behind progressive Democrats in upcoming midterm election primaries to counter the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the pro-Israel lobbyist that has recently hidden behind “shell PACs” to fund its preferred candidates, as opposition grows to its unconditional support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, sources told the _Prospect_. The new PAC, American Priorities, filed a statement of organization with the Federal Election Commission last Thursday. It’s committing to spending multiple millions of dollars across several races, the sources said, beginning with a focus on a pair of Democratic congressional primaries in the South, where progressive candidates are up against establishment opponents. _**More from Whitney Curry Wimbish**_ Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail It has so far spent $550,000 on Durham, North Carolina, County Commissioner Nida Allam, who is challenging incumbent Democratic Rep. Valerie Foushee for the state’s Fourth Congressional District seat. _INDY Week_ , which highlighted American Priorities spending in the race, found that the PAC is also funding mailers and has “quickly become the single largest spender in the 2026 election” for the Fourth District. Foushee previously accepted nearly $3 million from Israel lobbyists, according to the accountability website Track AIPAC, but last August dramatically broke with the group and said she would no longer accept their money. Allam is the first Muslim American woman elected official in state history and has the endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). (Read _Prospect_ executive editor David Dayen’s companion piece about that race here.) The other race American Priorities is spending on right now is in the 30th District of Texas, where the PAC is spending on the Rev. Frederick Haynes to take over the seat of Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who is running for Senate. Haynes is Crockett’s pastor and has her endorsement. The Haynes and Allam spots are running now in their respective districts. While it is biographical, the Haynes spot stresses his opposition to AIPAC, while the Allam spot hits Foushee for benefiting from AIPAC and other corporate PACs. Both candidates are endorsed by Justice Democrats, which is also spending money of its own in the races. The North Carolina and Texas primaries are on March 3. But this is only the beginning of American Priorities’ investments. The American Priorities statement of organization lists as its campaign treasurer Mark Hanna, a Zohran Mamdani donor who was once on the board of Yalla Brooklyn, a kind of precursor to the Mamdani movement in New York City. It is the second major spender to emerge ahead of the 2026 midterm elections with the goal of shaking off AIPAC’s stranglehold on political spending. Last week, the newly formed Peace, Accountability, and Leadership PAC (PAL PAC) joined with the national progressive organization Justice Democrats to support pro-Palestine candidates. The partnership’s first endorsement is activist and journalist Kat Abughazaleh, who is running for Congress in the Ninth District of Illinois. But American Priorities is the first organization that may be able to match AIPAC one-to-one in some races. Sources would not say how many races it will support, but suggested it could be as many as a dozen, with significant commitments that will make it a leading outside spender for the candidates it supports. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank Fight Agency, which did media for Mamdani, and Middle Seat, which works with progressive candidates, are doing paid media for the effort. The spending comes as AIPAC is using innocuous-sounding shell organizations to fund its chosen candidates, with names like “Elect Chicago Women” or “Affordable Chicago Now,” as David Dayen reported in early February and _The Washington Post_ re-reported yesterday. It is already pouring millions into pro-Israel candidates, such as in the Seventh District of Illinois, where it plans to spend millions of dollars on ads for Melissa Conyears-Ervin via its designated super PAC, United Democracy Project (UDP). AIPAC and UDP recently attempted to exact revenge on former Rep. Tom Malinowski for saying that he would be open to U.S. military aid to Israel coming with conditions. UDP ran attack ads against him in the primary race to replace New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill in Congress, though he is a longtime supporter of Israel who previously took AIPAC money. Malinowski’s strongly pro-Palestine opponent, Analilia Mejia, won the primary as a result. Sources close to American Priorities said taking an explicit pro-Palestine stance is a winning position for Democrats, despite the squeamishness of party leaders like Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY), who has accepted $6.4 million from the Israel lobby and its mega-donors as of this month, according to Track AIPAC. By last October, support among Democrats for imposing sanctions on Israel had grown to a supermajority, IMEU Policy Project and Gen-Z for Change found. Polling shows that it’s a winning position for Republicans, too. Forty-four percent of Republicans overall and a majority of voters under 45 said in a December poll IMEU released that they’d vote for a Republican candidate who supported cutting military aid to Israel. The attempted concealment of AIPAC spending in races in Illinois serves as an indication that the organization understands the toxicity of its politics and the dim view that Democratic primary voters take of it. Now there’s some firepower coming from the other direction in the ad wars. _**Whitney Curry Wimbish** is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes short fiction in a range of literary magazines. __wwimbish@prospect.org_ _Used with the permission. The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2024. All rights reserved. Click_ __here__ _to read the original article at Prospect.org._ __Click here__ _to support The American Prospect's brand of independent impact journalism._ _Pledge to support fearlessly independent journalism by_ __joining the Prospect__ _as a member today._ _Every level includes an opt-in to receive our print magazine by mail, or a renewal of your current print subscription._ * elections * Money in Politics * American Priorities * AIPAC * Palestine Subscribe to Portside

Pro-Palestine Super PAC Brings Multimillion-Dollar War Chest to Midterms (portside.org/2026-02-20/pro-palestine...

The Quintessential Epstein Files Email Then-White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler in October 2013 | Charles Dharapak/AP Photo On June 5, 2015, Kathy Ruemmler, then a corporate lawyer for Latham & Watkins but just one year removed from her stint as White House counsel for Barack Obama, emailed her good friend Jeffrey Epstein. Ruemmler, who was once under consideration to become Obama’s attorney general, wrote, “I am working on a PR strategy for MJ White v. Elizabeth Warren.” Epstein responded, “Good[.] mj is good.” And Ruemmler followed on in a response, “Yes, and EW is the worst.” This is the perfect Jeffrey Epstein email, with as much explanatory power about this man, and more important the world he associated with and cultivated, than anything to do with child sex abuse. It shows that there is in fact an Epstein class, which not only believes in their own personal impunity, but seeks to protect their fellow travelers as well. And that ultimately lines up with a political and economic vision that favors corporate domination over the public interest. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail But you have to unravel all the backstory to best understand it. The date—June 5, 2015—is the first important bit. Three days earlier, Sen. Warren had sent MJ (Mary Jo) White, who was then chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, one of the most withering documents I have ever seen in politics. The 13-page letter details the utter failure of White to police financial markets at the SEC, noting the inability to finalize long-delayed regulations on the sector and continued leniency in the enforcement of the securities laws. Warren was specific on the latter point. White had continued to allow corporate offenders to settle cases without admitting guilt, despite claiming in confirmation hearings that this practice would end. In 520 settlements to that point, the SEC only sought admissions of wrongdoing in 19 cases, and in 11 of those, the companies only had to stipulate to a broad series of facts rather than the legal violations themselves. White also allowed financial institutions that were convicted of securities law violations to continue to enjoy special regulatory privileges, by granting them waivers to ensure eligibility. That included companies found guilty of criminal misconduct, for the first time in a decade. > There is in fact an Epstein class, which not only believes in their own personal impunity, but seeks to protect their fellow travelers as well. Finally, Warren noted that White had had to recuse herself from nearly 50 investigations because her husband, John White, was a corporate defense lawyer at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and actively engaged in defending clients under SEC investigation. With a five-member SEC split between three Democrats and two Republicans, these constant recusals invited deadlock on key cases and in some cases blocked prosecutions. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank It was a thorough and unrelenting set of charges, which clearly detailed how White’s record belied her stated aims of justice for corporate wrongdoing. If I had one quibble with Warren, it was that she should have known this before voting for White’s nomination, since White literally invented the concept of legal immunity for corporate actors. While U.S. attorney in Manhattan in 1994, White decided to adopt something called the deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) for use in corporate criminal cases. Until then, DPAs had been previously used for juvenile delinquents to give them a chance to rehabilitate themselves. Literally, White treated corporations like children whose brains were too underdeveloped to truly hold them responsible for their actions. The initial poor unreconstructed soul was Prudential Securities, and since then, the DPA has become the standard way to pretend to crack down on corporate offenders while avoiding real accountability. Companies pay a fine, decline to admit guilt, and go about their business, with executives shielded from the inside of a jail cell or any other real sanction. After her stint at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Mary Jo White started defending corporations directly at the BigLaw firm of Debevoise & Plimpton, until Obama made her SEC chair, enabling her to get companies off the hook directly. So in 2015, Warren lit into her. Three days later, Ruemmler, who runs in such elite circles that she literally has a line of furniture named after her, tells her pal Epstein that she’s actually writing the PR strategy for White. Epstein approves; his job, such as it is, is helping wealthy people evade taxes, so any friend of elite forgiveness is a friend of his. About a month later, White unveiled her response to Warren, defending the SEC’s work. That one email isn’t confirmation that the SEC chair enlisted an outside corporate lawyer to do crisis communications on a political attack, but that’s certainly what Ruemmler and Epstein were bantering about. During White’s tenure, financial firms kept breaking the law with little SEC pushback, and when White left the agency after Trump became president, she returned to Debevoise to assist corporations from the other side of the table. She would eventually become the personal lawyer of the Sackler family, whose drive for profits at Purdue Pharma led to the opioid epidemic and left hundreds of thousands dead. White also became the criminal defense attorney for none other than Les Wexner, the fashion CEO who is likely the source of much of Epstein’s fortune, and who was recently unmasked as being listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in a 2019 FBI document about Epstein’s sex trafficking crimes. Wexner hired White shortly after Epstein died, and the mogul was later told he was not a target of any Justice Department action. One rueful side note to this is that Ruemmler was once a kind of lonely hero in the fight for real accountability in America. In the 2000s, she was the deputy director of the Enron Task Force, a Justice Department initiative that would eventually convict the energy trader’s top executives, Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. In 2006, Ruemmler gave the closing arguments in the Enron trial, and she was a key source in Jesse Eisinger’s book _The Chickenshit Club_, about why nobody with wealth and privilege goes to jail anymore. Yet within a few years of this triumph, Ruemmler sided with the literal pioneer of elite impunity in America, against Warren—the one woman with a modicum of power who called it out. And she went on to become a backup executor of Jeffrey Epstein’s will (in 2019!), while advising him about how to evade the law and diminish the credibility of his accusers. This is the Epstein class in all its glory. It’s an elite that schemes to remain as unaccountable for sexual crimes as it does for corporate crimes. It has its own hierarchy of friends and foes, and it will defend those friends no matter what they do, while the spoils of privilege flow. Its instinct is to protect and preserve money and power, with the concerns of anybody without a corporate jet tangential at best. And once you set those ground rules, once you build a wall around a certain class so they don’t have to pay any price for their actions, it’s inevitable that the actions will get darker and darker. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), whose Epstein Files Transparency Act is responsible for this glimpse at what the people who run the world say to each other when they think nobody else is looking, was a guest on our Organized Money podcast, and he expressed a change in his entire view of politics because of his work on this. “Until we get some of this elite accountability,” he said, “until people see that the people who did this are being held accountable, the bankers who caused the Great Recession, the people who got us into wars, this Epstein class, until they see that, I don’t know that we will have the trust to do the bold democratic projects that I want to do.” Maybe you see Ruemmler’s resignation last week as Goldman Sachs’s top lawyer as a measure of accountability, that she did pay for her involvement with Epstein. But it’s a very neoliberal version of accountability, the idea that the market will discipline those in the Epstein class revealed through disclosure. It will take more than transparency and a dependence on market factors to regain trust from a public that sees themselves on one side of a velvet rope, outside an inner sanctum where rules only selectively apply. Democrats were exceedingly uncomfortable at the time with Warren going after someone from their own party. Nancy Pelosi, then House Democratic leader, went on television to specifically say that Warren did not represent the views of the party. That’s the kind of thing that turns people off to politics, a situational ethics that defends the indefensible. The Epstein files are resonating because they show how the real divides in our country fall along the lines of class. I wrote a decade ago in my book _Chain of Title_ that there was a rot in the heart of our democracy, and this exchange between Ruemmler and Epstein shows precisely what that rot is. George Carlin once said that it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. We now can identify entry into that club by who had Jeffrey Epstein’s email address. It was a network of privilege and connections where your place in the world was defined by who you could get the next meeting to see, regardless of whether the man doing the connecting was a pedophile. And politicians and parties that decide to do nothing with this information, that decide to avoid the truth and try to move forward as if it didn’t happen, will learn what actual populist rage feels like. === _[**David Dayen** is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He is the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. He co-hosts the podcast Organized Money with Matt Stoller. He can be reached on Signal at ddayen.90.]_ Read the original article at Prospect.org. Used with the permission. © The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2026. All rights reserved. Support the American Prospect. Click here to support the Prospect's brand of independent impact journalism. * Jeffrey Epstein; US Politics; Elizabeth Warren; Mary Jo White; Subscribe to Portside

