The painting “The Thankful Poor” by Henry Ossawa Tanner is shown. | (Image by Henry Ossawa Tanner) We live in a world that constantly tells us to “count our blessings.” Gratitude is praised as a moral virtue, a mental tonic, a gateway to happiness. Entire industries are built on it: journals, apps, workshops, and social media trends. But what if gratitude isn’t a virtue at all? What if, instead of elevating us, it functions as a quiet mechanism that traps, silences, and pacifies us? At first glance, gratitude seems harmless—even virtuous. A simple “thank you” can smooth social interactions, remind us of the positive, and cultivate humility. Yet much of our gratitude is coerced, performative, or socially demanded. We are expected to be thankful, whether or not we genuinely feel it. Miss the cue, fail to smile, or silently resent the “blessing” offered, and we are framed as ungrateful, even morally deficient. Gratitude often functions less as a choice and more as a social leash, compelling people to perform virtue on cue. Take the workplace, for example. Employees are often reminded to “be grateful for having a job” when faced with low pay, long hours, or toxic conditions. The intention may be to inspire appreciation, but the ultimate effect is control—gratitude becomes a tool for compliance. By teaching people to “be grateful” for injustice or minimal provision, society trains obedience under the guise of virtue. It pacifies dissatisfaction by framing fundamental rights and fair treatment as privileges rather than entitlements. In such cases, thankfulness isn’t just a moral exercise—it’s a mechanism to normalize inequity. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Gratitude can act as emotional camouflage. We are taught to appreciate our lives, our health, our families, sometimes even our misfortunes. Perspective is valuable, but the relentless pressure to be thankful can suppress genuine emotions. Anger, grief, frustration—signals that something is wrong—are nudged aside. We are told to “look on the bright side,” even when the side that demands closer scrutiny is dark. Gratitude, in this sense, becomes a velvet handcuff: soft, polite, yet restraining real feelings and masking problems we need to confront. The human psyche thrives on complexity, but “gratitude culture” encourages simplification: Everything must be filtered through a lens of thankfulness. The braver, wiser act is to stop counting blessings on command, to resist the soft tyranny of enforced gratitude, and to reclaim our right to anger, dissatisfaction, and honesty. Gratitude also carries a heavy psychological burden. Feeling obligated to reciprocate kindness or opportunity breeds stress and anxiety. Recognizing genuine generosity is one thing; living under a constant sense of debt—to friends, family, employers, or society—is another. Those with fewer resources bear this pressure more heavily: Expectations of gratitude are imposed when there is little power to refuse or negotiate social norms. For some, gratitude becomes an unspoken debt that never expires, a pressure cooker of stress and resentment. In these cases, it is not liberating, but a subtle form of coercion. We are also encouraged to turn gratitude inward as a self-help tool: “Practice daily gratitude, and you will be happier.” While brief reflections on what we value can improve mood, this framing risks individualizing systemic problems. Feeling unhappy? Focus on what you do have. Struggling with debt, illness, or social injustice? Count your blessings. Gratitude thus becomes a psychological Band-Aid, a quiet insistence that the problem lies not in circumstances or structures but in our own perception. It is both a pacifier and a distraction from meaningful action. It’s worth noting that gratitude, in its purest, voluntary form, is not inherently bad. Genuine, spontaneous thankfulness can deepen relationships, foster empathy, and anchor us in meaningful moments. The problem arises when gratitude is demanded, packaged, or weaponized—when it is less a personal reflection and more a social or institutional expectation. That is when it stops being a virtue and becomes a subtle tool of emotional and psychological manipulation. Consider the social media dimension. We post “thankful” photos, recount the blessings of our lives, and share curated moments of appreciation. These public expressions rarely arise from raw emotion—they are curated for approval, likes, and social validation. Such displays may appear harmless, even charming, but they reinforce the notion that gratitude is an obligation rather than an organic experience. 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 Even in intimate settings, gratitude can carry hidden pressures. Being thankful to a loved one can generate unspoken debts or expectations: a favor must be repaid, a kindness acknowledged, a gesture reciprocated. This is not always harmful, but it becomes so when gratitude is demanded or used as leverage. In this sense, gratitude is not purely virtuous; it is a social contract with emotional consequences. Step back, and a pattern emerges: Gratitude is often less about authentic appreciation and more about maintaining social harmony, suppressing discontent, and normalizing inequality. It is a quietly coercive force. And yet, we are rarely taught to question it. We are trained to assume that gratitude is inherently virtuous, morally neutral, or personally beneficial. What if, instead, we allowed ourselves to interrogate it—to ask whether our thankfulness is truly ours or imposed? The real question is not whether gratitude can be good. It can. The question is whether our culture has overvalued it, weaponized it, or confused performative thankfulness with genuine reflection. By unquestioningly embracing gratitude as a moral imperative, we risk ignoring discomfort, overlooking injustice, and silencing authentic emotion. Sometimes, the bravest act is not to be thankful—to allow ourselves anger, frustration, or dissatisfaction. Sometimes the healthiest choice is to withhold thanks, at least until we genuinely feel it. In rethinking gratitude, we are not rejecting kindness or appreciation. We are reclaiming the right to feel emotions honestly, without guilt or coercion. We are resisting the subtle pressures that tell us to be grateful for situations that do not deserve it. Authentic gratitude, like all virtues, cannot be commanded; it must emerge voluntarily, thoughtfully, and without obligation. Only then can it be meaningful. The braver, wiser act is to stop counting blessings on command, to resist the soft tyranny of enforced gratitude, and to reclaim our right to anger, dissatisfaction, and honesty. Gratitude should serve us—not the agendas of others. _Martina Moneke writes about art, fashion, culture, and politics. In 2022, she received the Los Angeles Press Club’s First Place Award for Election Editorials at the 65th Annual Southern California Journalism Awards. She is based in Los Angeles and New York._ _Common Dreams is a reader-supported independent news outlet created in 1997 as a new media model. Our nonprofit newsroom covers the most important news stories of the moment. Common Dreams free online journalism keeps our millions of readers well-informed, inspired, and engaged._ * Thanksgiving * gratitude * self-help * complacency Subscribe to Portside

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announcing the members of his transition team in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, on November 5, 2025. | (Shawn Inglima / New York Daily News) _On Saturday, November 22, Jacobin founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara delivered the keynote at New York City Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) biannual organizing conference at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn. Below is a transcript of his remarks on why the Left must win real gains today — but also keep fighting for a socialist society beyond them._ I'm so excited to be here with you all. It feels to me that this is the political moment so many of us have been waiting for and working to build for years. We’re a month away from one of our comrades becoming mayor. We’ve built a network of socialist elected officials, we have a real organization to call home, and there’s a growing base of support in this city for our immediate demand of taxing the rich to expand public goods. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail This moment extends beyond New York — we have a huge political opening in the United States as whole. But we know that we have that opportunity because millions of people are living through hard times. We have an erratic and authoritarian president, we have an affordability crisis, with millions struggling to pay their bills and to live lives where they’re treated with dignity and respect. We’ve seen the return of forms of nativism and racism that should have been long vanquished by now. And at a social and economic level, things may get worse very soon. The country — not just this city — is crying out for principled political leadership. Not just a kind of populist leadership through great figures, though I’m grateful we have one of the greatest figures on our side. I mean class leadership through organization. The leadership that says that the disparities that we see in our country and the world are not the natural laws of God but the result of a world that human beings have created. The leadership that says that the interests of the working-class majority are distinct from the interest of capitalist elites, and that we need to organize around those interests to win not only a better distribution of wealth _within capitalism_ but a different type of society all together. **God’s Children Can Govern** Ijoined the Democratic Socialists of America when I was seventeen years old. I don’t need to tell you what DSA was in New York back in 2007. Some of you here remember it. I made so many good friends, but we were lucky if a dozen people showed up to a meeting. 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 We made progress through the patient, steady work and commitment of those people and the many more who joined later. We were marathon runners for socialism. This, though, is a moment for sprinting. This is the biggest opening our movement has had in decades. The time we devote to political work in the next few months and years will have an outsize impact in our city and country — for now and for posterity. But what exactly should we be doing, and how should we relate to both the new mayor’s administration and our other comrades in elected office? In my mind, our tasks as organized socialists outside of government are both different and largely compatible with theirs. The key demands of our moment are around the affordability agenda. Our mayor-elect will be leading an effort to raise revenue to fund social programs and empower the city’s working class. If Zohran , our other electeds, and the grassroots movement around them deliver positive change in people’s lives, we’ll build a deeper social base for the Left. Right now, our electoral strength has far outpaced our base. But people are ready for our message and ready for results. But fundamentally, there are constraints to any sort of social democratic governance. Just as under capitalism, workers are dependent on having profitable firms for jobs. Cities are dependent on big corporations and wealthy people for tax revenue. Zohran needs to navigate these constraints. He can’t undermine the old regime of accumulation and redistribution without having a replacement for it, and certainly there can’t be a total replacement in one city. These concerns aren’t new. This is the dilemma of social democracy. This is the tension between our near-term and long-term goals that has existed in the socialist movement for 150 years. Our elected officials in the near term need to manage capitalism in the interest of workers, while our movement also has a long-term goal of constructing a new system through the self-emancipation of those workers. We need to see the constraints that Zohran will be under in these structural terms, rather than moral ones. But having patience and being supportive of him doesn’t answer how we reconcile the _near_ and the _long_ — social democracy and socialism. At the very least, it’s important that we remember the end goal. The great theorist of reformism, Eduard Bernstein, once said that “the goal is nothing, the movement everything.” I think that’s not quite right. If we don’t talk about socialism after capitalism, no one else will. The historic dream of our movement, a world without exploitation or oppression, will be lost. But we shouldn’t just avoid reformism because we want to feel pure as “true socialists” or as an intellectual pursuit. We should avoid reformism and remember the goal of rupture with capitalism because it can offer a compelling vision of the world to those we’re trying to reach. Socialism isn’t “Sweden” like Bernie sometimes says. Socialism isn’t even _just_ , as Martin Luther King Jr said and Zohran has beautifully invoked, “a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children.” Socialism means a better distribution but also democratic control over the things we all depend on — workers holding the levers of production and investment, and the state guaranteeing the basics of life as social rights. Socialism means no longer begging corporations to invest in our communities or the rich to stay and pay their taxes. Socialism means overcoming the labor-capital dialectic through the triumph of labor itself, not a more favorable class compromise. Socialism means that the people who’ve kept this world alive — the caregivers, the drivers, the machinists, the farmworkers, the cleaners — stop being an invisible backdrop and become the authors of their futures. Socialism means a society where those who have always given without having any say finally show their true capabilities. Where, as C. L. R. James said, every cook can govern. Socialism means replacing an economy built on hierarchy and exclusion with one built on the intelligence and creativity of working people themselves. That is the goal we keep alive. Not because it’s utopian, but because it is the only horizon equal to the dignity and potential of ordinary people. And because, it’s _compelling_. This isn’t just offering workers some of their surplus value back in exchange for their votes. It’s offering them _the future_ , a society that they can own, a chance to assume their rightful place as agents of history. Something like this is real socialism. It isn’t an interest group or a label to distinguish ourselves from other progressives. It’s a fundamentally more radical goal than those of our allies. It’s premised on a different analysis of the world around us and the world that can be built. Perhaps we can think of ways to bridge some of the gap between near and long through a set of demands that at least raise the concept of socialization immediately. Ideas that offer not just more badly needed social welfare but a taste of ownership and control. A hint at a different political economy. Just one example: when a business closes down or its owners are retiring, workers supported by a public fund could get the first crack at saving it by converting it into a labor-managed firm. At the city level, we can have a municipal office to help workers turn shuttered shops into cooperatives by providing the backbone of legal and accounting support and fast-tracking permits. We’ve already been talking about city-owned grocery stores and the need for public housing. We need more ideas like these. Reforms that fit within social democracy but gesture beyond it. Socialism in Our Time It’s been thrilling to meet people who’ve just joined DSA. It’s been nice to see old friends too. I’ve been complaining about missing the first half of the Knicks game, but even Jalen Brunson can’t keep me away from here. I’m really enthusiastic about what we can do in the next couple of years. We _will_ improve the lives of millions of people. And we will grow our movement. But in addition to enthusiasm, we need honesty about how far we still have to go to root ourselves in working-class communities. We need more power not just at the ballot box but at the points of production and exchange. And we need to be honest about the battles and constraints that Zohran will face, and be ready to support him when times get tough. Zohran’s mayoralty will be a fight for what’s winnable right now. Our job is to let that fight expand, not narrow, our horizon — and to keep alive the goal of socialism in our time. _Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin, the president of the Nation magazine, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality._ * socialism * fightback * Zohran Mamdani Subscribe to Portside

