Portside

Andrew Puzder, Donald Trump’s nominee for labor secretary, is uniquely unqualified for that job.

The latest episode of the ABC sitcom expresses anger at the election’s outcome. It also insists on empathy.

The resignation of Shai Masot, the Israeli embassy’s senior political officer, is the latest fallout from Al Jazeera’s six-month investigation of Israel’s plot to influence UK politicians, which included a political “hit list” and “taking down” a British cabinet minister who criticized Israeli settlement policy. A former CIA station chief warns of such “insidious threats” and the “shame” of those who passively allow their institutions to be suborned by a foreign power.

Still, it’s worth emphasizing that these findings may not be exclusive to Chicago. Whether it’s Baltimore, Cleveland, New Orleans, or Ferguson, Missouri, the Justice Department has found horrific constitutional violations in how police use force, how they target minority residents, how they stop and ticket people, and virtually every other aspect of policing. These issues come up time and time again, no matter the city that federal investigators look at.

True, the Republicans played hardball and blocked many of his initiatives, but Obama did little to fight back in kind. If he was a community organizer, he was from the most timid in that genre. He kept extending a hand to the Republican dog that kept biting it at every overture.

My hope is that this presentation of the underlying views of a majority of Americans will enable readers to oppose the false prophets of further accommodation with the right, and to arm themselves with the knowledge that time, demographics, and the American people are on the side of progressives. Reconciling the views of Americans with how they vote I will have to leave to others.

When masses of workers start to lose their jobs to automation, workers will find it even more difficult to pay for the social insurance that provides them with a safety net. Therefore says Varoufakis we need another way to protect workers and another way to pay for it.

But Will They Finally Send One? To deal with a Trump administration, the tribal nation might now want to use that 200-year-old treaty right.

"Imagine--a woman in the White House." As Florida poet Meryl Stratford implies about her pre-feminist mother--"It wasn’t worth the argument"-- of just how hard it is to change someone's mind when it comes to voting!

The Stansbury Forum is proud to publish organizer and labor attorney Peter Haberfeld’s diagnostic of the Bernie Sander’s ground game in Berkeley/Oakland in the run-up to the California primary in June of 2016. Haberfeld contrasts the “organizing” work that he and his comrades attempted to do with the “mobilizing” approach of many in the national Sanders campaign, and their over reliance on social media and barnstorming meetings.