The Quintessential Epstein Files Email (portside.org/2026-02-17/quintessentia...

The Occupying Army Retreats Snow Flakes Crush Ice, Minneapolis | by Chad Davis (CC BY 4.0) Today’s announcement by Trump border czar Tom Homan that the administration was ending its deployment of ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minnesota encountered two distinct but ultimately complementary reactions from Minnesotans. Skepticism: “I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Elliott Payne, president of the Minneapolis City Council. And celebration of Minnesotans’ tenacious resistance: “They thought they could break us, but a love for our neighbors and a resolve to endure can outlast an occupation,” said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Today’s announcement by Trump border czar Tom Homan that the administration was ending its deployment of ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minnesota encountered two distinct but ultimately complementary reactions from Minnesotans. Skepticism: “I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Elliott Payne, president of the Minneapolis City Council. And celebration of Minnesotans’ tenacious resistance: “They thought they could break us, but a love for our neighbors and a resolve to endure can outlast an occupation,” said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. We don’t have a lot of legends about the triumph of such Americans over forces that occupied our cities, however, because we don’t have a lot of cities that have been occupied by such forces. As events would have it, however, the standout example of Americans outlasting and defeating such an occupation is about to have its 250th anniversary. It came in March of 1776, when patriot militias drove British troops out of Boston, who’d occupied that city since 1768 to quell Bostonians’ efforts to establish a modicum of control over their own affairs. Following the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, patriot militias—in advance of the formation of an American army—besieged British forces within Boston and neighboring Charlestown, both of which connected to the Massachusetts mainland by narrow necks of land that were easily blockaded. As in Minneapolis, the forces hemming in the British were infuriated civilians, the Massachusetts militia having been joined by militia forces from the other New England colonies. (Only after several months did the Continental Congress establish and enroll them in an American army, which George Washington then arrived to command.) In late 1775 and 1776, the patriot forces managed to bring artillery to the hills surrounding the city from faraway Fort Ticonderoga, in upstate New York, which had the capacity not only to bombard the British forces, but their ships in the harbor as well. With that, the British were compelled to withdraw. It took seven more years, of course, for all British forces to withdraw from the new nation, and it will likely take today’s patriots at least three more years to end the rule of Mad King Donald and his successors, which has thus far been defined not just by its war on immigrants and people whose skin color makes them look like some immigrants, but also on American cities and suburbs, where immigrants and liberals and Democrats reside. But as was the case during our Revolution, interim victories will hasten that day. On the heels of today’s announced Minnesota withdrawal, congressional Democrats appear poised to block funding for the Homeland Security Department, which is set to run out tomorrow. That could be, and surely should be, an interim victory, too, but many more (and more decisive) victories are required to end the rush to authoritarianism that Trump has engineered. Taking Congress in November’s election, of course, is by far the most important looming battle. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank As the siege of Boston continued through 1775 and 1776, the New England militias were joined by militias even from the Southern colonies. I suspect we’ll see a kindred rise in urban and blue-state solidarity today. Yesterday, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass ordered L.A.’s police to record the actions of ICE and the Border Patrol, since we can’t rely on the feds recording their own savagery. And in the wake of today’s announced retreat of ICE from Minnesota, Minneapolis Mayor Frey and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that they’d be meeting to discuss lessons learned—resistance lessons learned—from the experience of Frey’s city, and how they can be applied to New York. That might be the topic for a conclave of America’s mayors should someone have the smarts and credibility to call one. As Trump is plainly determined to commemorate the 250th anniversary of our Revolution by having an alien force of louts and thugs occupy America’s cities, so those cities should commemorate that anniversary by demonstrating the same kind of patriot resolve that created those American cities—as distinct from subservient colonial cities—250 years ago. Now as then, mad kings and their mercenaries have no place in our democratic republic. _**Harold Meyerson**_ _is editor at large of The American Prospect._ _Used with the permission. The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2024. All rights reserved. Click_ __here__ _to read the original article at Prospect.org._ __Click here__ _to support The American Prospect's brand of independent impact journalism._ _Pledge to support fearlessly independent journalism by_ __joining the Prospect__ _as a member today._ _Every level includes an opt-in to receive our print magazine by mail, or a renewal of your current print subscription._ * Immigration and Customs Enforcement * Minneapolis * Minnesota * U.S. history * American Revolution Subscribe to Portside

The Occupying Army Retreats (https://portside.org/2026-02-13/occupying-army-retreats

Trump To Repeal Obama-Era Finding Foundational to US Climate Rules Donald Trump with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin | Alex Brandon | AP In what is set to be its most audacious anti-environment move yet, the Trump administration on Thursday will roll back the mechanism allowing the government to regulate planet-heating pollution, the White House press secretary has told reporters. “President Trump will be joined by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to formalize the recession of the 2009 Obama-era endangerment finding,” Karoline Leavitt said at a press conference on Tuesday. “This will be the largest deregulatory action in American history.” The finding determined that CO2 and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, establishing a legal basis to regulate them under the Clean Air Act. Its overturning would be a “devastating blow to millions of Americans facing growing risks of unnatural disasters”, said Meredith Hankins, federal climate legal director at the environmental advocacy non-profit National Resources Defense Council. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail “The Trump EPA is cynically pretending climate change isn’t a risk to Americans’ health and welfare,” said Hankins. “This is the biggest attack ever on federal authority to tackle the climate crisis. The rollback is sure to draw legal challenges. “This isn’t going to stand without a fight,” Hankins added. “The EPA’s slapdash legal arguments should be laughed out of court. We will be seeing them in court – and we are going to win.” The Environmental Defense Fund has also promised to sue the EPA over the rule, said Fred Krupp, its president**.** Abigail Dillen, president of the green legal organization Earthjustice, also said her group “will see the Trump administration in court”. In a statement, an EPA spokesperson called the endangerment finding “one of the most damaging decisions in modern history” and said “hardworking families and small businesses have paid the price” for it. “EPA is actively working to deliver a historic action for the American people,” the spokesperson said. Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office directing EPA to assess whether the endangerment finding should be preserved. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank After Zeldin announced the plan to repeal the finding in July 2025, the agency received half a million comments on the proposal. He then submitted the repeal of the legal determination for White House review last month. Leavitt said on Tuesday the rollback would save Americans $1.3tn, but did not explain how officials arrived at that number. Though the new rule may save some corporations money, it could pose trillions in climate damages and healthcare costs, experts warn. The climate rules EPA is targeting could prevent tens of thousands of deaths and save the US $275bn for each year they are in effect, an analysis by the Associated Press in July found. “Trump and Zeldin are telling our families: we’ll let you get sicker and watch your healthcare costs skyrocket as long as oil and gas CEOs can profit,” said Alex Witt, senior adviser at environmental advocacy group Climate Power. The endangerment finding forms the legal underpinning of virtually all federal climate regulations, including those on vehicles, oil and gas operations and power plants. But the final rule, Zeldin told the Wall Street Journal this week, will apply only to emissions standards on cars and trucks, not those governing stationary sources such as power plants. The EPA did not directly confirm the scope of the planned change. The spokesperson said: “The Endangerment Finding is the legal prerequisite used by the Obama and Biden administrations to justify trillions of dollars of greenhouse gas regulations covering new vehicles and engines. Absent this finding, EPA would lack statutory authority … to prescribe standards for certain motor vehicle emissions.” The agency has separately proposed to find that emissions from power plants “do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution” and therefore should not be regulated. Gretchen Goldman, president of the science advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, said: “The science establishing harm to human health and the environment from global warming emissions was evident in 2009 and it’s even more undeniable today. “EPA has a legal obligation to regulate this pollution under the Clean Air Act,” said Goldman, who previously served in the Department of Transportation and the White House. “The American public deserves a government that will face the challenge of the climate crisis head on with proven policy solutions, not actively serve as agents of destruction by worsening it to boost fossil fuel profits.” _Dharna Noor is a fossil fuels and climate reporter at Guardian US_ * Climate Deniers * Donald Trump * Lee Zeldin * EPA Regulations * CO2 Subscribe to Portside

Trump To Repeal Obama-Era Finding Foundational to US Climate Rules (portside.org/2026-02-11/trump-repeal-...