_**No Inflammatory Remarks About Genocide Will Be Permitted!**_ **NOVEMBER 26 IS THE 55TH ANNIVERSARY** of a celebration by the state of Massachusetts to mark the arrival, in 1620, of the ship Mayflower, which carried the first group of pilgrims to North America. The 1970 event was billed as the 350th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving. The event’s organizers, who conceived of the event as a celebration of brotherhood between the European settlers and the members of the Wampanoag Nation, invited the leader of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head to give a dinner speech. But when the organizers reviewed a draft of the speech, they refused to allow it to be delivered because “the theme of the anniversary celebration is brotherhood and anything inflammatory would be out of place.” Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Here are excerpts of the suppressed remarks. Below is a link to the complete speech. “This is a time of celebration for you - celebrating an anniversary of a beginning for the white man in America. A time of looking back, of reflection. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People. . . . We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people. . . . here were broken promises - and most of these centered around land ownership. Among ourselves we understood that there were boundaries, but never before had we had to deal with fences and stone walls. But the white man had a need to prove his worth by the amount of land that he owned . . . Although time has drained our culture, and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts. We may be fragmented, we may be confused. Many years have passed since we have been a people together. Our lands were invaded. We fought as hard to keep our land as you the whites did to take our land away from us. We were conquered, we became the American prisoners of war in many cases, and wards of the United States Government, until only recently. . . .We forfeited our country. Our lands have fallen into the hands of the aggressor. We have allowed the white man to keep us on our knees. What has happened cannot be changed, but today we must work towards a more humane America, a more Indian America, where men and nature once again are important; where the Indian values of honor, truth, and brotherhood prevail.” _https://www.uaine.org/suppressed_speech.htm_ _**‘You Can Protest, But We Can Ignore You’**_ 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 **NOVEMBER 27 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY** of a national day of protest against the U.S.war in Vietnam. It saw demonstrations in many U.S. cities, including an anti-war rally by some 40,000 in Washington, D.C., which was the largest demonstration against the Vietnam war up until then. The massive 1965 demonstration completely surrounded the White House. But the U.S. government doubled down on the commitment to trying to use its military might to stifle the Vietnamese desire for national liberation. On the same day, the U.S. announced a plan to more than triple the deployment of U.S. troops from 120,000 to 400,000. For the National Guardian’s detailed account of the Washington demonstration, visit _https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/community.39212702.pdf_ and scroll down to the middle of the page. _**State Department’s Embarrassing Secrets**_ **NOVEMBER 28 IS THE 15TH ANNIVERSARY** of the beginning of Wikileaks release of more than 250,000 formerly secret messages sent between Department of State headquarters and more than 270 U.S. embassies, consulates, and diplomatic missions. The messages, which were dated between 1966 and 2010, revealed U.S. diplomats gathering personal information about top officials of the United Nations, sharp and embarrassing criticisms of U.S. allies, efforts to interfere with nuclear disarmament campaigns, and U.S. support for dictatorships and other oppressive regimes. The detailed information in the leaked messages, which was (and remains) fascinating and chilling, led Noam Chomsky to comment at the time, "Perhaps the most dramatic revelation ... is the bitter hatred of democracy that is revealed both by the U.S. Government – Hillary Clinton, others – and also by the diplomatic service". _https://wikileaks.org/plusd/?qproject[]=cg &q=#result_ _**Killing One of Robert Moses’s Many Bad Ideas**_ **NOVEMBER 30 IS THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY** of a major and lasting victory by defenders of one of New York City’s natural gems, one of the wildest but also well-known areas in New York City’s Central Park, the 38-acre Ramble. Six months earlier, in May 1955, New York City Parks Commissioner (and highway-construction czar) Robert Moses announced had accepted a $250,000 donation (worth about $3 million today) to build a recreation center for the elderly that would occupy more than a third of the Ramble’s total area. Not only had he accepted the contribution, but he had already (secretly) contracted with a large architectural firm to design the building. Many park users were outraged, not because they had any objection to the construction of such a recreation center but because to build such a large and presumably heavily-used building at that location would go a long way toward destroying the park’s most renowned woodland. The lobbying campaign against the construction got so much attention the trustees of the foundation that put up the money for the project withdrew the offer because they “were upset over the fuss made by nature lovers in general and bird watchers in particular.” Not only was the plan killed, but 46 years later the Ramble was one of the first areas in the city to be designated “Forever Wild,” and exempt from any development proposals. _https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cate/vol16/iss1/5/_ _**Throwing Jim Crow Out of the Bus**_ **DECEMBER 1 IS THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY** of a watershed moment for the U.S. civil rights movement, when police in Montgomery, Alabama, arrested Rosa Parks for her refusal to abide by the rules of Jim Crow public transportation. The effort to end Montgomery’s bus segregation had started eight months earlier with a court case, but the legal battle was far from its conclusion when Rosa Parks’ arrest was the signal for the NAACP to begin a very effective city-wide bus boycott by Montgomery’s very substantial Black population. The eventual success of both the court case after it reached the U.S. Supreme Court and the nationally publicized 61-week-long boycott in the very heart of the Confederacy’s one-time capital city forced the bus company to throw in the towel, and became the rallying cry for a sustained attack on racism throughout the country. _https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/montgomery-bus-boycott-1955-56/_ _**Wrist Slaps for Killer Cops**_ **DECEMBER 2 IS THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY** of police killing an innocent and unarmed Black man with two shots in the back, and the beginning of an eventually unsuccessful cover-up of those events. The family of the dead man, Bernard Whitehurst, Jr., deserves much of the credit for uncovering the truth, as does the publisher of the Montgomery, Alabama, Advertiser, who joined in the effort to prove that the police were lying, but no one can take much satisfaction in the slap-on-the-wrist quality of the final reckoning. Eight police officers were eventually either dismissed from the force or resigned. Montgomery’s Mayor and its director of Public Safety each resigned. The Whitehurst family never received a dime in restitution or compensation for the death of their family member. They were left to take what comfort they could from an acknowledgement of wrongdoing by the City of Montgomery and a City Council resolution formally expressing regret for Whitehurst’s death. The City also agreed to install to historical markers the provide an accurate description of the dereliction of duty that resulted in the killing of an innocent man and its aftermath. The Equal Justice Initiative has more information, here: _https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/dec/02_ For more People's History, visit _https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/_ Subscribe to Portside

Gene Bruskin’s father before entering military service in early 1940s My father, John Bruskin, served in WWII, and received two Purple Hearts when he was blown out of the tanks he was driving. While in the military he used a service they provided to record a series of “45s”, 7-inch vinal records, and send them to my mom, Gertrude. This “poem” is a compilation of his messages to my mom from France and other military locations. His hopes and anguish are palpable. He had been a young Jewish activist in the Communist Party in Philadelphia in the late 30’s but left the Party, disillusioned by its top-down structure. Working in a radio repair shop when WWII broke out, he entered the service to fight fascism and ironically endured antisemitism while being trained in Georgia. Although the notion of PTSD didn’t exist then, my father was clearly impacted for the rest of his life. He died young at 61 having been a TV repairman his entire life. The war never left his consciousness. I remember while growing up our summer “vacations” were yearly trips to gatherings of The Fourth Armored Division, held in a variety of cities, giving my father a couple days with the guys to reminisce and leaving me and my sisters bored and playing on the elevators. He read every book he could find on the war and watched every news reel documentary shown on TV. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Like many from the “greatest generation” the defeat of Nazism and the ascendancy of the US as the world’s superpower didn’t do him much good. He essentially worked himself to death, died without health insurance or even a bank account. The hypocritical notion of “Thank you for your service” continues today and vets struggle to earn a living and recover from service in endless US initiated wars. The best we could do as “patriots” is to end US militarism and thank the teachers and nurses and many others for their service in making our country function. * * * ## **The Dangers of Doing Away with Monsters** **(RECORDED WORDS OF JOHN BRUSKIN DURING WW II)** Gert, Monsters are roaming the earth Dinosaurs, leaving anguish, pain, death and sorrow in their wake That’s why I’m somewhere far away Fighting to get rid of these creatures So our children will never see such things It has to be done now, right? It’s not an easy life We all try to keep our chin up Millions of us No complaining No getting sad, you know Don’t worry I’m going to survive Get that one-way ticket home Some day Pretty sure 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 We can start over where we left off Like that wonderful day when we were so excited When we permanently joined as man and wife The nicest day of my life And yours too, huh? Sure, we’re poor But we’ll manage A little place of our own, our dream spot Our beautiful little baby gal Francie Maybe another one later And I have you. That’s what makes life worth living. So that’s it We don’t want much The simple things in life We don’t ask for more But it’s out of the question today And that makes me very sad Especially after seeing the baby for the first time She’s so cute She’ll be a fine girl Like her mother is Like her mother always was So be a good soldier Gert Keep your chin up You are strong You got common sense You understand what’s taking place I feel from the bottom of my soul This thing will be over We will be together and never be separated. Perhaps it’s inevitable for many of us to go. We all hope and pray it don’t happen. But if it happens Well, you understand. Don’t you Gert? **…** _**Gene Bruskin is a retired 45 year veteran of labor and international solidarity work. He has served as a USWA Local president, spent two years as Jesse Jackson’s labor director in the 1990s and 10 years as Secretary Treasurer of the Food and Allied Service Trades of the AFL-CIO. He was the UFCW Justice@Smithfield Campaign Director organizing 5,000 meatpacking workers in North Carolina in 2008. During the Iraq war he was a founder of US Labor Against the War and has done extensive international labor solidarity work for struggles in Central America, South Africa, Cuba , the Philippines, Iraq and Israel/Palestine . He recently helped establish the National Labor Network for Ceasefire in Gaza. He is currently mentoring Amazon workers in various locations Since retirement from AFT in 2012 he has written and produced 3 musicals, and his current production is called The Return of John Brown. (www.thereturnofjohnbrown.com)**_ * World War 2 * military service * Veterans Subscribe to Portside

A rattled President Trump tells a female reporter, "Quiet, piggy" aboard Airforce One | screen grab At several points in the past few months, it looked as if Trump had gone too far and that resistance to his incipient dictatorship had reached a turning point. But each time, it didn’t quite happen. In mid-September, I wrote a moderately optimistic piece for the _Prospect_, taking stock of the various elements of resistance, most notably courts and elections. Many readers felt I was being a little too hopeful. _**More from Robert Kuttner**_ Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Since Election Day, however, there has been a notable shift. And each aspect feeds on the others. They include: * A Democratic wave election that is likely to be repeated and intensified in 2026 * Lower courts becoming even bolder in striking down Trump’s excesses * The Supreme Court likely to overturn three key Trump cases: tariffs, his efforts to fire Federal Reserve governors, and birthright citizenship * At least some states, such as Indiana and Kansas, resisting Trump’s redistricting demands * The continuing fallout from the Epstein files * Republican defections. The most important sign of impending lame-duckery is Republicans finding that they can defy Trump with impunity. The examples are legion. They keep cumulating and nurturing each other. Trump kept pressuring House Republicans not to sign the discharge petition to force the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. He threatened to punish Republicans who resisted, but in the end it was Trump who was thoroughly humiliated. The White House, by trying to delay release of the files by launching a whole new investigation, is miscalculating again. This only keeps Epstein in the headlines: What is Trump hiding? But the Republicans’ Epstein revolt is only the beginning. Republican legislators have defied Trump’s demand to end the filibuster, his scheme to engage the cost-of-living issue by sending everyone a $2,000 “tariff rebate” check, his proposal for a $10,000 subsidy for people to buy private health insurance, his idea for 50-year mortgages, and more. They are not taking him seriously. Republicans have joined Democrats in expressing unease about his illegal demolition of fishing boats as alleged drug smugglers, his plan for a splendid little war on Venezuela, and his latest pro-Putin scheme to sell out Ukraine. His threats to primary disloyal Republicans are going nowhere. And the more Republicans are willing to stand up to him, the more his threats ring hollow. 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 There is also the sheer incompetence of Trump’s efforts to use selective prosecutions to punish political opponents. Trump’s effort to prosecute former FBI director James Comey has turned into an embarrassing fiasco. The Department of Justice admitted that it never presented the two-count indictment to the full grand jury. The appalled magistrate wrote, “If this procedure did not take place, then the court is in uncharted legal territory in that the indictment returned in open court was not the same charging document presented to and deliberated upon by the grand jury.” The whole case may be thrown out. And Trump’s crony, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, who has combed mortgage records to find ways to prosecute prominent Democrats, is now on the defensive himself, as lawyers challenge his flagrant conflicts of interest. Trump’s minions even managed to bungle a slam dunk by admitting the sheer racism in the Texas redistricting plan, which was then overruled by a three-judge panel, with the most indignant comments coming from a Trump appointee. Appellate Judge Jeffrey Brown wrote that “it’s challenging to unpack the DOJ Letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors. Indeed, even attorneys employed by the Texas Attorney General—who professes to be a political ally of the Trump Administration—describe the DOJ Letter as ‘legally[] unsound,’ ‘baseless,’ ‘erroneous,’ ‘ham-fisted,’ and ‘a mess.’” Meanwhile, the Republican victory in forcing Democrats to reopen the government with no concessions on health care is looking more and more like a defeat because it keeps the issue of unaffordable health insurance front and center. In the most recent polls, approval of Trump is underwater by 17 points. Even among Republicans, his approval is 68 percent, sharply down from 92 percent in March. As we head into an election year, with Democrats flipping both Houses a distinct possibility, more and more Republican legislators are looking to save their own skins—which gives them more reason to distance themselves from Trump, and the process keeps intensifying. So are we out of the woods yet? No, we are not. The more Trump is on the defensive, the more hysterical he becomes. The latest example is his call to execute Democrats who pointed out that the professional military has an obligation to defy illegal commands. Even the White House press office had to walk that back. But Trump is continuing to use carrots and sticks with the corporate parents of media organizations to destroy a free and critical press. And as an increasingly desperate Trump tries to keep changing the subject and the headlines, watch out for even more reckless foreign-policy adventures. However, something fundamental has shifted. Trump is not a dead duck yet, but he is increasingly a lame one. And the more he proves impotent to punish defiant Republicans, the more they will keep acting to distance themselves and to weaken Trump. We may yet redeem our democracy. That seemed a long shot just a few months ago. Not a bad cause for Thanksgiving.\ _**Robert Kuttner** is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is _ __Going Big: FDR’s Legacy, Biden’s New Deal, and the Struggle to Save Democracy__ _. Follow Bob at his site,___robertkuttner.com__ _, and on [email protected]_ _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._ * Donald Trump * Jeffrey Epstein * elections Subscribe to Portside

The November 4 elections give the opposition to MAGA—and its progressive contingent especially—a huge boost. But in the coming year, the fight against US-style fascism will only intensify, as will contention over how to wage it and what ought to come next. The election results showed the scale of public disapproval of MAGA’s agenda. They indicated that a substantial majority is willing to turn out to defeat MAGA candidates. And the readiness to not only vote but to actively campaign is strongest among those enthused by progressive standard-bearers like Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani, whose big win in New York City was the highlight of the day. But the next year’s challenges are going to be harder. MAGA’s assault on democratic rights and working-class living standards has already included steps to rig the electoral system. The administration is escalating its election interference efforts and preparing to use all means, up to and including outright theft, to ensure that it keeps control of Congress in the 2026 midterms. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Landslide anti-MAGA ballot totals will be necessary but not sufficient to block those efforts. Preparation for mass action to protect election results—large-scale non-violent civil resistance—must be part of this next year’s to-do list. Most of the progressive movement already understands that non-compliance and disruptive protests are needed both to reduce harm and to lay the basis to push MAGA out of power. Many are already practicing that level of militancy in defense of immigrants and resistance to National Guard occupations. Now is the moment to recognize that the 2026 election is likely to be another “this-is-not-a-drill” test of strength. It will present huge challenges but also opportunities to engage millions in participatory political action. Other experiences in anti-authoritarian resistance have shown that attempts to steal elections can be the trigger for a popular uprising (including something approximating a general strike) that topples an anti-democratic regime—and provides millions with a rich lesson in class struggle in the process. ## Election winds at anti-MAGA’s back By now readers are familiar with the list of major contests that added up to an overwhelming rebuke of Trump 2.0: Zohran Mamdani scoring more than 50% of the vote to become Mayor-elect of New York City; Democrats winning landslides in races for the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia and the Virginia Attorney General’s office, and capturing two statewide offices in Georgia for the first time since 2006; all the liberal State Supreme Court justices in Pennsylvania retaining their seats; a two-to-one majority voting for California’s temporary redistricting measure to counter the GOP’s Texas gerrymander; and the GOP losing its supermajority in the Mississippi Legislature. ### **A few other important points have received less attention:** #### **The GOP candidate for Governor of Virginia made anti-Trans messaging a centerpiece of her campaign.** Her effort tanked so badly even Republican post-mortems admitted it was a losing strategy. And the racist, anti-LGBTQ group Moms for Liberty, which stormed into School Board seats in numerous places after its founding in 2021, lost every one of the 31 contested races its candidates entered. It’s long past time for those who have been silent or wavering on defense of trans rights to get off the fence. #### **In every contest for which there is data, evidence is strong that****Latinos swung heavily toward Democrats****this year.** This is a big opportunity for anti-MAGA and for progressives in particular, but taking advantage of it requires abandoning all “demographics are destiny” myths and organizing at the grassroots with a working-class economic agenda as well as an anti-racial-profiling one. 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 Mamdani victory is the revenge of all the campus protesters”** Zohran Mamdani’s win was due to many factors, and several excellent pieces have been published analyzing his victory, the challenges his administration will face, and the lessons to be drawn for work in other localities. (See here, here, and here). Given less attention but crucial is this insight from Mark Naison: “The Mamdani victory is the revenge of all the campus protesters that powerful Israel supporters pushed out of area universities…those protesters and activists who powerful Zionists thought they had neutralized became the heart and soul of an extraordinary get out the vote effort… this election was about Gaza, validating all those who warned, 2 years ago, that a ceasefire was necessary and a genocide was going to take place if people didn’t mobilize to stop it.” ## MAGA election interference already underway In a best-case voting scenario for 2026, MAGA candidates lose the votes for the majority of House seats, possibly enough Senate seats to flip that chamber, and numerous positions at the state and local level. But due to MAGA voter suppression, interference with fair vote-counting, and potentially outright refusal to certify anti-MAGA victors, those results, especially for federal offices, could well be nullified. Election rigging has been part of the Right’s playbook for many years, even before MAGA. Under Trump 1.0, racist gerrymandering became more naked and voter suppression more widespread. Trump 2.0 has now gone further. A 2020 election denier has been appointed to head the “election integrity” office at the Department of Homeland Security, and Justice Department probes and FBI investigations have been launched in attempts to intimidate election workers, who have faced direct threats of violence since 2020 from right-wing non-state actors. Current National Guard and ICE deployments are, among other things, testing grounds for the use of armed force to intimidate voters. The full list of MAGA plans to steal future elections is documented in _The Atlantic_. The Brennan Center has published a timeline of all steps already taken to rig elections, and states: “Since day one of his second term, the Trump administration has attempted to rewrite election rules to burden voters and usurp control of election systems, targeted and threatened election officials and others who keep elections free and fair, supported people who undermine election administration, and retreated from the federal government’s role of protecting voters and the electoral process.” All MAGA election-rigging moves are being challenged in the courts. But even if lower courts follow the law and the Constitution and rule these measures illegal, the Federalist Society hijackers who have taken over the highest court in the land are bent on ruling the other way. Most recently, this Gang of Six signaled they will gut what remains of the Voting Rights Act, reinforcing the denial of political representation to people of color, African Americans in the first place. ## Fierce primary battles will shape the general The first necessary step in stopping the steal is defeating MAGA candidates at the ballot box, with special emphasis in 2026 on flipping the House. Numerous labor, community, and issue-based organizations have already been focused on this and will be intensifying those efforts. The 2026 midterms will be shaped by the outcome of the fight over direction currently underway in the Democratic Party. A combative posture toward the Trump administration and MAGA in general characterized the winners from all parts of the party in 2025, from “moderates” like the governors-elect in Virginia and New Jersey to Mamdani in New York. But there are big differences between the programs of those two tendencies. And there is a layer of Democrats who either choose caving over fighting (evident in the shutdown surrender supported by more Dem Senators than those who voted with the GOP) or stay silent when MAGA and the Left square off (Chuck Schumer) or outright ally with MAGA (Cuomo and the big money donors and elected heavyweights who backed him). Several organizations are throwing down to support challenges to the business-as-usual Democratic Party. Justice Democrats has so far endorsed four challengers to incumbent mainstream Democrats and is supporting nine progressive incumbents against anticipated challenges from corporate and AIPAC-funded opponents. “Run for Something,” which recruits young progressives to run for office, had 3,000 people sign up since November 4. Democratic Socialists of America, which played the anchor role in Mamdani’s campaign, is energized by his victory and will almost certainly back socialist challengers for numerous House seats in 2026. The Working Families Party will build on important candidate victories in 2025 by recruiting and training candidates for House seats in 2026; two new WFP endorsements have just been rolled out. Corporate and centrist Democrats are going to have mega-donors behind them in these battles. But outpourings of people power, like the volunteer energy galvanized by Mamdani, can defeat big money. And only if progressives gain enough strength to shape the 2026 campaign and shape Democrats’ action agenda in its aftermath can the millions alienated from politics as usual be motivated to turn out against MAGA and fight for a post-MAGA government that will deliver for the working class and popular majority. Mamdani’s campaign models the kind of program insurgents can win on: economic populism, an “affordability agenda” that substitutes big ideas for tinkering around the edges, and an “injury to one is an injury to all” stance that throws no constituency under the bus in the face of MAGA’s racist, sexist, nativist, or homophobic dehumanization. Even on what has long been a third rail in US politics—backing for Palestinian rights—Mamdani’s victory showed that taking that kind of a firm stand is not just morally right, it is a political winner. The movement for Palestinian rights not only was a key factor in Mamdani’s win, it is showing its strength in the number of centrist Democrats who are now saying they will not take donations from AIPAC. Not only Palestine, but US militarism and foreign policy in general is likely to be a topic of heightened struggle between progressives and mainstream Democrats in the next year. Under Trump 2.0, US military interventionism is increasing, not diminishing, with murder on the high seas and threats to attack Venezuela in a regime-change operation the latest flashpoint. Besides this being a case of immoral aggression, there is a long sordid history of strongmen going to war to suppress dissent and “unite the nation.” With leading Democrats still hesitant to take on the National Security State, it will fall to insurgents to prepare the electorate to understand that fearmongering about foreign enemies is a tool used to weaken and divide movements of the popular classes and facilitate a transition to fascist rule. ## Year-round organizing and civil resistance On the non-compliance and direct-action front, the last few months have seen a dramatic expansion in the number of people being trained and taking to the streets. In July, Indivisible launched its “One Million Rising” campaign to train a mass cohort of people in non-cooperation, civil resistance, and community organizing. The October 18th No Kings demonstrations exceeded the July turnout by several million. Thousands have since taken newly acquired skills to work in community-wide resistance to ICE kidnappings and National Guard occupations. In the group’s November 6 post-election call, Indivisible’s coordinators stated that, “we’re going to build the kind of popular mass mobilization muscle that is necessary on the back end to resist and repel any [2026 election] sabotage effort.