This Week in People’s History, Feb 11–17, 2026 _**Hell No, We Won’t Go!**_ **FEBRUARY 11 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY** of Julian Bond urging a large audience at City College in Manhattan to resist the U.S. Army’s efforts to turn them into cannon-fodder in Vietnam. Bond, a civil rights activist and neophyte Georgia politician, was the featured speaker at a 1966 meeting that was co-sponsored by the local chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Independent Committee to End the War in Vietnam and the W.E.B. Du Bois Club. He called for “an organized movement of Negroes to avoid military service on racial grounds” because “we’re first-class citizens on the battlefield but second-class citizens at home.” He asked, “Why fight for a country that has never fought for you?” Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail If Bond had known it, he could have counselled his listeners that the most effective way to dodge the draft was simply to never register with the Selective Service System. The federal government had the names, addresses and ages of most young men, but it was very easy to “disappear” by moving and not giving the Post Office a forwarding address. Because the authorities lacked the resources to track down the hundreds of thousands of men who relocated in that way, if such a person avoided arrest, they were almost certain of avoiding prosecution for draft evasion, at least until 1973, when the draft was abolished. _https://wagingnonviolence.org/2023/12/uncovering-americans-long-history-conscription-conscientious-objection-draft-resistance/_ The image is by Simeon Dorelus. _**A Titan of a President**_ If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank **FEBRUARY 12 IS THE 217TH ANNIVERSARY** of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. You can read “Lincoln and Marx” by historian Robin Blackburn, former editor of New Left Review, here: _https://jacobin.com/2012/08/lincoln-and-marx_ _**What Part of ‘War Crime’ Don’t You Understand?**_ **FEBRUARY 13 IS THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY** of the UN Commission on Human Rights finding Israel responsible for committing war crimes in the West Bank. The vote was 23 to 1, with 8 abstentions. The United States cast the sole negative vote. The 1976 resolution “deplores once again Israel's continued grave violations, in the occupied Arab territories, of the basic norms of international law and of the relevant international conventions . . . which are considered by the Commission on Human Rights as war crimes and an affront to humanity, as well as its persistent defiance of the relevant resolutions of the United Nations and its continued policy of violating the basic human rights of the inhabitants of the occupied Arab territories”. The resolution condemns Israel’s “mass arrests, administrative detention and ill treatment of the Arab population” and moves to annex parts of the occupied lands. It accused the Israelis of destroying Arab houses and confiscating Arab property, of “purging” archeological and cultural property, interfering with religious freedoms and hindering “the exercise by the population of the occupied territories of their rights to national education and cultural life.” You can read the complete resolution here: _https://www.refworld.org/legal/resolution/unchr/1976/en/8392_ _**Bringing New York City to Its Knees**_ **FEBRUARY 14 IS THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY** of the end of a 10-day strike by 3,500 New York City tugboat workers that brought the city to its knees. In 1946 almost all the food and the fuel for heating and power consumed by New Yorkers was delivered to the city on barges powered by tugboats. All of the tugboat workers were members of Local 333 of the International Longshoremen’s Association. When the tugworkers struck on February 4, the fuel and food supply-chain came to a screeching stop that could not possibly have been ameliorated by deliveries via railroad and truck. And even the little food and fuel that could be delivered to wholesalers by truck and train could hardly be distributed to retailers because of lack of fuel to operate delivery trucks. Less than three days after the strike started, 15 thousand buildings had no heating fuel, a number that was expected to quadruple in three days. Outside, the temperature was around 40 degrees. Four days into the strike, almost all the city’s coal and oil stocks were gone and all the schools were shut due to lack of heat. The mayor released a report saying “No more serious disaster has ever faced this city than confronts it right now.” The federal government took control of the tugboat companies, but the striking tugboat workers refused to return to work, so all tugs remained idle until Navy sailors began to try, with very slight success, to learn how to operate tugs safely and effectively. Some tugs belonging to the Navy started to move emergency supplies, but their numbers were totally insufficient to make up for the deficit caused by the strike. As dire as the situation was, negotiations between the union and the tugboat owners association remained at a standstill until the owners finally agreed to binding arbitration. With an agreement to abide by an arbitrator's decision in place, the tug workers returned to work, and one of New York City’s most desperate moments came to an end. _https://urbanarchive.org/city/ny/s/a5ec2c10-3241-4501-af58-59613875f50a/i/63f5b25f-f8f8-4b3e-a02b-3e5827f5d1e3_ _**Kidnappers, Go to Hell!**_ **FEBRUARY 15 IS THE 175TH ANNIVERSARY** of one of the first acts of successful militant disobedience to the newly amended version of the thoroughly racist federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. On this day in 1851, a large group of outraged African-Americans burst into a Boston courtroom to rescue Shadrach Minkins, who was the first formerly enslaved, self-emancipated person arrested in New England under the recently amended law. The new law required any and all law enforcement officials to assist in the recapture of the self-emancipated; refusal to do so was a federal offense. When Minkins's former “master” learned that Minkins was in Boston, he had U.S. marshals arrest him. They took him to the federal building in Boston, where an angry crowd stormed the courtroom and freed Minkins. He was taken to a nearby hiding place and then, that night, he began his journey on the Underground Railroad. Six days later he arrived in Canada, where he was not subject to arrest. Minkins settled among self-emancipated slaves in Montreal, married, raised a family, and worked as a barber. While about two-thirds of U.S.-born blacks in Canada returned to the U.S. after the promulgation of the 13th Amendment, Minkins did not. He remained in Montreal, where he died in December 1875. This post summarizes (and borrows from) the lengthier “Shadrach Minkins Seized” page on the Mass Humanities website. The excellent, more detailed version is here: _https://www.massmoments.org/moment-details/shadrach-minkins-seized.html_ _**Emma Goldman, a Woman in Dramatic Revolt**_ **FEBRUARY 16 IS THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY** of one of the first New York City openings of “Emma: A Play in Two Acts About Emma Goldman, American Anarchist,” by historian Howard Zinn. It is one of three historical plays by Zinn, the others being the 1-man biographical play “Marx in Soho” and “Daughter of Venus” a drama concerning nuclear disarmament. No one, I believe, would call “Emma” a really great play, but it’s a fine one, with a superb first act. Zinn succeeds in bringing a totally believable, clever, daring, selfless and loving Emma Goldman to life on the page, or the stage. (I have only watched the video.) Zinn puts lines like – “Everybody in this system has to sell something to stay alive'' – into Emma’s mouth that bring to life her radical vision of fighting for justice. The opening, set in 1887, introduces four young clothing-factory workers, whose fear of being trapped in a fire, as has happened to others like them, leads them to protest and to organize, to build a labor union and, perhaps, a revolution. In “Emma”, Howard Zinn shows a theatrical flair that is well worth reading and deserves to be brought to the stage again. You can watch a 2-minute trailer by Teaching for Change here: _https://youtu.be/Bd5XToDIgBM?si=Q2j4420iTT5QZymM_ or the full 2-hour production here: _https://youtu.be/lZMF-V9hWSk?si=5rNpVYagixYDTSOB_ _**‘No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger’**_ **FEBRUARY 17 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY** of world heavyweight champion boxer Muhammad Ali’s announcement that he would refuse to allow himself to be drafted into the U.S. Army because of his opposition to the Vietnam War. In so doing, he displayed his talent as a poet with one of his many catchy refrains: Keep asking me no matter how long, On the war in Vietnam I sing this song, I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. _https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/-muhammad-ali-convicted-refusing-vietnam-draft/_ For more People's History, visit _https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/_ * anti-draft movement * Julian Bond * Abraham Lincoln * West Bank * Strike Wave * Fugitive Slave Act * Emma Goldman * Howard Zinn * Muhammed Ali Subscribe to Portside

This Week in People’s History, Feb 11–17, 2026 (portside.org/2026-02-09/week-peoples-...

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal — Melania’s Next Move Rachel Maddow Show ## **WARNING! This video is a s****ophisticated****forgery/hoax and Portside regrets and apologizes for posting it. The authors of the video use technical and psychological techniques to mislead and manipulate the viewer. We have reported the posting to YouTube.** Portside moderator. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail At precisely 10:03 a.m. Eastern Time this morning, the Supreme Court issued a short but definitive order: “Application denied.” With no dissents and no accompanying opinion, all nine justices unanimously rejected a last-minute emergency appeal, bringing months of legal maneuvering in a major federal case to a close. The timing of the decision is what makes it particularly notable. It came just 72 hours after Melania Trump’s legal team submitted a proffer agreement to federal prosecutors—an arrangement that outlines evidence she is prepared to provide in exchange for possible immunity. Court filings and official records indicate that she voluntarily waived spousal privilege and offered financial records, communications, and sworn testimony that could have direct consequences for the case. This video breaks down the critical 72-hour timeline, explains the nature of a proffer agreement, examines why the emergency appeal was unsuccessful, and analyzes the legal and strategic meaning of the Supreme Court’s one-sentence denial. It also details the three categories of evidence cited in the filings, the legal precedent surrounding voluntary spousal cooperation, and the potential next steps for prosecutors, including the prospect of additional charges. All information presented is drawn from public court records, official filings, and established legal precedent— not rumors or anonymous sources. The emphasis is on process, timing, and legal implications, explained step by step to help viewers understand the significance of this moment and what developments may follow. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank ⚠️ Disclaimer This video is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice. The analysis presented reflects publicly available court documents and established legal precedent. Viewers are encouraged to consult original court filings and qualified legal professionals for authoritative interpretations. No claims of guilt or innocence are made. * Donald Trump * Melania Trump * Supreme Court * immunity * spousal privilege Subscribe to Portside

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal — Melania’s Next Move (portside.org/2026-02-08/supreme-court...