**”** These initiatives and others, such as those launched by Choose Democracy, operate on the idea that “protests ask, resistance refuses.” Building on them and similar efforts month after month is a way to construct a well-prepared body of people located throughout the country and ready to swing into action before, during, and after Election Day 2026. Of special importance: efforts to build support in the labor movement for protests, including workplace actions against authoritarianism, overlap with and can feed into overall election protection work. Based on a Workers Over Billionaires agenda, May Day Strong, along with numerous partners, organized well-attended protests last Labor Day; plans are for consistent organizing over the coming years on May Days and Labor Days, leading up to coordinated workplace actions by as many unions as possible on Mayday 2028. There are also efforts to get a conversation about calling a general strike going in the labor movement. At present, unions and other organizations with a genuine base in the working class are not ready for anything on that scale. But a blatant attempt by MAGA to steal the 2026 election could cause a shift in sentiment and sense of urgency. And whatever was galvanized in 2026 would be important not just for that year but as a valuable “stress test” for 2028. Intersecting with all of the above are a set of post-No Kings Day suggestions from Eric Blanc for specific action campaigns that could steadily escalate in size and militancy. And a group of organizations have launched the We Ain’t Buying It economic pressure campaign, calling for a boycott of major retailers—including Amazon, Target, and Home Depot—that have caved to Trump and reneged on pledges to support diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. These, or similar ideas, are ways to build protest muscle between now and November 2026, and beyond. ## Defeating the steal The essential point is that a MAGA attempt to steal the election—if it is called out forcefully as such—has the potential to trigger whole new levels of political action on the part of a majority who voted against MAGA candidates. But that trigger will set off a powerful grassroots explosion only if a contingent of people prepared to engage in disruptive but non-violent protest step up to monitor polling places and protest at vote-counting sites, and provide on-ramps for large numbers of new people to join them. MAGA is likely to go all out with its steal—we need to appreciate Steve Bannon’s message to the faithful: “as God is my witness, if we lose the midterms, if we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison—myself included.” Under those circumstances, defeating their power-grab will require action of sufficient size, and militancy to convince decisive sections of the ruling class, the military and other armed agencies of government, and the political class that the country will be ungovernable if MAGA’s steal stands. For the US, this would be uncharted territory; the only comparable moment would be the lead-up to and then the waging of the war against the Slave Power. It—fascism—can happen here. But the 2025 election results remind us that the potential is there to oust MAGA and push US fascism back to the margins. _¡No pasarán!_ _Max Elbaum is a member of the Convergence Magazine editorial board and the author of _ _Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che_ _(Verso Books, Third Edition, 2018), a history of the 1970s-‘80s ‘New Communist Movement’ in which he was an active participant. He is also a co-editor, with Linda Burnham and María Poblet, of_ _Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections_ _(OR Books, 2022)._ * 2026 Midterms * Election sabotage * fightback Subscribe to Portside

_**Don’t Mourn, Organize!**_ **NOVEMBER 19 IS THE 110TH ANNIVERSARY** of the cold-blooded murder of labor organizer and Industrial Workers of the World activist Joel Hägglund, who is almost universally known by his pen name, Joe Hill. The bosses hated Hägglund and everything he represented, including his ability to set new pro-worker lyrics to popular tunes, such as his "There is Power in the Union," which uses the tune of "There is Power in the Blood of the Lamb," and "Casey Jones—the Union Scab" Hägglund was found guilty of a murder he did not commit and martyred because he refused to rat on a friend. Neither he nor his friend had anything to do with the murder, but the friend, who had shot Hägglund in a fight, was saved from a long prison term by Hägglund's refusal to squeal. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Anyone who wants to learn the details of Hägglund’s fascinating life and also get the best insight into what made him tick ought to consider two books that were published on the centennial of his death in 1915. The two volumes were informatively reviewed for Portside by Paul Buhle in 2015. You can read that review here: _https://portside.org/2015-12-24/joe-hill-again_ _**There Is an Important Lesson in the Anti-Racist Organizing of 1835**_ **NOVEMBER 20 IS THE 190TH ANNIVERSARY** of the founding of the New York Committee of Vigilance, a non-governmental effort to prevent slave-traders from kidnapping African-Americans and selling them into slavery. The would-be kidnappers had the backing of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which made any self-emancipated slave a fugitive, and subject to arrest, anywhere in the U.S. And, of course, the kidnappers were highly motivated to falsely assert their victims were fugitives, a practice they often attempted. 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 New York Committee of Vigilance and similar groups in Boston, Philadelphia, Syracuse and also a NY state-wide organization operated in a manner akin to anti-ICE groups now. They raised the alarm whenever they got wind of slave-catchers’ presence, harassed and interfered with slave-catchers, and tried to ensure that anyone accused of being a fugitive had all the legal help possible to prevent their removal to the South. On any number of occasions, vigilance committee activists and their supporters used brute force to rescue the slave-catchers’ victims and spirit them out of the country. Sometimes the activists were arrested for such defiant acts, but they were often acquitted by juries who refused to convict those who had defied laws that were widely considered to be immoral. _https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/new-york-committee-vigilance-ruggles/_ _**Women Rise Up Angry Against Police Sexism**_ **NOVEMBER 22 IS THE 45TH ANNIVERSARY** of a fierce demonstration by some 500 supporters of Leeds Women Against Violence Against Women, who were protesting a shambolic, 6-year-long police effort to capture a serial killer of women in West Yorkshire, England. In 1980 the demonstrators were reacting not only to the inability of the police to arrest a man who had killed at least 13 women in the vicinity of the Leeds and had also grievously assaulted at least seven others, but also to the authorities’ proposal to impose a nighttime curfew on women in the area, instead of a curfew on men. The demonstrators blocked downtown traffic, beat on cars and buses, smashed windows, and vandalized two movie theaters that were showing pornographic films, including one about a killer of women. Less than six weeks after the anti-police rampage, Yorkshire police arrested the man who was eventually convicted of 13 murder charges and sentenced to life in prison. _https://secretlibraryleeds.net/2019/09/13/the-leeds-women-against-violence-against-women-march/_ _**Judge Slams Homophobic Police**_ **NOVEMBER 23 IS THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY** of a little-remembered early legal victory for civil liberties and gay rights. On this day in 1955, Baltimore Criminal Court judge James Cullen dismissed all charges against 162 patrons of the gay-friendly Pepper Hill Club, who had been arrested for allegedly disorderly conduct, but actually for no reason other than their presence in the club. When he dismissed the charges, Cullen said the police had no right to make such a mass arrest in a public place. _https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045462/1955-11-23/ed-1/?sp=21 &r=-0.119,1.136,0.914,0.378,0_ _**Deadly Brutality Backfires**_ **NOVEMBER 25 IS THE 65TH ANNIVERSARY** of what turned out to be the beginning of the end for Rafael Trujillo’s brutal dictatorship over the Dominican Republic. On this day in 1960 Trujillo’s thugs attacked and beat to death the Mirabal sisters, Minerva, Patria and Maria Teresa, three of the country’s best-known anti-Trujillo activists, The public revulsion over Trujillo’s brutality was the last straw; six months later, after more than 30 years in power, Trujillo was assassinated. The Mirabal sisters have been permanently memorialized by the United Nations, which designated the anniversary of their killings as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. _https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirabal_sisters_ For more People's History, visit _https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/_ Subscribe to Portside

In this February 13 photo, US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson speaks to the 2025 Supreme Court Fellows Program at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. | Jacquelyn Martin/Pool/Getty Images As she oversaw President Donald Trump’s emergency Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, case this past week, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson once again proved she isn’t beholden to Supreme Court custom. The least senior justice, who has been the court’s most **consistent critic of the second Trump administration**, appeared to be sending signals not only about the technicalities of the SNAP case but also more subtle messages about the way the court has handled a litany of short-fuse appeals on its emergency docket this year dealing with presidential power. She did all that, oddly enough, **by siding with Trump**. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail “She’s modeling the way that the emergency docket should be used,” said Elizabeth Wydra, the president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center. Since joining the court three years ago, Jackson has drawn attention for a sharp pen. That has been particularly notable**** in**** a series of cutting dissents she has written this year calling out the Trump administration for what she has framed as “**lawlessness**.” And she has not spared her colleagues for acquiescing to the White House in some of those decisions. “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Jackson wrote in August when the court allowed the **Trump administration to halt about $800 million** in research grants. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.” That pointed prose and her unflinching willingness to criticize her colleagues**** has made Jackson, who was nominated to the bench by former President Joe Biden, a divisive figure. “Even before the SNAP case, Justice Jackson had already emerged as the most vocal, most frequent, and sharpest critic of the majority’s inconsistent, difficult-to-justify, and often unjustified behavior in Trump-related cases,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center. Her machinations in the case, Vladeck said, underscored “a justice who is using every possible strategic and tactical maneuver behind the scenes to try to push the court toward what she believes the right answer is, but who is unafraid of sending increasingly loud public signals when those efforts are, as they so often have been this year, ultimately for naught.” 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 appeal on funding for SNAP emerged as the highest-profile legal case of the government shutdown. A lower court **ordered the US Department of Agriculture** to transfer $4 billion from another fund to pay full SNAP benefits for November – an order that the administration appealed as an overreach of judicial power. With a midnight deadline approaching – and benefits for more than 40 million Americans hanging in the balance – the case landed in a rush at the Supreme Court on a Friday evening. Trump wanted the justices to temporarily block the lower court order, known as a “stay.” Because she handles emergency appeals from the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals, the case went to Jackson. The “circuit justice” generally plays a straightforward role, setting a briefing schedule and – in big cases – ultimately referring the matter to the full court. But as he has raced up to the Supreme Court this year in case after case, Trump has been asking for something else as well: An even shorter-term order known as an “administrative stay,” which freezes the lower court decision while the justices review the written arguments in the case. That administrative decision, usually, rests with the assigned justice – in this case, Jackson. A former trial court judge who recently took up boxing as a way to relieve stress, Jackson **ultimately granted Trump’s request**, a move that initially raised anxiety among liberals and cheers from conservatives on social media. But Jackson also took several steps that were a departure from how other justices have handled administrative stays. First, Jackson included a few paragraphs of written explanation in her order, breaking from the**** boilerplate-only language usually found in administrative stays. She wrote that she was granting Trump’s request “to facilitate” the appeals court’s “expeditious resolution” of the appeal. The Supreme Court has faced enormous criticism this year for regularly overturning lower court orders on its emergency docket without explanation. While there are **sometimes good reasons** for brevity in those cases, some justices – such as Justice Elena Kagan – have said the court could **provide a little more explanation**. Second, rather than leaving the timing open-ended, Jackson set her administrative order to lift 48 hours after the appeals court ruled. Jackson likely understood – or at least assumed – there would be a majority to grant Trump’s request if she didn’t do so. By granting it herself but limiting the timeline, rather than sending it to the full court, she had the effect of bringing the case back to her chambers for a second look in an unusually short order, Vladeck wrote in **widely circulated post** over the weekend. Wydra said Jackson handled the case as should be done on the emergency docket. Justices, she said, should deal with the requests “quickly, as transparently as possible, and for logistical reasons, not…make what amount to significant substantive decisions.” Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston who also wrote about Jackson’s maneuvers, agreed that she appeared to be going “her own way.” “She has a clear vision of how she wants the shadow docket to be run,” Blackman said. But, he suggested, it ultimately didn’t work. In the end, as Congress **drew closer to an agreement** to fund the government, the full court extended her administrative stay for a few days without writing to explain why. Jackson wound up in dissent, which she also registered without explanation. And the Trump administration ultimately got what it wanted. **Trump signed the spending measure** late Wednesday, reopening the federal government and funding the food program. Hours later, the Department of Justice sent a letter to the Supreme Court noting that it was abandoning its appeal – an anticlimactic end to a case that had significant real-world consequences. On Thursday, as the court announced it was reopening its doors to the public, a single line was added to the docket in the SNAP appeal: “Application withdrawn.” * Ketanji Brown Jackson * Supreme Court * SNAP * emergency docket * Donald Trump Subscribe to Portside

Workers leave the Stellantis Windsor Assembly Plant, in Windsor, Ont., ahead of a shutdown linked to US auto tariffs. Canadian autoworkers have faced many crises over the years, but the present threat is distinct. Lana Payne, President of Unifor, has warned that “If we don’t push back hard against him [US President Donald Trump] and against these companies, we’re going to lose it all.” So far, the debate over what to do has started and stopped with Trump’s tariffs. But the threats go deeper, both for auto companies and for our ability as workers and citizens to determine democratically what kind of society we want – that is, for Canada’s substantive and not just formal sovereignty. Taking on these larger challenges demands coming to grips with some tough realities. The starting point for a response must be that the tariffs are only a symptom of Canada’s larger dilemma: the over-dependence on the world’s dominant global power. We may be America’s long-standing ‘closest economic partner and most loyal ally’, but that hasn’t prevented Trump from treating us as a vassal state. ### Beyond Tariffs No-one would know, hearing the Trump Administration’s justification for tariffs against Canada, that the US actually has a trade _surplus_ with Canada in manufactured goods, including auto. The tariffs were imposed in spite of this and driven, as US Secretary Treasurer Scott Bessent brazenly asserted, by the US determination to apply ‘the most America-first policies that are possible’. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Bessent added that the only qualifier was not ‘incurring market wrath’. This declaration that the only constraint America accepts is the US stock market, overwhelmingly the property of the rich (10% of the US population owns more stock than the other 90%), offers a remarkably bleak – if accurate – view of not just America’s international vision, but of US internal democracy. Whatever the long-standing frustrations of many Canadians with our subordinate relationship to the US and a pervasive unease with what America represents, dissent was historically muted by the economic seduction of US goods, US markets, US investment, US technology and the alleged security of the US military umbrella. But today, a good many Canadians have learned – or relearned – that clinging to the US is a liability. Though Trump has brought antipathy for US unilateralism to a head, what we confront isn’t reducible to Trump. The problem preceded Trump and will remain after he’s long gone. Canada is, of course, not alone in its dependence on the American Empire. Other countries, including other US allies, face similar anxieties. In Canada’s case, however, the dependence is however especially extreme and in the auto industry uniquely so. In auto, moving major Canadian assembly plants to the US is disruptive and costly, but comparatively easier than in other sectors and other countries. This is an effect of being part of a highly integrated continental industry with the main market being the US, and with the core research, development and planning decisions concentrated in the US. Canada does have lower labour costs than the US, largely because of our lower dollar and the American stubborn refusal to adopt a universal public healthcare system. But unlike the huge labour cost differential between Mexico and the US (Mexico’s labour costs are about one-sixth that of the US) Canada’s labour cost advantage is not large enough to over-ride the uncertainties put in play by Trump’s pressures to relocate to the US. Seeing corporations exiting Canada and the growing bias against future investment in Canada is appalling, but it should not be surprising. It’s precisely what Trump intended with his tariff threats. Even if the tariffs end and Trump and our Prime Minister hug each other, US corporations won’t forget this experience very easily. Caution in placing new work and production facilities in Canada will persist. ### The Threat to Jobs on Both Sides of the Border A second reality affects workers on both sides of the border. Autoworkers are in the firing line between an environmental crisis that can’t be avoided and an industry that, obsessed with its short-term profits, has failed to prepare for the evolving planetary climate catastrophe. This too predates Trump, though he has done everything he can to make it worse. 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 contrast with China is stunning. While the North American corporations are actively delaying conversion to EVs (electric vehicles), China charges ahead. While the North American industry dithers, China has established secure access to the necessary EV supply chains and the required rare-earth minerals for EV batteries. While China subsidizes EV research, battery innovation, assembly costs, and constructs a national network of readily available recharging stations Trump doubles down on keeping gas prices low, reinforcing dependence on environmentally costly oil. The North American based corporations shed crocodile tears about there being no demand for EVs, but China has demonstrated that if the price is right and if the recharging stations are readily at hand, consumers will come. As China’s production ramped up, economies of scale lowered the cost of EVs to the point that EVs in China now sell for about $20,000 – less than half the price of EVs here and elsewhere. EVs now account for about 50% of the market in China but only 10% of the US market and 15% of Canada’s. To put these achievements in historical perspective, at the turn of this century the US vehicle sector was assembling more than six times that of China (even Canada was assembling about 50% more). China’s production was then only 3.4% of the global industry. Yet today, with electric vehicles being the future of the industry, China accounts for 7 of every 10 EVs produced globally. That’s the same ratio the US was producing of the world’s gasoline driven vehicles at the height of America’s postwar economic dominance in the mid-fifties. The China-US contrast in the transition to EVs extends to their respective responses to energy renewables; China is far and away also the leader in solar and wind power. Acknowledging China’s impressive response to a fundamental threat to nature and humanity isn’t a matter of being ‘pro-China’. China clearly has its share of drawbacks, notably its weak worker and union rights and its undemocratic top-down rule. The point rather is to shift blame from the alleged disinterest of North American consumers in EVs to the astonishing economic and technological failures of American capitalism to make EVs a practical consumer option. Given this historic failure it is incredulous to imagine corporate America and the American state leading the world out of the broader and far more complex environmental catastrophe before us. ### Auto Can No Longer Deliver Jobs the Way it Once Did A third reality is that the auto industry in the developed countries is not going to be – can’t be – the job creator it was in the past. The hundreds of thousands of auto jobs lost in Canada and the US over the decades are not coming back and, at best, only some of the existing jobs will be saved. The reasons for this are clear: the environment won’t sustain further maximizing the cars on the road; the market for new vehicles in the developed capitalist countries is relatively saturated; whatever growth there is, is offset by productivity gains; and the shift to EVs will require significantly less labour per vehicle unless battery production also occurs in Canada. (There is as well the fact that international competition is shifting vehicle production away from the developed West, with China and Mexico being the main beneficiaries.) In the US, motor vehicle jobs have fallen by over 20% since 2000, a loss of almost 300,000 jobs. This obscures the far larger impact on the American Mid-West, since it includes job _gains_ in the American South. Since the turn of the century motor vehicles jobs in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana fell by 46%, more than double the national US decline. Asian and European corporations had come to the US to counter protectionist threats, but they avoided going where the auto jobs were being lost and went instead to the overwhelmingly non-union US South. Tariffs alone did little for manufacturing in the Mid-West. Though US jobs losses have flattened in the last half-dozen years, insecurity for autoworkers remains a permanent reality. For Canada, jobs have declined by close to 30% – worse than in the US as a whole, but not as high as in the Mid-West, though the latest data predates the impact of the tariffs. In 2000, the US-based Big Three – GM, Ford, and Chrysler (now Stellantis) – had nine assembly plants in Canada. In spite of the massive subsidies over the years, no new plants have been added by the Big Three; four facilities have since closed; three are in limbo, waiting for products; and one has lost a shift and there is uncertainty about its future. Only two Big Three assembly plants are currently assembling motor vehicles (one expecting the addition of a third shift in 2026). Canadian Big Three Assembly Plants since 2000 --- No. | ASSEMBLY PLANTS 2000 | CURRENT (November 2025) 1 | GM St Therese | Closed 2002 2 | GM Oshawa car | Closed 2005 3 | GM Oshawa truck | Closed 2009 4 | Ford St Thomas | Closed 2011 5 | GM CAMI, Ingersoll | EV product suspended 6 | Stellantis, Brampton | No product 7 | Ford Oakville | EV truck dropped, gas-driven truck 2026 8 | GM Oshawa truck Silverado | 3 shifts, down to 2 in 2026, gas-driven 9 | Stellantis Windsor | 2 shifts up to 3 in 2026 Toyota, with three non-union facilities (one of which is the only added assembly plant in the industry over this period) is now assembling more in Canada than the traditional Big Three _combined_. Add Honda’s two Canadian facilities and the assembly capacity of these two Japan-based companies will exceed that of the Big Three even if the Big Three plants in limbo get products. The message here, which Unifor is very aware of, is that unionizing the Japanese transplants has become as crucial today as unionizing GM and later Ford and Chrysler was in the 1930s. ### Resistance is Paramount No resistance essentially means giving up. Moving to tripling our military expenditures to make Trump love us only led, as should been expected, to Trump adding other demands. And the only thing more absurd than Ontario thinking of no better ads than praising US President Ronald Reagan is hearing that our Prime Minister ‘apologized’ to Trump for a Canadian jurisdiction putting out an ad that Trump didn’t like. The boom in military expenditures, as is also the case in Europe, will mostly be spent buying US equipment and will divert government revenues from funding health, education, and social services for the poor, as well as from adequate investment for addressing the environment. In surrendering to US pressure, Canada is essentially trying to defend its sovereignty by becoming more like the US. When unions began to accept, under duress, corporate demands for concessions in the eighties in exchange for promises of job security, an instructive lesson emerged. Giving in to bullying only reveals weaknesses and invites more concessions. The jobs didn’t come, unions lost credibility with their members, and workers and their unions were weakened for the battles to come. ### Immediate Responses What then can be done to salvage the reeling Canadian auto industry? Various immediate steps have been proposed to stop the hemorrhaging of the Canadian auto industry: fighting for products in suddenly idled plants, counter-tariffs, diversifying Canadian trade, joint-ventures with China, and an industrial strategy. Each is important yet even together they are limited. Getting immediate product for existing facilities, rather than being brushed off with a ‘possibility’ of a future product down the road, is critical. As Unifor has insisted, passively leaving facilities idle reduces pressure on the corporation to deliver and risks such facilities fading from public attention. Moral outrage about broken promises is however unlikely to get the union very far. Every form of protest, including a revival of the union’s historical legacy of plant takeovers, has to be part of its arsenal. Introducing counter-tariffs against the US, as Canada’s Prime Minister originally threatened, is unlikely to work as a tactic. On its own it would likely have little or no positive impact on Canadian jobs and no doubt lead to more US threats. But imposing counter-tariffs would nevertheless be a defiant assertion that we won’t be walked over without a fight. It might also rally other US allies to respond more aggressively. If Canada, the most dependent of US allies, has concluded it must challenge the US then why not them as well? Diversifying our trade, including with China, now seems like straightforward common-sense. Doing so isn’t a matter of replacing our subservience to the US with a new dependency, but simply an overdue rebalancing of our overdependence on the US. Yet, here too, we should have no illusions that modest steps will solve Canada’s auto crisis. Canada has, for example, neither the leverage of China’s massive market and its vast pools of low-cost labour, nor China’s technological foundation. What space exists abroad is already occupied by China, and Europe also is looking to exports to offset the limits imposed by the US. As for joint EV ventures with China, the US would surely block significant numbers of these vehicles