This Week in People’s History, Feb 4–10, 2026 _**Gotta Go Down and Join the Union (1976)**_ **FEBRUARY 4 IS THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY** of the 1976 release of Union Maids, a superb hour-long documentary about working and union organizing. Labor Notes, the monthly newsletter, has published this short description of the film, which I can’t improve upon, so I won’t try. “If you’re going to work, and there’s a union, join it. No matter what kind it is. Any union is better than none. And if there isn’t one, then organize one.” So opens Union Maids, establishing the tone of this oral history of woman-led labor organizing in Depression-era Chicago. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail “Union Maids weaves together the personal stories of radical rank-and-file organizers Kate Hyndman, Stella Nowicki, and Sylvia Woods—who, after experiencing the daily exploitation of domestic life, set out to build race, gender, and class solidarity in the workplace. “Interviewed in their late 60s and early 70s, the women reflect with pride and clarity on their 1930s experiences agitating for safety measures in packinghouses, textile mills, and stockyards, how they educated their fellow workers to avoid yellow-dog contracts (where employers made new hires pledge not to join a union), and the power of downing tools when the bosses ignored their demands for better pay or a slower pace. “In stunning archival footage, we get to see the vibrant character of the new Congress of Industrial Organizations, which was opening its arms to radicals, women, immigrants, and workers of color while the American Federation of Labor remained dedicated to cultural conservativism and craft unionism. “Union Maids, directed by Jim Klein, Julia Reichert and Miles Mogulescu, is an ode to the class war of nearly a century ago and the women who led their co-workers into battle and emerged victorious. “Stream for free on Kanopy with a public library card, or on YouTube.” _https://labornotes.org/about_ If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank _**The Ferguson Brothers Lynchings on Long Island (1946)**_ **FEBRUARY 5 IS THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY** of an arrest for disorderly conduct that ended with two unarmed African-American men shot dead and a third wounded by a White policeman in Freeport, a suburb of New York City on Long Island. In the days after the killings, there were widespread protests and calls for the arrest of the police officer on manslaughter charges. Members of the large Black community in Freeport, along with the National Lawyers Guild, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and many more area residents joined together to form the New York Committee for Justice in Freeport, which held a mass meeting in Manhattan to demand the appointment of a special prosecutor to conduct a new, unbiased, investigation of the killings. As a result of the public dissatisfaction with the failure to prosecute the responsible police officer, in July New York Governor Thomas Dewey agreed to take action, but he refused to appoint a special prosecutor. Instead he appointed the chairman of the New York State Board of Social Welfare to investigate the matter and report back to him. The new inquiry did almost nothing to satisfy the widespread calls for justice in the case. The way the new hearings were conducted made it very unlikely that they would reach any new conclusion. After the Board of Social Welfare chief reported as much, the governor ignored the cries for justice and refused to appoint a special prosecutor. For more about the case and a link to Christopher Verga’s book, The Ferguson Brothers Lynchings on Long Island: A Civil Rights Catalyst, visit _https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/ferguson-brothers-killed-by-police-on-long-island/_ _**Autherine Lucy Didn’t Know the Meaning of ‘Quit’ (1956)**_ **FEBRUARY 6 IS THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY** of the largest, most violent U.S. demonstration against the racial integration of public schools to occur since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in _Brown v. Board of Education._ The riotous demonstration took place on the campus of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 1956. Its objective was to prevent the attendance of Autherine Lucy, the first person of color ever admitted to any public educational facility in the state that was not designated as being for Blacks only. On her second day of classes in Tuscaloosa, a crowd of more than a thousand people, not by any means all of them students, surrounded the Education Building where Lucy was taking a class. They threw rocks and bottles and promised to kill her as soon as they could. Lucy was convinced she would die that day if no one came to her aid. Someone called the police, and an officer managed to sneak her into a patrol car and get her off campus. Days later, university administrators suspended Lucy, both “for her own safety” and “for the safety of other students.” A month later, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a sermon about Lucy’s harrowing experience, in which he said, “As soon as Autherine Lucy walked on the campus, a group of spoiled students led by Leonard Wilson [who later became the leader the West Alabama (White) Citizen’s Council] and a vicious group of criminals began threatening her on every hand. Crosses were burned. Eggs and bricks were thrown at her. The mob even jumped on top of the car in which she was riding. Finally the president and trustees of the university of Alabama asked Autherine to leave for her own safety and the safety of the university.” King continued, “The next day after Autherine was dismissed the paper came out with this headline: 'Things are quiet in Tuscaloosa today. There is peace on the campus of the University of Alabama.' Yes, things were quiet in Tuscaloosa. yes there was peace on the campus, but it was peace at a great price. It was peace that had been purchased at the exorbitant price of an inept trustee board succumbing to the whims and caprices of a vicious mob. It was peace that had been purchased at the price of allowing mobocracy to reign supreme over democracy.” Eventually the University came up with an excuse to permanently expel Lucy, but 20 years later the expulsion order was officially annulled. Never a quitter, Lucy enrolled in the University’s graduate school of education, where she earned an M.A. in 1992. In 2010, the University erected a clock tower to honor her. _https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis56.htm#1956lucy_ _**Baby Doc Throws In the Towel (1986)**_ **FEBRUARY 7 IS THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY** of a huge U.S. Air Force C-141 cargo jet’s departure from Haiti’s main airport, carrying Jean-Claude Duvalier, who had just resigned Haiti’s presidency, to exile in France. Duvalier’s departure, along with more than a score of family members and close associates, in addition to tons of valuables and expensive vehicles, marked the end of 28 years of Duvalier rule that began with Jean-Claude’s father, Francois, in 1957. Jean-Claude’s government fell after more than a year-and-a-half of growing popular rebellion, which was widely supported by the impoverished Haitian masses and also by more affluent social sectors, including a growing part of the country’s influential Catholic hierarchy. Duvalier’s kleptocratic government had been forced to depend increasingly on terror – mass arrests, broad-daylight government-sanctioned murders and mysterious disappearances of regime opponents – so much so that his circle of supporters was in danger of vanishing. One of the last straws that led to the regime’s downfall was a general strike, of both employers and workers, which had largely paralyzed the capital, Port-au-Prince, for nearly a week. _https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/haitians-overthrow-regime-1984-1986_ _**Tell Us How You Really Feel! (1911)**_ **FEBRUARY 8 IS THE 115TH ANNIVERSARY** of the unveiling of a war memorial on the lawn of the Hillsborough County courthouse in downtown Tampa, Florida. The year was 1911, so one might have thought the veterans of the 1898 Spanish-American War were being honored, but that was not what the United Daughters of the Confederacy had in mind when they chose to put up a 25-foot marble obelisk. Two life-sized statues of Confederate soldiers stand beside the obelisk; one appears to be going off to war, the other is returning home in a tattered uniform, head bandaged, using his rifle as a cane. The main speaker at the dedication ceremony was the area’s elected prosecutor, who told the 5,000-person audience, “The South stands ready to welcome all good citizens who seek to make their homes within her borders–but the South detests and despises all, it matters not from whence they come, who, in any manner, encourages social equality with an ignorant and inferior race.” There was nothing unusual about such an event in 1911. The vast majority of monumental Civil War memorials were created after 1895 in an effort to celebrate and re-affirm the objectives of the Confederacy. In 2018 the obelisk was moved from the courthouse lawn to a cemetery about 10 miles away. _https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lost-cause-the_ _**Free and Fearless (1941)**_ **FEBRUARY 10 IS THE 85TH ANNIVERSARY** of the first edition of the amazingly successful anti-Nazi newspaper Het Parool, published daily during World War 2 in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Despite the fact it was illegal and the target of unrelenting Nazi persecution, Het Parool, which means The Password or The Motto, achieved a circulation of approximately 100,000 in 1944. When the war ended, Het Parool continued to be published. It was, for years, the second largest newspaper in the Netherlands. _https://www.republicofamsterdamradio.com/freeandfearless_ For more People's History, visit _https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/_ * union organizing * lynchings * police violence * Autherine Lucy * Haiti * Lost Cause * Het Parool Subscribe to Portside

This Week in People’s History, Feb 4–10, 2026 (portside.org/2026-02-02/week-peoples-...

Minneapolis May Be Trump’s Gettysburg It was clear after the killing of Renee Good on Jan. 7 that “Operation Metro Surge” — the Trump administration’s pretextual immigration crackdown in Minnesota — was a failure. Far from cowing the people of Minneapolis, Good’s death at the hand of an ICE officer stiffened their resolve and led even more Minnesotans to join the fight against the president’s masked paramilitaries. A less fanatical White House might have used that moment to stage a tactical withdrawal, to pull back on the assault and recalibrate in the face of stiff resistance. But in the actually existing Trump administration, immigration policy is dictated by rigid ideologues. They met Good’s death with insults, slander and the promise of further repression. Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said that Good was engaged in “domestic terrorism.” The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called Good a “deranged lunatic.” Vice President JD Vance said that her actions were “an attack on law and order” and “an attack on the American people.” He also said that the officer who shot Good was protected by “absolute immunity.” (He later backtracked from this claim, insisting instead that he said the opposite, video evidence notwithstanding.) Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail We know what happened next. On Saturday, officers with Customs and Border Protection detained, beat, shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old I.C.U. nurse who had been observing and filming ICE and C.B.P. operations. Like Good’s death, Pretti’s was caught on camera, and like Good’s death, it was egregious. Images and video of Pretti’s killing exploded on social media. Before the White House could even respond there were protests on the ground, demands for accountability, calls to abolish ICE and palpable discontent from across the political spectrum. And when the administration did address the killing, it returned to the same lies and distortions it used to try to discredit Good. “This individual went and impeded their law enforcement operations, attacked those officers, had a weapon on him and multiple dozens of rounds of ammunition, wishing to inflict harm on these officers, coming, brandishing like that,” Noem said, as if video of the confrontation did not exist. Similarly, Stephen Miller, the president’s homeland security adviser, called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and accused Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota of “flaming the flames of insurrection for the singular purpose of stopping the deportation of illegals who invaded the country.” By Sunday, officials in the Trump administration had begun to backpedal. By Monday, they were doing everything they could to appease the public’s anger. First, administration officials announced that they would remove Gregory Bovino, the highly visible field commander for Customs and Border Protection, from the area. Homeland Security said it would remove some C.B.P. agents from Minnesota, and President Trump said that he would withdraw ICE officers as well. “At some point, we will leave,” he said. “We’ve done, they’ve done, a phenomenal job.” This was no longer a defeat; it was a rout. Not only had the White House failed to achieve its strategic objective — both the mass removal of immigrants from the Minneapolis area and the suppression of the administration’s political opponents through force and the fear of force — it had also lost significant ground with the public on its most favorable issue. When Trump took office last January, he had a net eight-point advantage on immigration according to an average computed by the pollster G. Elliott Morris. Now he has a net 10-point disadvantage. Individual polls show an even starker decline: Trump is 18 points underwater on immigration, according to the latest poll from The New York Times and Siena University. Sixty-one percent of respondents also said the tactics used by ICE have gone too far. And Trump’s overall approval has dropped below 40 percent in recent polls from YouGov, Reuters and The Economist. The president is so clearly in retreat in the wake of Pretti’s death — especially coming as it did on the heels of Good’s — that even congressional Democrats have abandoned their usual defensive posture for something more aggressive. Senate Democrats have promised to filibuster an upcoming funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security if it doesn’t include a serious effort to rein in ICE and C.B.P. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who leads Democrats in the House, has pledged to impeach Noem if she doesn’t resign. There are signs, too, of infighting within the administration. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen,” Noem said in remarks reported by Axios, referring to Miller. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank **Gettysburg was supposed** to be the blow that forced the United States to negotiate an end to the Civil War. Gen. Robert E. Lee would demonstrate the superiority of his Army of Northern Virginia — on Union soil, no less — and prove to key European powers that the Confederacy was here to stay so as to push them off the sidelines. The Gettysburg campaign was, in other words, a strategic offensive meant to advance the overall goals of the rebellion if not win the conflict altogether. What Lee did not anticipate was the iron resolve, the ferocious tenacity, of the Union defenders. There was Brig. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren, whose quick thinking brought reinforcements to a small, rocky hill at the left flank of the Union line — Little Round Top — where Col. Joshua Chamberlain and the 385 men of the 20th Maine held their position against a fierce Confederate offensive. There was the lone brigade of New Yorkers, led by George S. Greene, who fended off attacks on the right flank, suffering significant losses but successfully holding Culp’s Hill. And there were the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac’s II Corps, who successfully repelled Lee’s frontal assault on the Union center. The result was a catastrophic defeat for the Confederacy. Lee lost the initiative and would spend the rest of the war fighting on the defensive, unable to wage another strategic campaign. The Confederacy would not win foreign recognition, leaving it helpless against a Union blockade. And even with the tremendous loss of life — the Union Army suffered more than 23,000 casualties over three days of battle — the Northern public would be reinvigorated by victory, ready to continue the fight. ICE and C.B.P. still roam the streets, and Trump’s authoritarian aspirations have not dimmed. But surveying the wreckage of Operation Metro Surge — of this reactionary administration’s crushing defeat at the hands of another band of tenacious Northerners — it does look to me like MAGA’s Gettysburg. _Based in Charlottesville, Virginia,__Jamelle Bouie_ _is a columnist for the New York Times. He covers history and politics. In addition, he co-hosts_ _the Unclear and Present Danger podcast_ _on the political and military thrillers of the 1990s. Before the Times, Jamelle was chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He began his career at the The American Prospect magazine and also spent time as a writer for The Daily Beast. Jamelle has also contributed essays to volumes such as "Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019" and "The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story."_ _Get_ __the best of the New York Times__ _in your Inbox with a free newsletter. Gain unlimited access to all of The Times with a_ __digital subscription__ _._ * Gettysburg * American Civil War * MAGA * Minnesota * Minneapolis Subscribe to Portside

Minneapolis May Be Trump’s Gettysburg (portside.org/2026-01-30/minneapolis-m...

Organized Labor Escalates Against ICE Summary Executions Activists carry signs during a protest on January 26, 2026, in Washington, D.C. | Probal Rashid/Sipa via AP Image Unions in Minnesota and across the country are gearing up for new mass actions after the public execution of one of their own, ICU nurse and American Federation of Government Employees Local 3669 member Alex Jeffrey Pretti. Federal immigration agents shot Pretti in the back ten times in five seconds on Saturday as he attempted to help a woman they had thrown to the ground. His last words were to her: “Are you OK?” Organized labor responded immediately to Pretti’s execution with rage and anguish, including the National Nurses United (NNU), which said Monday afternoon that it is holding a national week of action, including vigils every night this week. “ICE messed with the wrong profession,” NNU President Mary Turner said in a statement. Like Pretti, she’s a Twin Cities intensive care unit registered nurse. “Never get between nurses and our patients. We nurses are forever patient advocates, and that means we will fight to protect you at the bedside and we will fight to protect you in the streets—just as Alex was doing when he was executed in cold blood by border patrol. This stops now. Nurses want ICE abolished. Not one more penny for their crimes.” Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Coming just one day after 100,000 workers successfully shut down the Twin Cities for a one-day general strike to demand immigration thugs leave town, nurses and other union members described their heartbreak and spoke movingly of the inhumanity of Trump’s terror campaign. One was registered nurse and SEIU National Nurses Alliance chair Martha Baker, who said in a statement, “When a nurse is killed for trying to help others, none of us are safe.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement “must be removed from our communities now,” wrote Baker, who is also the president of SEIU Local 1991. “We will not stop organizing and speaking out. We must ensure that this tragedy is a turning point, and not allow it to break our momentum. Alex was there to help. ICE was there to hurt. We won’t forget him.” **Now union members are organizing to escalate**. Over the weekend, workers across sectors met throughout the country to determine their next steps, including striking again for a day, holding an indefinite strike, and building toward a general strike. In 2023, United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain called on unions everywhere to set their contracts to end on May 1, 2028, so that workers across industries could go on strike that day legally. Union contracts often include a no-strike clause that forbids workers from going on strike, forcing workers to strike only after their contract expires. (Workers may also undertake a wildcat strike, which federal law holds is illegal.) But that’s not soon enough, workers say. “Clearly, we cannot wait until 2028,” said Emily Woo Yamasaki, a member of the UAW Local 2320, Legal Services Staff Association, and an organizer with the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP), speaking on Saturday night at an FSP forum in New York City. “A general strike can’t be built overnight,” they said, “but it is more urgent than ever” for organized labor to talk about it. Dan Troccoli, labor branch co-chair of Twin Cities DSA and member leader in the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, was another labor leader who met to discuss escalation with a range of other union members this weekend. The most likely next action is a one-day strike, he said, which will help build strength and labor discipline toward bigger actions. Troccoli knows first-hand what it takes to move people to strike; the public middle school social studies teacher has done it twice before and described it as “a lift.” Like Yamasaki, he noted that it takes time. But he said union leaders everywhere should know that people who showed up to the strike on Friday were mostly non-union workers, and recognize that people are motivated to act now. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank “It should give a lot of these union leaders the confidence that we can call for this thing, and it will be responded to en masse,” Troccoli said, adding that the demands of a national general strike must match the enormity of the action. “If we’re going to do this, and we need support from the rest of the country, then the question becomes not simply ICE Out alone, but also Trump out of the office. We can’t simply go from city to city to mobilize big actions. We have to oppose the entire agenda.” The call for a general strike should come “because the appetite for it is extremely widespread,” Troccoli added. “Many people are looking at what the Trump administration is doing with horror and this is the answer.” Speaking at the forum in Manhattan this weekend, John Ferretti, member of Transport Workers Union Local 100, described challenges workers face to pulling off a nationwide strike, including the low support of union staff and leadership, whom he said would prefer to maintain the status quo. “There’s not going to be any easy next steps that we can plan out in advance. I think that the key is rank-and-file involvement in putting tremendous pressure in the labor bureaucracy to grow a fucking spine to understand the moment we are living in,” he said. “ICE is a haunting reminder,” he added, of pervasive union weakness and low union density across the U.S. “I’m very much in favor of a line of development where workers begin to take action,” he said, and that will require moving union leadership. “I’m all for educating workers about the general strike and the lessons of past general strikes,” Ferretti said, “but I’m not for an unprepared general strike. I’m not for a general strike that loses.” When unions are silent about political issues, “they become weak, and that weakness only encourages the sociopathic violent fantasies of billionaires,” which mirrors exactly the violent practices of immigration agents, he said. Workers must also contend with preparing to defend themselves and their communities, including because Trump has redefined domestic terrorism so that almost any kind of dissent qualifies. “Unfortunately, love doesn’t win the day,” he added. “It’s about power, and they are showing us that every day.” **Pretti is the****fifth person****immigration agents have executed** since September, according to reported incidents. ICE agent Jonathan Ross executed legal observer Renee Good with four shots to the face on January 7. Just days before that, an off-duty ICE agent killed Keith Porter in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve; the agent claimed Porter raised a weapon at him. In December agents shot to death Isaias Sanchez Barboza in Texas. And before that, an agent shot to death Silverio Villegas González on September 12. Agents have also shot and wounded eight other people since September: Marimar Martinez in Chicago on October 4, Carlitos Ricardo Parias in Los Angeles on October 21, Jose Garcia-Sorto in Phoenix on October 29, Carlos Jimenez in California the next day, Tiago Alexandre Sousa-Martins in Maryland on Christmas Eve, Luis David Nino Moncada and Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras in Oregon on January 8, and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in Minneapolis on January 14. Agents have faced zero repercussions for the deaths and injuries. Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and her subordinates routinely spread lies about the people their agents have killed and maimed, including their smear campaign against Pretti. “This would be a tragedy if it wasn’t a crime,” Troccoli said of Pretti’s execution, and added that he wants to see the Democratic party take stronger action as well as reckon with the fact that prior to Trump, the president with the most deportations to his name was Barack Obama, who ultimately deported 3.1 million people during his eight years in office. He also called on local leaders to undertake a strategy of noncooperation with immigration agents rather than, as Gov. Tim Walz did, mobilize the National Guard to defend the Whipple Federal Building rather than defend Minnesotans. Ultimately, Trocolli said, workers are the ones who will drive out ICE, not elected officials. “We as the people can’t necessarily look to them as the center of change,” he said. “That has to be with us. That has to be with the mass of people.” The UAW did not respond to a request for comment by deadline. === _[**Whitney Curry Wimbish** is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes short fiction in a range of literary magazines.]_ _Read the original article at Prospect.org.___ _Used with the permission. ©_ _The American Prospect_ _,__Prospect.org, 2025_ _. All rights reserved._ _Support the American Prospect_ _._ _Click here_ _to support the Prospect's brand of independent impact journalism._ * Alex Pretti; ICE; Unions; Strikes; Subscribe to Portside

Organized Labor Escalates Against ICE Summary Executions (portside.org/2026-01-27/organized-lab...

Gov. Kathy Hochul Refuses To Back Striking New York Nurses Since day one of the New York nurse strike, Kathy Hochul has tweeted many more times about her beloved Buffalo Bills than about nurses’ fight for patient safety. And unlike Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders, she has stayed far away from the picket line. | (Heather Ainsworth / Bloomberg via Getty Images) Unlike Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Governor Kathy Hochul has remained far away from the front lines of the nurses strike. Since day one, she has tweeted far more times about her beloved Buffalo Bills. Her tepid calls for negotiations show far less passion. Ideologically, Hochul is not troubled by the enormous salary disparities between nurses and hospital CEOs. As Bernie Sanders highlighted at a January 20 rally, the CEOs of the three hospital networks facing strikes make an average of $16 million per year. Despite the 1 percent’s upcoming windfall from Donald Trump’s tax cuts, the governor is nonetheless resisting Mamdani and New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA)’s demand to share the wealth. When crowds chant “Tax the rich!” she hears “Let’s Go Bills.” Hochul’s position on the strike also may be influenced by practical considerations. The Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) is a historically large donor to the state Democratic Party. In 2025, GNYHA dropped over $2 million into Dem campaign coffers. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Of that amount, $1.5 million went to the party’s “housekeeping” account, or general fund. which is essentially controlled by Hochul. That donation provided about one-third of the account’s total haul for the year. The Democrats’ state senate and assembly housekeeping entities received $250,000 apiece. The Brooklyn and Bronx county organizations reeled in far more modest sums. Meanwhile, state Republican accounts collected $150,000 from GNYHA in 2025. The expenditures from the Democrats’ general fund in 2025 went to a party account handling federal races as well as to local county committees. The assembly intake from GNYHA was a small fraction of their account’s total haul of $3.6 million, most of which came from unions and industry groups. That entity’s expenditures went primarily to networking events. Brooklyn assemblywoman Phara Souffrant Forrest, a former member of the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), says that Hochul first revealed her hand in the current conflict when she issued an executive order prior to the strike that made it easier for the hospitals to maintain staffing during the walkout. In addition, the NYC-DSA-backed legislator observes that Hochul “has not been on the picket line, which is a clear sign that she does not stand with nurses.” GNYHA was one of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s most powerful allies during his decade in office. The group even took credit for the governor’s controversial liability waiver for nursing homes during the pandemic. When nearly all his key supporters called for Cuomo to resign during the sexual harassment scandal in 2021, GNYHA stood by their man. By not using her leverage to end the strike, Hochul, like Cuomo, is playing ball with the hospital execs. The governor’s office did not respond to the _Indypendent_ ’s request for comment. Compare and Contrast If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank Watch Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani both talk about the nurse’s strike. Kathy Hochul: Zohran Mamdani: Republished from _Indypendent_. #### Share this article Facebook Twitter Email #### Contributors Theodore Hamm is chair of journalism and new media studies at St Joseph's University, New York, in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. He covers criminal justice and New York City politics for the Indypendent. * Subscribe * Donate _Jacobin_ ‘s winter issue, “Municipal Socialism,” is out now. Follow this link to get a discounted subscription to our beautiful print quarterly. * NYSNA * strike * Zohran Mamdani * Kathy Hochul Subscribe to Portside

Gov. Kathy Hochul Refuses To Back Striking New York Nurses (portside.org/2026-01-25/gov-kathy-hoc...