flowing to the US market from Canada. In fact, it is already doing this even against US companies operating in Canada. Without assured access to the US market and with China not wanting to risk further overall US retaliation, it’s hard to imagine China considering such cooperation with Canada. An ‘industrial strategy’, with the government playing a larger role in the economy, has long been raised and is now being resuscitated for auto and other sectors. But given the scale of the problem, some qualifiers are elemental. If the leadership role remains in private hands, with governments meekly trying to influence the direction through ‘incentives’, it won’t work. There is long experience to back this up. The government must lead, and public ownership will have to play a significant role. Furthermore, focusing on the supply side is not enough. Markets for the output from an industrial strategy must be found and this again raises the planning role of the state as a purchaser of goods (more on this below). Above all linking an industrial strategy to markets can’t be left to corporate decisions on profitability and ‘competitiveness’. Such prioritizing of the corporate freedom to do what is best for their stockholders undermines _our_ freedom to address our needs. The newly created markets must be reserved for our newly developed domestic productive capacity. Among other things this highlights inevitable conflicts within industrial strategies. Worker and popular concerns may not, and generally will not, converge with business interests. As in all capitalist countries such differences in goals shape the policy responses. Working people may feel torn about how to respond – not surprisingly, since the issues are complex and the ‘Big Questions’ have for so long been obscured. But Canada’s economic elites and their state allies are clear. Their singular priority is returning to the pre-Trump trade status-quo which also brought pressures on Canadian workers and governments to ‘match’ (that is, be competitive with) the US, the country with the worst labour laws and weakest social programs amongst the core capitalist states. Nationalist rhetoric can therefore be a trap – a vehicle to co-opt the labour movement into a ‘jointness’ within which labour is a subordinate player and its particular interests are defused. Notably, the opposition we would face in any serious alternatives posed from below would not be restricted to American corporations. Canadian businesses would in general be just as or even more antagonistic to unravelling the dependence of the Canadian working classes on the US. ### Setting Our Sights Higher The crippling point about political and economic dependency is that you can’t just snap your fingers and escape historic chains. If we look to counter what we are up against, there is no way out except to think bigger, much bigger. The immediate can’t be ignored but this must not come at the expense of developing and preparing for a longer-term response. Significantly breaking the chains to the US would disrupt _everything_ in Canada’s capitalist economy. Coping with this would demand a comprehensive degree of planning; as emphasized, it could not be done by tweaking markets and corporate incentives. And since you can’t plan what you don’t control it would also mean increased regulation of corporations and the development of state-owned companies to realize the plans. Overcoming Canadian dependency on the US consequently also forces overcoming our dependency at home on both major Canadian and American capital. The new planning capacities would have to be _democratic_ capacities in terms of whose interests they serve and how decisions are made. Economic restructuring, formerly a threat to workers, would potentially become an opportunity. Such historic transformations can’t happen overnight but raising them now provides markers – guideposts – to where we should be heading. In struggling with how to come to grips with what we’re up against, a number of points are fundamental. First, while the union must fight to save what still has possibilities, if the corporations have decided to leave, it is no longer a realistic strategy to beg them to stay. It is then the _productive capacities_ – the industrial spaces, flexible equipment, multi-purpose tool and die shops, the varied component capabilities – not the companies themselves that must become the target. These are assets we must not waste. Repeating the failed history of bribing them to stay is futile. Some corporations may stay and invest in Canada, but we can’t depend on this to solve the overwhelming threats we confront. Here especially the tactics will have to include reviving labour’s history of sit-ins and plant takeovers. Second, we must set our sights beyond making vehicles. Making vehicles, especially ones more compatible with the environment is not to be dismissed, but the larger challenge lies in converting our rich productive potentials and developing them to produce the myriad of goods we need beyond auto. Third, linking transformation in the production capacity in transportation to the environmental crisis may make the points more concrete. To address the environment, we will have to fix everything about how we live, work, travel, and play. For those asking what we will produce if we rely significantly less on the US market, the answer is that tackling the environmental challenge holds out a good part of the answer: accelerating the shift to EVs; converting all public vehicles to EV fleets made in Canada (postal vehicles, utility vehicles, ambulances, school buses, police cars); expansions in public transit vehicles and their infrastructure; retrofitting houses and offices; transforming workplace machinery; immense investments in renewable energy alongside the phased retreat from oil production. Fourth, a National Conversion Institute could monitor developments, develop plans for needed goods and facilitate conversions and investment in new facilities. It would coordinate financing with local governments and their specific municipal environmental projects and with businesses supplying components. Provincial governments could set up local technology hubs in various communities where thousands of young engineering workers would research community and business needs and initiate or support engineering adjustments to produce new goods, services, and production methods. Fifth, union locals, in the public as well as private sectors, could set up workplace committees to monitor whether their employer is planning cutbacks or closures, prepare for the worst if it does happen, and bring in the proposed National Conversion Center to address alternatives to maintaining production and services. Trade would still take place, but it would be integrated into the needs of the new, far more inward oriented domestic economy, not left to the free trade of private corporations. Manufacturing has, for decades now, been downplayed as a fading part of the economy. But fixing and sustaining the environment can’t be done without manufacturing capacities. This includes meeting people’s yearly necessary social needs, such as the shortages in collective goods like housing, education and senior care, and reversing the erosion of community healthcare clinics, sports facilities and community centers. There is also the very considerable and urgent load of fixing and sustaining the environment. Rather than wondering what will happen to our excess labour, we may very well face a _shortage_ of labour if we can achieve a political and social turn to meeting social needs and not market imperatives. ### Conclusion: The Necessary Challenge of ‘Thinking Big’ In the early 1980s, Canadian workers confronted an acceleration of globalization, ruling economics and political elites looked toward closer integration with the US, Ottawa driving what came to be called neoliberalism (aptly summarized by Adolph Reed as ‘capitalism without a working-class opposition’). The UAW parent union to autoworkers in North America reluctantly accepted that there was no option but to give in to concessions demanded by the auto companies and was looking to impose this same defeatist position on its Canadian members. Canadian autoworkers were in an historic bind. The parent union represented 90% of the Big Three workers in a uniquely integrated industry. The certifications recognizing the union were formally with the parent union. A split from the US would therefore mean losing not just the weight and resources of the far larger US parent union. It would also require recertifying all its hundreds of bargaining units. In choosing to defy the UAW central that had once inspired their own breakthroughs, Canadian autorworkers were also challenging some of the largest corporations in the world, their own government, and the trend to ever deeper integration with the US. In spite of this, the union leadership in Canada understood that if it didn’t want to ‘lose it all’ it had to win its members over to breaking away from its American parent. Led by its President, Bob White, the confidence to take this necessary risk prevailed. The credibility this established for the newly independent Canadian Autoworkers (CAW) union in the wider society subsequently allowed it to lead, along with other Canadian unions and social movements, to fight against free trade, neoliberalism, and deepening integration with the US. It was not, however, then clear to the CAW and Canadian autoworkers, nor the larger union movement, how much further they would need to go to succeed. Today that dilemma of the relationship to the US is back. Among the significant differences in the context today is that the weakening of the labour movement over the intervening years has left the labour movement no longer coping with the extent of our dependence on the US but primarily arguing for ending the tariffs and, effectively inviting _greater_ integration with the US. Building a different kind of society on the edges of the American empire is obviously an intimidating historical task. It’s easy to understand why people shy away from it. Yet thinking bigger is ultimately the only _practical_ option if we want to escape our present impasse with its frustrations and demoralization. The exact steps and timing in soberly moving in this direction will ‘depend’. But what should not be avoided is at least starting the discussions – in our workplaces, union locals, communities, and nationally – on what we face, where we stand in response, what needs doing, and how we might do it. Electoral politics will inevitably be necessary but past experience tells us that leaving this to the politicians will fritter away decisive action. The electoral world is only relevant if a social base has been built outside of parliament with the vision, commitment, solidarity, and confidence to drive the politics. This demands an institution laser-focused not on the next election but on building the social force that will one day make electoral activity truly relevant. The creation of such an institution – a ‘party’ of a different kind – is, ultimately, the critical missing piece in our struggles. • _The Socialist Project is especially interested in responses to the direction laid out here. Do you think it’s on the right track? Are you interested in hearing more? Interested in setting up a committee in your local or community and if so, what further information might be useful? Interested in helping organize a public forum on all this and if so, getting suggested speakers? Contact:_ [email protected] Sam Gindin was research director of the Canadian Auto Workers from 1974–2000. He is co-author (with Leo Panitch) of The Making of Global Capitalism (Verso), and co-author with Leo Panitch and Steve Maher of The Socialist Challenge Today, the expanded and updated American edition (Haymarket). * autoworkers * Canadian auto workers Subscribe to Portside

In cities across America, a new generation of left-wing mayors is confronting the same dilemma: What do you do when you inherit institutions designed to crush left movements like those that carried you into office? Socialist campaigns promise to challenge the power of capital, but upon taking office, left executives find themselves constrained by police unions, business interests, and state politicians eager to appear tough on crime. Does anyone have a good plan to push back? In New York City, we’re about to find out—starting with the cops. In the run-up to his election as mayor, Zohran Mamdani said he would keep Jessica Tisch—a billionaire heiress who has rolled back police reforms and collaborated with ICE—as NYPD commissioner. He repeated that pledge after his victory last week. Five years ago, Mamdani called the NYPD “racist, anti-queer,” “wicked,” and “corrupt.” After being forced to apologize for these comments, and pledging his support for the police, he’s now saying that he and Tisch can work together. This decision has drawn criticism from Mamdani’s supporters, and leftists have good reason to be concerned about Tisch’s record. Yet instead of viewing this as a betrayal, we should think of it as proof of how much power police have in local politics—and how little power the left holds. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Business elites demand aggressive policing because it establishes what they see as proper order, a prerequisite for commercial investment. To quote former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, police “flush” homeless and other ostensibly disposable people “off the street” to fuel development and displacement. The ultra-rich aren’t being subtle about this. “Public safety is the number one fiscal stimulus,” one hedge fundie told _Bloomberg_ just after Mamdani’s election. The playbook is national. In San Francisco, Big Tech and real estate money toppled reform DA Chesa Boudin; in Minneapolis, defunding efforts were defeated in part by business and police union advocacy (though the full story is more complex). The message travels: Undermine police power, and capital will move to punish you—at the ballot box, in the press, and through state preemption. Because Mamdani’s campaign is now the test case for progressive governance, how he manages the NYPD will have enormous consequences for left organizing across the country. But ultimately, what happens will be less down to Mamdani’s choices than to ours. Without movements strong enough to either pressure or protect them, any left politician is bound to yield to these interests—and Mamdani is no different. We won’t be able to push Mamdani, or anyone else, to undermine police power unless we become a force to be reckoned with. Who is Jessica Tisch, anyway? An heiress of the Loews Corporation, Tisch entered public service in 2008, working within the NYPD intelligence division that helped build a vast surveillance network targeting Muslims. Adams tapped her as commissioner in late 2024 after his earlier picks fell afoul of federal corruption probes. Tisch rooted out some cronyism in the department, and she has taken credit for subsequent declines in shootings, though New York may only be following a nationwide trend. But Tisch has also practiced a firmly old-guard version of policing in ways that underscore just how strange a bedfellow she is set to be with Mamdani: adopting Bill Bratton’s broken windows policing practices, defending the city’s racist gang database, overseeing a training that labels the keffiyeh antisemitic, and collaborating with ICE to crush pro-Palestine protests. Against the available evidence, she blamed modest steps like bail reform and Raise the Age for post-pandemic crime spikes. She is also a staunch Zionist who has defended the NYPD’s brutal policing of Palestine protests, whereas Mamdani is an advocate for Palestinian liberation. And Tisch’s family members spent over a million dollars opposing Mamdani’s election. So what explains their fragile alliance? In a word: power. 