RFK Jr.’s Tuskegee Experiment Guinea-Bissau child | humanism.org Between 1932 and 1972, the United States Public Health Service, in what was called “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” knowingly withheld life-saving antibiotics from 600 African American sharecroppers in Alabama. Most died from syphilis. Purposefully withholding antibiotics so that investigators could observe the neurological outcomes of untreated syphilis was then, and remains today, a dark stain on American history. RFK Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, will soon conduct his own Tuskegee experiment. He has chosen the resource-poor nation of Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, to do it. Guinea-Bissau is currently overwhelmed by hepatitis B virus. About 18 percent of the population is infected. The World Health Organization (WHO) strongly recommends that all children in all countries receive a birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine to prevent mother-to-child transmission. The United States implemented the birth dose in 1991, eventually eliminating tens of thousands of cases of hepatitis B virus in children less than 10 years of age. Guinea-Bissau, on the other hand, has struggled to implement the WHO recommendation, deferring the first dose to 6 weeks of age. Consequently, about 11 percent of children less than 18 months of age in Guinea-Bissau are infected with hepatitis B virus. These children have a 90 percent chance of developing cirrhosis (chronic liver disease) or liver cancer later in life. Realizing the problem, Guinea-Bissau has decided to launch a universal birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine for all infants in 2027. RFK Jr. sees this one-year delay in implementation of the much-needed hepatitis B birth dose as a “window of opportunity” to test his theory that the vaccine causes long-term neurological problems even though more than 30 years of experience in the United States has disproved his claims. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Kennedy recently funded a $1.6 million, 14,000-person study in Guinea-Bissau set to begin in early 2026. Investigators will divide 14,000 newborns into two groups. One group will receive the hepatitis B vaccine at birth, as recommended by the WHO. The other group won’t receive the vaccine until 6 weeks of age, a continuation of the woefully substandard care that has put so many children in Guinea-Bissau at risk. Because it is unethical and cruel, this study could never be performed in the United States. In addition to exposing children needlessly to a potentially fatal infection, RFK Jr. has manipulated the study to support his unsupportable, science-resistant beliefs about harms caused by the hepatitis B vaccine: • The study will not be examining the efficacy of early or late vaccination, as it is clear that there is no value in delaying a hepatitis B vaccine, especially in a child whose mother is infected. RFK Jr. would prefer not to know that he is exposing children to unnecessary risk. • The study will be conducted over 5 years. Children who are infected with hepatitis B virus at birth don’t develop chronic liver disease for decades. Therefore, RFK Jr. is unlikely to know about how much harm his “study” has done during the 5-year period. • The study is single-blinded. This means that investigators will know whether children received a birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine, but the parents won’t know. This allows for investigator bias, where the investigator might find vague neurodevelopmental problems in the birth-dose group but not the 6-week group. • RFK Jr. bypassed the standard bidding process so that he could choose his own investigators. He picked Peter Aaby and Christine Benn. Benn has several ties to the anti-vaccine movement in the United States. In 2018, Aaby and Been published a study claiming that the DTP vaccine had caused the premature deaths of young girls in Guinea-Bissau. In a subsequent paper, they recanted their findings. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank • It is unlikely that parents will be asked to sign a consent form outlining the real risks of being in the 6-week vaccine group. As this study is funded by the American taxpayer through money provided by the CDC, the U.S. Congress should insist on seeing the details of the study, including the consent form. In the next few months, as many as 7,000 children born in a country with a high-risk of hepatitis B infection early in life will be denied a birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine. Many of these children will have shortened, difficult lives as a result. Who will step forward to protect these children whom RFK Jr. considers expendable? When, pray tell, will someone in power stand up to this man. But we remain silent, much as we did during the Tuskegee experiment when we considered African American sharecroppers in rural Alabama expendable. Now it’s children in a resource-poor country. To quote W. H. Auden’s _Shield of Achilles_ , “They were small and could not hope for help, and no help came.” [Paul Offit](https://Professor of pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, and author of "Tell Me When Its Over"), MD, is professor of pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, and author of "Tell Me When Its Over" Beyond the Noise is a column written by Paul Offit, MD, cutting to the chase about important health topics. * RFK jr. * Guinea-Bissau * vaccines * Medical ethics * Tuskegee Study Subscribe to Portside

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How Trump Doomed the American Auto Industry Ford Lightning electric pickup trucks are displayed at a dealership, February 6, 2023, in Manchester, New Hampshire | Credit: Charles Krupa/AP Photo About three and a half years ago, the American auto industry made a big bet on electrification, with the help of the Biden administration. It has been obvious to informed observers for at least a decade that EVs are where car production as an industry is going to land, sooner or later. They are faster, simpler, cheaper to run and maintain, dramatically more efficient, and most importantly, produce no direct carbon emissions, when stacked up against cars running on fossil fuels. So, the Inflation Reduction Act contained a large subsidy package for the manufacture and sale of EVs. Automakers got a variety of subsidies for building batteries and EVs, while car buyers got a $7,500 tax credit for purchasing them. That way, the Big Three—General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis—could start to catch up with Chinese companies, which stole a march on America the first time Trump threw a wrench into the EV transition. Thanks to the IRA, the Big Three could claim a piece of the global auto market going forward. Then the American people, in their infinite wisdom, elected Donald Trump, and he proceeded to stab the American auto industry directly between the shoulder blades. Almost all of the EV subsidies in the IRA were repealed, as part of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Now, thanks to that betrayal, plus Trump’s lunatic trade and foreign policy in general, the American auto industry is bleeding out. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Consider Canada, which has historically been one of the biggest markets for American cars, being quite similar culturally, already heavily integrated into the U.S. auto industry (along with Mexico), and also one of the few places that will buy our big stupid trucks. America’s share of the Canadian auto market has been tumbling, down from about half in the previous decade to just 36 percent, because of Trump’s deranged trade war and threats of annexation, which has sparked a massive nationalist backlash and a mounting customer boycott of anything American. Canada’s Liberal prime minister Mark Carney almost certainly would not have been elected without Trump’s lunatic aggression. Now, he is quietly attempting to detach Canada from its dependence on American trade wherever possible. Last week, he announced a trade deal with China whereby Canada would exchange a greatly reduced tariff on Chinese cars in exchange for a big increase in China’s imports of Canadian canola seed, along with several other agreements. This is the kiss of death for American car sales in Canada. You can get a Chinese Xiaomi sedan with 300-plus miles of range, more than 600 horsepower, and _extremely_ fancy luxury trimmings for the equivalent of about $42,000 in China; or you can get a Chinese BYD Seagull with 190 miles of range for about $11,000. I would bet that the next step for Chinese automakers is to build a factory in Toronto or somewhere nearby so Canada can get a slice of the jobs and production. More broadly, the American EV transition has clearly hit the skids, thanks to Trump. Sales plummeted by about 46 percent when the tax credit for purchase expired at the end of September. Ford took a $19.5 billion bath on a planned battery factory investment, canceled its F-150 EV, and is now reportedly in talks with—wait for it—BYD to pick up batteries for its hybrid cars sold abroad. GM is doing better, but its EV sales are still down sharply, as are Tesla’s. Contrary to the triumphalism of various EV critics, all this horrendous waste does not mean that the global EV transition is now in question. As I have previously detailed, in 2025 a quarter of global car sales were EVs, led by Southeast Asia, where the EV share of new car sales in several nations has soared past the 40 percent mark, with many more nations just behind. China, the largest car market in the world, went from almost zero to more than half in just five years. America’s failure to gain a serious toehold in EV production—particularly very cheap models—is a major reason why the Big Three’s share of the global auto market has fallen from nearly 30 percent in 2000 to about 12 percent today, while China’s share has risen from 2 percent to 42 percent. And this is just the start. If the staggering fall in battery prices over the last year is any indication, EVs are still in the period of industrial development where both technological advancements and price declines are rapid. And critically for the developing nations like India, Pakistan, and Nigeria that will likely make up most of the economic growth this century, they allow nations to shake off the heavy burden of oil imports. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank The EV transition isn’t over even in America. As Andrew Moseman points out at Heatmap News, EVs are still straight-up better than gas cars for most purposes, and even our network of DC rapid chargers, while wretched by Norwegian standards, is good enough to make road trips workable in almost all of the country. Cheaper models like the Chevy Bolt or Equinox, Toyota bZ, or the Nissan Leaf are coming to market just in time. Who knows: Perhaps in 20 years, a desiccated husk of what once was Ford or GM will still be clinging to life. It’s ironic, given Trump’s fixation on “manly” blue-collar professions, that the only companies he actually throws his weight around to protect are Big Tech monopolies. When Europe ponders enforcing its laws regarding child pornography on Elon Musk’s Twitter/X, then the administration is quick to issue retaliatory threats. But American auto manufacturers? Those Trump will kill with his own hand. _**Ryan Cooper** is a senior editor at The American Prospect, and author of ___How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics__ _. He was previously a national correspondent for The Week. His work has also appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and Current Affairs._ * EVs * Donald Trump * government subsidies ended Subscribe to Portside

How Trump Doomed the American Auto Industry (portside.org/2026-01-21/how-trump-doo...