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 Mamdani won the Democratic primary, the richest New Yorkers threw tantrums and lit money on fire. When Mamdani set out to assuage their fears, the scions of capital settled on one demand: Keep Tisch in her job. Adding to the pressure, Democratic party leaders initially stayed silent. Figures from Kathy Hochul to Hakeem Jeffries reportedly conditioned their endorsements on keeping Tisch. Faced with this onslaught, Mamdani yielded. If he wanted to turn his upstart campaign into a bona fide Democratic coalition, it seemed, he had no other choice. Fulfilling their end of the Faustian bargain, Hochul awkwardly yet earnestly joined Mamdani at campaign rallies, and Kathy Wylde, one of the local ruling class’s most influential power brokers, began saying that perhaps all sides could find a way to work together. Now we will all see whether that’s true. How should leftists interpret these developments? Writing in _The Nation_ last July, writer and policing expert Alex Vitale discouraged Mamdani from keeping Tisch, arguing that she would “never truly ally with him.” After Mamdani confirmed that he wanted to keep Tisch, journalist Ken Klippenstein said Mamdani had chosen a “straitjacket,” while Spencer Ackerman called the decision a “big mistake,” noting that “Tisch cooperated with ICE to lock up Leqaa Kordia.” I also do not see Mamdani and Tisch as natural allies, and I agree that Tisch’s collaboration with ICE was repugnant. Yet there is a clear explanation for Mamdani’s decision: There was no organized opposition. There wasn’t even a rumored alternative to Tisch, let alone a concerted campaign to propose one. The left doesn’t build talent pipelines for police brass, and I’m not arguing that we should start. We want to reduce police resources, staffing, and technology. Yet our inaction meant Mamdani saw no constituency for another choice. More broadly, the left has yet to recover from the backlash against the George Floyd uprising, and any honest observer would admit that regaining the momentum that crested in 2020 will require quite a bit of organizing. The consequence of all of this is that there was no significant counterweight to the immense forces urging Mamdani to stick with Tisch—and to repudiate his former stances on policing. Is it any wonder that he gave way? The core battle over Tisch—and the political necessity of conceding, at least in part, to police power—appears to have been lost. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing the left can do. Instead of expending energy on battles we already decided not to fight, we should scrutinize what Mamdani’s NYPD does differently in 2026. We must ensure that Mamdani stays true to the promises he made: abolishing the Strategic Response Group (SRG), cutting overtime spending, and creating a Department of Community Safety. (SRG’s top officer filed for retirement the day after Mamdani won.) Mamdani apparently recognizes that Tisch is a savvy politician. Her mentor and former top cop Bill Bratton describes himself as a political broker—it’s part of the job description. But he has political skills of his own. When _Hell Gate_ asked Mamdani how he reconciled Tisch’s agenda with his own, his response was wry: “I think everyone will follow my lead—I’ll be the mayor.” Time will tell whether can stay three steps ahead of Tisch and her backers. The first major hurdle for this relationship may come alongside any major Palestine-related action in 2026. Mamdani’s support base overlaps with Palestine activists—he started a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter in college—so it’s hard to imagine that he would be enthusiastic about police cracking student skulls or swarming Bay Ridge, as they did under Eric Adams. At the same time, Tisch is committed to brutal protest policing. Mamdani’s coalition will be severely, perhaps fatally, damaged if he winds up overseeing that kind of assault. He’s already working on an alternative protest-policing approach, but implementing it will be an early, defining test. One constituency was remarkably quiet amid the battle to control the NYPD: the NYPD’s largest union, the Police Benevolent Association (PBA). The PBA endorsed no one in the mayoral race and stayed silent on Tisch. Given the PBA’s outsize influence on New York politics, its silence is deafening—and cannot be expected to last long. How might we expect the PBA to greet its new Muslim socialist boss? Its relationship with New York’s first Black and democratic socialist mayor provides some clues. David Dinkins clashed with the PBA over his proposal to make the Civilian Complaint Review Board an independent, civilian-controlled agency. In 1992, the PBA organized an opposition rally of thousands of cops that devolved into a drunken riot, complete with cops shouting slurs and storming City Hall. Bill de Blasio, whose campaign emphasized police reform more than Mamdani’s, also fought the police unions (and lost). Cops turned their backs on de Blasio and walked off the job—a classic police tactic, given that work slowdowns generate headlines reinforcing the myth that police pullbacks endanger residents. The nadir of the relation between police and de Blasio came during the 2020 protests, when a police union gleefully posted a report of Chiara de Blasio’s arrest—an incident likely on Mamdani’s mind, as he hired additional security after Islamophobic threats. The battle over Tisch may not be a primary focus for police unions (though the Sergeants Benevolent Association thinks Tisch should stay). The only major play that the unions have made so far is forcing Mamdani to apologize for calling them racist—hardly a controversial claim, as Eric Adams famously founded an organization drawing attention to the issue, but one Mamdani walked back nonetheless. On the one hand, perhaps police see Mamdani’s modest reform promises as tolerable. On the other hand, perhaps they are waiting for an opportune moment to press for what they always want: more money and less accountability. Could the proposed Department of Community Safety cause a fight over city resources? Mamdani often notes that police are stuck with work they don’t want, like mental-health crisis response. But across the country, police fight to maintain their professional authority. In Baltimore, violence interrupters work to stop retaliatory violence. Because they won’t share real-time street information with cops, relations are tense. Police view interrupters as criminals, and interrupters feel that they have become targets of police sabotage. If the new department competes for dollars, expect police backlash—the NYPD arrested two interrupters last year. Maybe Mamdani keeps Tisch and compels her to carry out reforms; maybe she storms off and the press calls it a crisis. Either way, what happens next will measure the left’s real strength. If she walks, organizers should move to block any consensus around a status-quo safety agenda. The task will be to give Mamdani political cover to appoint a commissioner actually willing to implement his program. If she stays and complies, we should be ready to push for more ambitious demands: reduced NYPD technology and surveillance capacity, the end of the gang database and status-quo approaches to gang policing, and budget and headcount reductions. We are in the unfortunate position of needing to organize like hell just to claw back the status quo we enjoyed in 2019—the city jail population nearly doubled under Adams. In either scenario, we will need to become stronger. The defund movement in NYC was ruthlessly crushed and co-opted—this is part of why the billionaires are able to choose what happens with the NYPD. Organizers focused on criminalization may need to engage in electoral work more often. Mamdani is ostensibly accountable to NYC-DSA, for example. Mamdani’s allies have also created a nonprofit to continue the momentum of his campaign, which is focused on affordability—but has made no mention of organizing around safety. There may be a case for joining such organizations to push internal decision-making to address policing and incarceration. Labor action is another important tactic. Across the country, police and corrections officers use wildcat strikes to resist accountability and retaliate against criminalized people. Strikes work! Aligning labor with anti-police organizing magnifies leverage. Twentieth-century movements succeeded by disrupting capital to force politicians’ hands. The New Deal and the Civil Rights Act were the result of militant, disruptive mass action. Effective tactics may seem uncivil or illegitimate—that’s too bad for the respectability police. Organizing efforts could dovetail with Mamdani’s agenda. The Department of Community Safety will demonstrate the potential of non-police approaches. That said, the administration’s ability to move towards abolitionist horizons depends on our power. In an ideal world, Mamdani’s coalition would be so robust that we could insulate him from the fallout of calling the NYPD’s bluff when it walks off the job—or firing Tisch if she refuses to budge on more ambitious steps. Indeed, throwing Tisch under the bus at an opportune moment could be a great play to undermine the prospects of a potential threat in the next election. What we learn from the billionaires’ insistence on Tisch is that, while they’ll merely grumble about a leftist agenda on the cost of living—and, potentially, higher taxes—they are not prepared to brook dissent on the running of the policing machine. This is true in every city where progressives are gaining power. To build a government that serves working people, police power must be challenged. Winning the election was an accomplishment, but the NYPD didn’t even see it as a fight worth joining. That means the real battle still lies ahead. Now is the time to find a political home for that battle. Everyone has skills that can contribute to the cause. Perhaps it’s taking notes in union meetings, signing up for ICE-watch training, or phonebanking to keep voters engaged. Even one small task matters. Mamdani can’t beat the NYPD alone. No politician can. The only way to break the cops’ choke hold on city politics is to become stronger than them. Tisch’s tenure should remind us what’s at stake: Until the left can build and sustain real power in the streets, the billionaires will keep theirs in City Hall. _Jonathan Ben-Menachem is a PhD candidate in sociology at Columbia University, where he researches the politics of criminalization and crime journalism._ _Copyright c 2024 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be reprinted without_ __permission__ _. Distributed by_ __PARS International Corp__ _._ _Please support progressive journalism.___Get a digital subscription__ _to The Nation for just $24.95!_ * Zohran Mamdani * Jessica Tisch * NYPD * police unions Subscribe to Portside

The leadership of the Democratic Party wanted to preserve the filibuster for one reason: it checks anyone who defies party orthodoxy. | Photo: Daniel Heuer / Bloomberg // Jacobin Why did the Democrats cave in on the shut down? It seems clear that the main issue was not electoral backlash, since most of the senators who caved are not up for reelection, and the politics were trending in the Democrats’ favor, or at least not against them. The main issue was the filibuster. There was growing pressure from Donald Trump on the Republicans to get rid of it, and the Democratic leadership had every reason to fear its elimination. Why? It has very little to do with preserving their power while they are in the minority; that ship has obviously sailed. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail The Democratic leadership doesn’t want to get rid of the filibuster for the same reason the Republican leadership doesn’t want to get rid of it: The filibuster allows the leadership of both parties to keep their radical flanks at bay. Chuck Schumer needs the filibuster to protect himself from the Bernie Sanders wing in the Senate and the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) wing in the House: if you can’t get to sixty, Bernie and AOC, we have to follow the lead of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Same goes for John Thune to whoever inhabits the radical role at any given moment in the GOP. You have to read the media coverage on this issue carefully. Usually, the blah blah blah of filibuster reportage is about the party worrying what happens when it is in the minority or individual senators worrying about losing their individual power. That’s the buzz of Broderism, a style of reporting that’s a holdover from the last century. The real moment of truth comes in a nugget like this, from an article in the _New York Times_ on November 4, which got lost amid the excitement about the Zohran Mamdani election: > In reality, the filibuster also serves Republicans as a handy check on a president who sometimes takes stances that carry substantial risk or defy party orthodoxy, an excuse for Senate Republicans to avoid doing things they don’t see as sound policy or politics without infuriating Mr. Trump. For Trump, swap in Trump’s most rabid allies and foot soldiers in the Senate and the House — or Schumer’s and Hakeem Jeffries’s enemies in the Senate and the House — and you get a pretty clear sense of why the leaderships of both parties need the filibuster: It checks anyone who “defies party orthodoxy,” while providing “an excuse to avoid doing things.” 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 _**Corey Robin** is the author of _[_The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump_ _and a contributing editor at Jacobin.]_ _Jacobin_ ‘s fall issue, “Borders,” is out now. Follow this link to get a discounted subscription to _our beautiful print quarterly._ * Chuck Schumer * Senate * Democratic Party * Bernie Sanders * AOC * Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez * Hakim Jeffries * House of Representatives * Democrats * Government Shutdown * Shutdown * filibuster * Elections 2026 * 2026 Midterms Subscribe to Portside