Clever Raccoon Brains Can Clarify Human Intelligence, Too The moment you look away from those adorable eyes, these mischievous creatures will sneak out of your lab | Joshua J. Cotten/Unsplash, CC BY-SA When a curious raccoon broke into an Ashland, Virginia, liquor store in December 2025, sampled the stock and passed out on the bathroom floor, the story went viral within minutes. The local animal shelter’s Facebook post was picked up by national and international outlets and quickly inspired raccoon-themed cocktails, “trashed panda” merchandise and even a cameo on “Saturday Night Live.” For me, the story hit close to home. The store that hosted this inebriated bandit sits just blocks from the small behavioral neuroscience laboratory where I began investigating raccoon brains about 15 years ago. Although the so-called drunken raccoon made questionable decisions after breaking into the liquor store, the species – _Procyon lotor_ – is known for its impressive intelligence, curiosity and problem-solving skills. Despite being one of the most intriguing mammals living alongside humans, raccoons have avoided the scientific spotlight. Why aren’t more neuroscientists and psychologists studying raccoons? What have researchers missed about the mammalian brain by focusing on rodents instead? Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Someone had a good time. ## Why raccoons aren’t lab staples In the U.S., it is estimated that laboratories use more than 100 million rodents, including mice and rats, each year. Rodents are ideal for research because they reproduce easily and adapt well to confinement. Scientists have tailored extensive research tools to study them. Long before rats dominated psychology labs, raccoons were actually a leading candidate for animal models of problem-solving and intelligence. That ended when scientists realized they’d met their cognitive match. In one study, researchers reported that all raccoon participants escaped through the laboratory ventilation system. Unsurprisingly, scientists promptly shifted to rodents. Practicality – not scientific suitability – ultimately crowned the rat as king of the laboratory. I have studied rats for decades, and I can confirm that none have ever disappeared into the ceiling. ## Neither pet nor pest Humans have an ambivalent relationship with raccoons. They appear too wild to be domesticated, too endearing to be treated purely as pests and too ubiquitous to be considered exotic wildlife. Even President Calvin Coolidge, who famously received a raccoon intended for the dinner table from a supporter in Mississippi, ended up keeping it as a beloved White House pet. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank And the role confusion continues today with glimpses of humanlike behaviors in raccoons as they enter our living spaces. One report described raccoons interacting with playground equipment at a child care center on Canada’s west coast in ways similar to human children, and even breaking into classrooms as if they were auditing the morning lesson. Raccoons know how to get around. RLO'Leary/Moment Open Inspired by Montessori education principles, I visited a raccoon rehabilitation center in Saskatoon, Canada, called Bandit Ranch Rehab a few years ago. After introducing young raccoons to slinkies, puzzles and blocks, I sat in awe as they interacted with these objects with the focused enthusiasm of preschoolers on a mission. This interspecies confusion seems to be mutual. Recent evidence suggests that urban raccoons are becoming increasingly tolerant of humans, especially when it suits them. But they are quick to leave when curiosity or opportunity calls. ## Raccoon imagination The drunken Ashland raccoon captured global attention because it fit the narrative people have projected onto the species: mischievous, opportunistic, clever and more than a little humanlike. But their sophisticated brains and mental capacities, aligning more with primates than other mammals, are even more intriguing. Early behavioral research suggested that raccoons can learn a task, walk away and later return to solve it accurately – as if having mentally rehearsed the solution. In contrast, other species, including dogs and rats, needed to maintain continuous focus. Scientists have speculated that raccoons have mental imagery capabilities similar to humans. Raccoons had some notes for the author’s student, too. Kelly Lambert, CC BY-NC-SA When a rogue raccoon scaled a 25-story skyscraper in Minneapolis several years ago, I couldn’t help but wonder what that animal was anticipating at the top. Do raccoons form internal representations of future outcomes? And if so, how much agency and foresight do they bring to their decisions? To answer these questions, I have collaborated with wildlife biologists, veterinarians and neuroscientists around the country to study what may be one of the most underestimated and understudied brains in the animal kingdom. ## What’s going on inside the raccoon brain? Working with neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, my laboratory at the University of Richmond has found that raccoons pack an astonishing number of neurons – an amount comparable to primates – into their brains. Scaled up to size, a raccoon brain would contain roughly the same number of neurons as a human brain. We also found that raccoons possess specialized fast-conducting brain cells known as von Economo neurons, which are also found in humans, other great apes and a few additional large-brained mammals. In apes, these neurons appear in both the insula – a part of the brain important for processing internal body states – and the anterior cingulate, which plays a key role in emotional regulation. In raccoons, these neurons are present only in the insula and not in the anterior cingulate. This neural arrangement may help explain the species’ striking combination of clever problem-solving and rapid decision-making during exploration – frequently leading to risky behaviors that can have unfortunate consequences. These findings raise the possibility that raccoon neuroscience could offer useful insights into the neural foundations of impulse control and distracted attention. The dexterity of raccoon hands enables their humanlike escapades. Zocha_K/iStock via Getty Images Plus In collaboration with ecologist Sara Benson-Abram’s research team, we also found that raccoons with more sophisticated cognitive abilities had more neural cells in the hippocampus, reinforcing the idea that their learning and memory capacities map onto similar brain systems as those in people. Taxi drivers in London, who frequently use their knowledge of the 25,000 streets in London, also have a larger hippocampal area. In addition to their impressive brains, raccoons’ dexterous hands play a key role in their cognitively creative escapades. Indeed, researchers have found that raccoon forepaws are mapped onto their cerebral cortex – the outer layer of the brain – in a similar manner as human hands. Both take up a lot of real estate in the brain. As journalist Carl Zimmer wrote, “The hand is where the mind meets the world.” ## What raccoons can teach us about the human brain As I argue in my upcoming book “Wild Brains,” understanding raccoon intelligence requires observing them in the environments they choose – not confining them to the small, simple spaces that suit rats and mice. So-called living laboratories that monitor wildlife without restricting their behavior may be scientists’ best chance at unlocking the secrets of this species’ remarkable mind. In my graduate training, I was taught to avoid anthropomorphizing animal research subjects – to resist the temptation to project human thoughts and emotions onto nonhuman minds, because human brains likely contribute to uniquely human cognitive and emotional experiences. But primatologist Frans de Waal later introduced the useful counterpoint of anthropodenial: the mistaken assumption that animals cannot share emotional or cognitive capacities with humans simply because they are not human. The drunken Ashland raccoon captured global attention not just because the story was funny, but because it felt familiar. People recognized something of themselves in this curious, impulsive, problem-solving animal navigating a very human environment. A willingness to lean away from anthropodenial – while remaining grounded in rigorous science – may open new paths for understanding raccoon intelligence and, ultimately, the wonderfully complex human brain. _Kelly Lambert_ _, Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience,__University of Richmond_ _This article is republished from_ _The Conversation_ _under a Creative Commons license. Read the_ _original article_ _._ * Science * animal intelligence * intelligence * psychology * Evolution Subscribe to Portside

Clever Raccoon Brains Can Clarify Human Intelligence, Too (portside.org/2026-01-16/clever-raccoo...

Stop ICE? Go After Its Corporate Collaborators Robin Lubbock/WBUR Renee Nicole Good’s _murder_ by an ICE agent in Minneapolis has left millions of Americans wondering how we can stop ICE from terrorizing our communities any further. There are many well-known ICE-fighting tactics that we can and should use, like protests, know-your-rights trainings, and neighborhood watches. But two recent victories show a promising, relatively underutilized path forward—one that deserves to be pursued further: we can target businesses to break from ICE. ICE relies heavily on the private sector to help carry out its Gestapo-like crusade against immigrants and their allies. Without the logistical, financial, and political support of business, its capacity to terrorize our communities would crumble. Over the past week, activists around the country _successfully pushed_ Avelo Airlines to stop running deportation charter flights, and _workers_ in Minneapolis pushed a local Hilton affiliate to stop renting rooms to ICE agents. But these wins are just a fraction of what could be achieved if the millions of people who are outraged by ICE’s thuggery organize to pressure _all_ companies to stop working with ICE. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail (Robin Lubbock/WBUR) ## **Trump’s Pillars of Support** Anti-authoritarian scholars and organizers stress that the most important thing for pro-democracy movements to do is to peel away a regime’s _“pillars of support.”_ Even the most despotic of regimes can’t rule without the backing or consent of powerful external institutions. Businesses are society’s most important non-state institutions, and most of the biggest ones in America are collaborating with Trump, making themselves a very steady pillar of support for his rule. These mega-corporations have immense financial and political power. It may seem like there’s nothing to be done to bring them to heel. But the successes with Avelo Airlines and the Minneapolis Hilton—as well as earlier pressure campaigns like the #Tesla Takedown, the fight to force Disney to rehire Jimmy Kimmel, and the boycott of Target over its Trump-friendly anti-DEI moves—show the immense leverage that consumers and workers have when provided an opportunity. We are _not_ powerless, and there are concrete actions anyone can take to start eroding Trump’s support from big business. Consumer pressure campaigns can start with petition gathering and social media callouts, then escalate to coordinated one-day boycotts. Workers have even more leverage: employees can circulate internal petitions calling on their CEOs to cut ties with ICE and organize collective actions like sick-outs. Tactics can include rallies in front of targeted stores, flyering customers about a company’s ICE contracts or collaboration, and nonviolent civil disobedience that makes clear that business as usual won’t stand. Other creative ideas include setting up anonymous tip lines for employees to whistleblow on non-public ICE collaborations, pressuring job sites like Monster.com and Indeed to stop featuring ICE job listings, asking local small businesses to post “Immigrants Welcome Here” placards, and writing online reviews calling out companies’ collaboration with ICE. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank The key is providing people with concrete, outwards-facing activities they can take right now, while building an escalating national campaign that can culminate in larger coordinated days of nonviolent disruption—for example, on _May 1, 2026_. National online mass calls and trainings can give large numbers of people the tools they need to get started. National unions, immigrant rights groups, and organizations like Indivisible and the Democratic Socialists of America can leverage their volunteer activists and resources to help launch and support the campaign. And high-profile politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Chris Murphy, and Zohran Mamdani can use their platforms to build momentum around this urgent fight. ## **Corporate Targets** The most strategic corporate targets fall into three categories: low-lift national targets, high-lift national targets, and local targets. **Low-lift national targets** are mostly public-facing companies with relatively small ICE contracts that are set to expire soon, making them particularly vulnerable to consumer and employee pressure. Campaigns against companies like these can play a crucial role in generating further momentum against ICE, Trump, and their worst corporate collaborators. Here are some examples: * **Dell** ($18.8 million _contract_ with ICE for Microsoft software licenses, expiring March 2026) * **UPS** ($90,500 small package _delivery contract_ with ICE, expiring March 2026) * **FedEx** ($1 million delivery services _contract_ with ICE, expiring March 2026) * **Motorola Solutions** ($15.6 million tactical communication infrastructure _contract_ with ICE, expiring May 2026) * **Comcast** ($24,600 internet services _contract_ for ICE Seattle office, expiring May 2026 — this could be a great fight for new mayor Katie Wilson to take on). * **AT &T** ($83 million IT and network _contract_ with ICE, with a potential end date of July 2032). * **LexisNexis** ($21 million data-brokerage _contract_ with ICE — this company is particularly vulnerable to pressure from university students and professor unions, since much of its revenue comes from colleges.) * **Home Depot and Lowe’s** are _using_ AI-powered license plate readers and feeding this data into law enforcement surveillance systems accessible to ICE. Their parking lots are also _regular sites_ of ICE raids targeting day laborers. **High-lift national targets** have deeper relationships with ICE, and will be harder to pressure. But two in particular need to be tackled. * **Amazon** _provides_ ICE with the digital backbone for its data and surveillance operations through Amazon Web Services. Amazon’s Whole Foods stores are a rich potential target for nonviolent disruption on big days of action. * **Palantir** _provides_ ICE with core data platforms that integrate and analyze information from many databases so agents can search, link, and manage deportation operations. It will take longer to force these behemoths—the two worst corporate collaborators with ICE—to cut their ties, but it’s essential to publicize their centrality to Trump’s deportation machine. **Local targets** can be found in communities across the country, where hundreds of smaller business have ICE contracts. Local activists can research and target these businesses—from contractors providing services to ICE offices to suppliers selling equipment—creating distributed pressure campaigns in every region where ICE operates. Hotels that rent rooms to ICE agents are particularly vulnerable targets, as the Minneapolis example demonstrated, and hospitality unions can play a key role in these campaigns. ## **Defend Immigrants, Defeat Trumpism** Breaking companies from ICE is a winnable struggle that can put serious pressure on the administration by raising the political cost of mass deportations and damaging ICE’s ability to function. No administration can survive long without the consent of corporate America. Obviously, the stakes are highest for our undocumented friends and family members. But this fight impacts all of us. To stop Trump’s authoritarian oligarchy, we need millions of people — well beyond our normal circles of activists — to join the fight. Who is going to stop Trump from invading more countries and stealing the 2026 and 2028 elections if not a mass movement from below? Who is going to force politicians, whether Republicans or Democrats, to stand up for immigrant communities? Who is going to make corporations pay a price for collaborating with the Trump regime? We _need to start building_ the organizing muscle and connective tissue _now_ for widespread nonviolent disruption. Strategic organizing to win justice for all is the best way to honor the memory of Renee Nicole Good and the countless other victims of Trump’s inhumanity at home and abroad. __[__Republished from The Nation__ _]_ * * * _**Eric Blanc** is a professor of labor studies at Rutgers University. He writes the __Labor Politics_ _newsletter on Substack. His latest book is_ _We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big_ _._ _**Wes McEnany** is a longtime union organizer and was the Deputy Labor Policy Director of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions._ _**Claire Sandberg** was the national organizing director for Bernie Sanders's 2020 presidential campaign. She is the founder of Crowdwave Campaigns._ _Eric Blanc @ laborpolitics My substack is laborpolitics.com. I am an orgainizer trainer in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee._ _Eric Blanc is author of "We Are The Union: How Worker-to-WorkerOrganizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big_ _Subscribe to laborpolitics_ Subscribe to Labor Politics (Working-Class Organizing and Politics) * Labor * organizing * unions * Immigration and Customs Enforcement * big business Subscribe to Portside

Stop ICE? Go After Its Corporate Collaborators (portside.org/2026-01-11/stop-ice-go-a...

AOC: ICE Killing of Renee Good Exposes ‘Fundamental Difference’ Between Herself and JD Vance Speaking with reporters on Friday about the killing of Renee Nicole Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis earlier this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the violence exposes a key contrast about the nation she wants to live in and the vision espoused by Vice President JD Vance, who has been outspoken in his demonization of the victim while defending the actions of Ross. “I understand that Vice President Vance believes that shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, and I do not,” said the New York Democrat to a gaggle of reporters outside the Capitol Building. “And that is a fundamental difference between Vice President Vance and I. I do not believe that the American people should be assassinated in the street.” The specific question was asked by CBS News’ Patrick Maguire who asked for Ocasio-Cortez’s reaction to Vance claiming that the killing of Good was “a tragedy” of her “own making.” In comments in the White House briefing room on Thursday, a day after the shooting, Vance said it was “preposterous” for anyone to criticize the actions of Ross. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Vance, along with President Donald Trump and other White House officials, have repeatedly tried to deny what video evidence of the shooting clearly shows: that Good was presenting no imminent threat to the officer, did not “target” him with her vehicle, and was not—as officials claimed—fully blocking the street from passing vehicles prior to her killing. Vance on Thursday also falsely asserted that ICE agents like Ross have “absolute immunity” for their actions, a claim that legal experts—as well as prosecutors in Minnesota—have said is simply not true. In her remarks to reporters on Friday, Ocasio-Cortez lamented what she called “extrajudicial killings” by ICE agents on the streets of America, exceeding their mandates and empowered by a huge influx of funding provided by the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers this year. Ocasio-Cortez said it “shows the danger we are in,” when Trump claims, like he did in an interview with the _New York Times_ this week, that he will only be constrained by his “own morality,” suggesting Congress and the judiciary are not obstacles to his power. “We have a Republican majority that has decided to completely abdicate its power to the president,” she said. “I think it’s up to the American people to ensure that we take away power from those who do not use it well.” In contrast to Republicans who say ICE agents operating in cities across the country are “just doing their jobs,” Ocasio-Cortez said, “I would not say that assassinating a young mother of three in the street is part of ICE’s mandate.” She encouraged people not to take her word for it, but to “watch the video for yourselves.” If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank “Watch that video for yourself and you will see a woman trying to back up her vehicle and leave a volatile scene—and she was met with three bullets to the face,” the lawmaker said. “Any law enforcement officer in the country, worth their salt, can tell you that is not how you handle that situation.” Ocasio-Cortez and Vance are both seen as leading possible contenders for their respective parties when it comes to the presidential race in 2028. “Vance, who may see himself pitted against [Ocasio-Cortez] in a general election,” said journalist Ryan Grim on Friday, “will deeply regret—I hope in his heart, but certainly politically—trashing Renee Good as ”deranged“ while valorizing his killer, who called her a ‘fuckin’ bitch’ after shooting her through her side window.” Released Friday, and posted on social media by Vance, video footage taken from Ross’ own phone, which was holding and filming with in the moment leading up to the shooting, Good’s final words to recorded were not those of an angry or “deranged” person, but a smiling local citizen who said to Good, “It’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” _Jon Queally is managing editor of Common Dreams._ _Founded in 1997, Common Dreams is a reader-supported, independent news outlet created as a new model for media. We are a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization committed to delivering free, accessible_ _journalism_ _that keeps millions of readers informed, engaged, and motivated._ _We are optimists. We believe meaningful change is possible—but only when well-informed, well-intentioned, and determined people demand it. Together, we believe we can achieve our common dreams._ * Rene Good * Immigration and Customs Enforcement * Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez * J.D. Vance Subscribe to Portside

AOC: ICE Killing of Renee Good Exposes ‘Fundamental Difference’ Between Herself and JD Vance (portside.org/2026-01-10/aoc-ice-killi...

The Mad King’s Madness Deepens Things are not going well politically for Donald Trump. The polls show him _underwater on every major issue_. And while he insists that these are fake, it’s clear that he knows better. He recently _lamented_ that the Republicans will do badly in the midterms and even floated the idea that midterms should be canceled. And as January 6th 2021 showed, Trump simply can’t stand political rejection. He will do anything, use any tool or any person at his disposal, to obliterate the sources of that rejection. So as we head into the 2026 midterm season, the best way to understand U.S. policy is that it’s in the pursuit of one crucial objective: Propping up Trump’s fragile ego. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail What was the motivation for the abduction of Nicolás Maduro? It wasn’t about drugs, which were always an obvious pretense. By Trump’s own account it wasn’t about democracy. Trump talks a lot about oil, but Venezuela’s heavy, hard-to-process oil and its decrepit oil infrastructure aren’t big prizes. The _Financial Times_ reports that U.S. oil companies won’t invest in Venezuela unless they receive firm guarantees. One investor told the paper, “No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country.” The real purpose of the abduction, surely, was to give Trump an opportunity to strut around and act tough. But this ego gratification, like a sugar rush, won’t last long. Voters normally rally around the president at the beginning of a war. The invasion of Iraq was _initially very popular_. But the action in Venezuela hasn’t had any visible rally-around-the-flag effect. While Republicans, as always, support Trump strongly, independents are opposed: And now the story of the moment is the atrocity in Minneapolis, where, on Wednesday, an ICE agent killedRenee Nicole Good by shooting her in the head. Trump and his minions responded by flatly lying about what happened. But their accounts have been _refuted by video evidence_ which show an out-of-control ICE agent gunning down a woman who was simply trying to get away from a frightening situation. Yes, MAGA loyalists will fall into line, preferring to believe Trump rather than their own lying eyes. But public revulsion over Good’s murder and Trump’s mendacity are high and growing. A president who actually cared about the welfare of those he governs would have taken Good’s killing as an indication that his deportation tactics have veered wildly and tragically off course. He would have called for a halt of ICE actions and made sure there would be an objective and timely federal investigation into this national tragedy. But for Trump, ICE’s violent lawlessness is a feature, not a bug. Sending armed, masked, poorly trained, masked and out-of-control armed thugs into blue cities is, in effect, a war on Americans, just as January 6thwas a war on American institutions. In effect, Trump would rather savage his own people than be held accountable for his actions. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank So in Trump’s mind, Renee Nicole Good’s murder is at most collateral damage, in service to his insatiable need to dominate and feel powerful -- so insatiable that he is attempting to create an alternate reality, claiming that that Good _ran over an agent_ although there is irrefutable video evidence that she didn’t. And when one set of lies doesn’t work, he switches tactics – changing the topic, deflecting, and spouting even more lies. Thus, just hours after Good’s death, Trump proclaimed that he was seeking a huge increase in military spending: It’s a near certainty that Trump’s assertion that he arrived at an immediate 50% increase in the military budget after “long and difficult negotiations” is yet another lie. There’s been no indication whatsoever that a massive increase in defense spending was on anyone’s agenda before he suddenly posted about it on Truth Social. So what was that about? Given the timing, it’s clear that Trump’s announcement was yet another exercise in self-aggrandizement, as well as an attempt to grab the headlines away from Good’s killing. But what’s also important to realize from Trump’s announcement is that he is now clearly conflating the size of the US military with his ego. Evidently the sugar rush of Maduro’s capture has left him wanting more and more military validation, particularly as his poll numbers tank. So here’s a warning to the US military: if you continue to indulge the sick fantasies of this man, he will drag this country into more and deeper international morasses to feed his need for glory. Do what Admiral Alvin Holsey, an honorable man, did – stand down and refuse an illegal order. Here’s a warning to the Republicans: if you continue to allow this man to perpetrate war against his own people with impunity through the actions of ICE, you will be remembered as cowards and hypocrites. Here’s a warning to all his other enablers: if you do not do something to stop this madman, you will go down in history as traitors to this country. And here’s a warning to those directly perpetrating Trump-directed atrocities: He will not be in power forever, and I expect and hope that you will be held accountable, personally, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. _I [Paul Krugman) am an economist by training, and still a college professor; my major appointments, with some interim breaks, were at MIT from 1980 to 2000, Princeton from 2000 to 2015, and since 2015 at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. I won 3rd prize in the local Optimist’s club oratorical contest when in high school; also a Nobel Prize in 2008 for my research on international trade and economic geography._ _However, most people probably know me for my side gig as a New York Times opinion writer from 2000 to 2024. I left the Times in December 2024, and have mostly been writing here since._ __Subscribe or upgrade subscription__ _to Paul Krugman's Substack column._ Subscribe to Portside

The Mad King’s Madness Deepens (portside.org/2026-01-09/mad-kings-mad...