Homemade signs support the candidacy of Democrat Peter Hubbard for Georgia’s Public Service Commission, July 9, 2025, in Atlanta. | Kate Brumback/AP Photo Donald Trump is an unpopular president. He has always been an unpopular president. Every time America has held an election while he is in power, his party has lost. That includes off-year elections (even in 2019, Andy Beshear flipped a gubernatorial seat in red Kentucky and Democrats took over the Virginia legislature). When he takes over, he governs badly, people get angry, and they take it out on his party. It’s really that simple, and I don’t understand why this isn’t conventional wisdom. Given that reality, I don’t know that all the effort to lay out what Democrats must do to win has accomplished much of anything. The iron law of 21st-century politics, beyond Trump’s incompetence, is that in nine of the last ten elections, the parties have traded power, with at least one chamber of Congress or the presidency changing hands. That’s likely to happen in 2026 as well. The party that actually responds to public needs will break this cycle, and Donald Trump resoundingly isn’t up to that task. _**More from David Dayen**_ Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Will Democrats take this opportunity, or will they be content to negative polarize their way back to power, without planning what to do when they get there? The power of Zohran Mamdani’s message came from finding the right problems to address, which is the necessary step to finding the right solutions. But if we zoom in a little closer, we can see a through line that has rapidly become a top-tier issue in U.S. politics: electric bills. The Georgia Public Service Commission determines what customers pay for electricity by regulating utility rates. Georgia is one of only ten states where utility commissioners are elected. The five commissioners, all Republicans, approved investor-owned Georgia Power, the largest utility in the state, for six rate increases over the past two years. Georgia Power’s profit margins are now the second-highest in the nation, with a return on equity of 12 percent, far higher than their counterparts. I’ve written about how investor-owned utilities use complex models to bamboozle public utility commissioners and get the rate hikes they want. Two of the commissioners (Republicans Tim Echols and Fitz Johnson) who made those decisions were up for re-election on Tuesday. Democrats Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson ran on reducing the return on equity and saving ratepayers $700 million annually. They each won by 26 points, making them the first Democrats to win a statewide race in Georgia in two decades. You might assume that these districts must be skewed to Democrats, but no: These were statewide races, even though each commissioner represents a particular part of the state. We only had elections in 2025 because they were canceled for the previous two election cycles due to a multiyear legal battle that preserved statewide elections for the PSC. So one of the biggest swing states in the country saw total blowouts on the level of statewide Democratic wins in California. Sure, part of this is a function of turnout: The preliminary numbers show about 20 percent turnout statewide, compared to around 50 percent for the last midterm election in Georgia. Low turnout favors the more motivated party, and Tuesday’s results show that Democrats were far more motivated. But this is such a giant victory that it’s reasonable to suggest something else is going on: People are really, really angry about skyrocketing utility bills. It’s no surprise that the election where that was the central issue showed the biggest loss for Republicans. The dynamic was not limited to Georgia. Democrat Mikie Sherrill defied the polls and won a double-digit victory to become governor of New Jersey. In the final weeks of the campaign, she hit on a key promise: to declare “a state of emergency on day one, freezing utility rate hikes … I’m not doing a 10-year study. I’m not writing a strongly worded letter, I’m not going to convene a group, I’m declaring a state of emergency to drive your costs down.” Promising something tangible in the state where utility rates have risen 22 percent in one year clearly paid political dividends. (Republican Gov. Brian Kemp happened to cut a deal with Georgia Power recently to freeze base rates for three years, but when you do that _after_ six rate hikes in two years, and when you exempt fuel and storm damage costs, it lacks punch.) 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 other major governor’s race this week was in Virginia, home to more data centers than any area on the planet. The build-out of the computing power needed to generate AI models is seen as responsible for widening energy demand and therefore soaring costs. Democratic Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger said during the campaign that she wanted to see Big Tech companies “pay their own way and their fair share” of costs for data center energy. Democrat John McAuliff, a former clean-energy staffer in the Biden administration, flipped a seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates that Trump won last year by running against the data center explosion. In one campaign ad, he accused his opponent of personally profiting from hundreds of data centers. “I’m tired of losing family farms to data centers,” McAuliff says in the ad. The evidence is pretty strong that electricity has jumped the line over some other affordability issues and now sits near the top of the list. And Democrats have a pretty good plan to execute to counteract this. First, they can stress reducing the profit margins that utility companies argue they must have in order to stay in business. As much as anything, this is an anti–Wall Street stance: It’s the investors demanding double-digit returns. Utility regulators don’t have to accept that. In addition, data centers are clearly a fat target from a campaign standpoint. Forcing a choice between food and electricity so someone can make a video of a cat in a sombrero dancing isn’t a trade-off most people will accept. And then there are the tools that align with environmental imperatives. Amid high energy demand, no power generation facility should be arbitrarily disfavored. Clean energy like solar and offshore wind is vital if the finances are available to build them; Trump’s war on clean energy is totally counterproductive. The situation offers that long-sought way for Democrats to sell the energy transition: It’s actually to reduce costs over the long term. One of the reasons New Jersey’s utility rates shot up this year was the closure of several power plants; there’s a direct line from Trump denying permits to offshore wind projects that would help New Jersey because he doesn’t like how wind turbines look from his golf course and how much residents are paying for electricity. Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican challenger to Sherrill in New Jersey, aligned with Trump on offshore wind; he got pummeled. Connecting these power generation projects to the grid, which has become a flashpoint with the grid operator that serves New Jersey and Virginia (PJM), could be another plank of the agenda, along with reconductoring to minimize the loss of energy through power lines. Democratic solutions on energy affordability neatly connect to Trump’s refusal to allow energy projects to move ahead. And there’s a populist streak to taking on powerful utility monopolies and their financial backers. Delivering success here will build trust in an electorate that has already rejected laissez-faire solutions. It feels like a real opportunity to reset the climate debate as a cost-of-living debate, and reverse the structures of power that have made a basic necessity of life unaffordable. * * * _Used with the permission. The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2025. All rights reserved._ _Read the original article at Prospect.org._ __Click here to support the Prospect's brand of independent impact journalism.__ * electric power * cost of living * elections * Georgia * New Jersey * Virginia * Data Centers * wind power Subscribe to Portside

On election night, **Zohran Mamdani** stood before a crowd of campaign volunteers in Bronx and said something that, in another century, might have come from the steps of Tammany Hall. “We will fight for you, because we are you,” he began. “Ana minkum wa alaikum.” Then he called the roll of his coalition: Yemeni bodega owners, Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers, Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks, Ethiopian aunties, South Asian delivery drivers. It was a moment of recognition—for communities that had long kept the city running without ever feeling like the city was theirs. New York’s political life has always been a nexus of immigration, xenophobia, and realignment. Each new wave of arrivals has transformed the city’s parties and power structures, from the Irish Catholics who captured Tammany Hall in the late 19th century to the Jewish and Italian tenement workers who built the unions and socialist movements of the early 20th to Black and Latino transformations during the civil rights movement. Mamdani’s rise comes amid its own modern strain of suspicion—Islamophobia, anti-immigrant politics, and the quiet bigotry that still shadows those whose faith or surnames mark them as foreign. It rhymes with the 19th-century fear of Catholic immigrants and the early-20th-century hysteria over “radical” Jews and Italians—each era finding new language for the same anxiety about belonging. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail The first great breakthrough came in **1880** , when **William R. Grace** , an Irish-born Catholic shipping magnate, became New York’s first immigrant mayor. His election was a crack in the wall of Protestant dominance that had ruled the city since its founding. Only a few decades earlier, the Know-Nothing Party had treated Catholic immigrants as a civilizational threat. Grace’s win was the city’s quiet answer: the immigrant could not only belong, but lead—a rhyme Mamdani would recognize in a new century. For the first time, an ethnic and religious minority—despised by xenophobes as “drunkards and papists”—had seized control of City Hall. Within a decade, Tammany Hall had remade itself in Grace’s image, transforming from a genteel club into an Irish-Catholic machine that traded favors for votes and delivered something like democracy through patronage to people who’d never had it. For poor immigrants, Tammany wasn’t a story about corruption; it was proof that the system could finally see them. By the **1920s** , Irish immigrants became the political establishment, embodied by **Mayor Jimmy Walker** , the silk-hatted son of the machine. Walker was rakish, funny, and entirely at ease in the moral gray zone that had once scandalized elites. Under his reign, politics became a jazz-age spectacle of favors and excess. But his glamour disguised decay. The machine that had once fought for immigrants had become a gatekeeper against newer ones—Italians, Jews, and Eastern Europeans—whose sweat powered the city’s factories but who rarely saw their reflection in its politics. Those white ethnic newcomers found their voice in **Morris Hillquit** , a Jewish socialist lawyer who, in **1917** , ran for mayor on a platform of rent control, union rights, and opposition to the First World War. Hillquit’s 22 percent of the vote shocked the political establishment. He didn’t win, but he proved that a tenement-based working class—Jewish seamstresses, Italian dockworkers, the radical press—could function as a political bloc. For his trouble, he and his allies were branded traitors. Five Socialist legislators from immigrant districts were expelled from the state assembly. Yet the genie was out of the bottle: class solidarity and immigrant politics had become a political movement of its own. In 1922, during a bruising congressional campaign, Fiorello La Guardia was accused of antisemitism by a rival who assumed the charge would stick. La Guardia’s answer was pure theater and pure New York: he dictated a reply in **Yiddish** , the language of his accuser’s own voters, and challenged the man to debate him in it. The invitation—audacious, funny, and devastating—went unanswered. It was La Guardia at his most revealing: turning the politics of identity into a performance of fluency, using wit to remind New Yorkers that he was not an outsider looking in but a reflection of the city itself. La Guardia’s mother was Jewish and his father an Italian Catholic who had long since drifted from faith. He grew up navigating a world of languages and neighborhoods—Italian in the kitchen, Yiddish on the street, English in the classroom. Yet despite his mother’s Jewish roots, La Guardia never publicly identified as Jewish; historians suggest he avoided doing so because he believed it would be “self-serving” and preferred his identity to be rooted in his immigrant background rather than a single faith tradition. 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 When La Guardia finally became mayor—after the Seabury Investigations had shredded the old party machine and the Depression had destroyed the old ethnic and political loyalties—he drew on that same fluency. He built a coalition made not only of tenement renters but of middle-class reformers, spanning Italian, Jewish, Irish, and Polish neighborhoods. Backed by the New Deal, he transformed city government from a dispenser of jobs into a provider of public assets. As fascism darkened Europe, La Guardia turned his multilingual empathy into policy—denouncing Adolf Hitler, promoting boycotts of German goods, and making City Hall a kind of civic refuge for the city’s persecuted immigrants. Every phase of political transformation in New York City was met with a wave of bigotry. Grace faced anti-Catholic hysteria; Hillquit, the Red Scare; La Guardia, whispers that he was too foreign to be trusted. But the city’s demographic tide kept rising, and each wave of immigrants redrew the boundary between outsider and insider. Each of these figures widened New York’s circle of belonging, though never evenly. Grace’s rise gave Irish Catholics a seat at the table but left the city’s Black residents and Caribbean migrants untouched. Hillquit’s Socialists built interracial alliances with Black labor organizers like A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, even as their broader movement still treated race as secondary to class. La Guardia, decades later, went further—appointing Black and Puerto Rican officials, investigating discrimination in Harlem, and campaigning in Spanish—but even his reform coalition operated within a segregated city. The city’s circle of belonging widened in fits and starts, stretching to include new voices even as old hierarchies tugged at its edges. Nonetheless Mamdani’s Queens feels like it rhymes with La Guardia’s base in East Harlem and the Lower East Side—blocks of working-class renters who keep the city humming and yet pass invisibly through it. The tenement floor now lives on a scooter and in an app: delivery riders with plastic ponchos, rideshare drivers orbiting JFK at 2 a.m., home-health aides and night-shift nurses catching the dawn train. Many are immigrants; most are tired. They’re the heirs of the garment cutters and dockhands who once packed Socialist rallies and crowded Tammany ward halls, the same stubborn coalition of people who make the city run before the city remembers their names. In his victory speech, Mamdani named them. “To every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point, know this: this city is your city, and this democracy is yours too.” New York has never changed by polite inheritance. Each coalition elbows its way in, and in doing so redraws the borders of “we.” Grace cracked the door; Walker swung it wide and nearly lost it; Hillquit mapped the immigrant tenement workers; La Guardia built a floor sturdy enough to stand on. Now, in a city remade by migration once again, Mamdani’s bloc—bodega owners and nurses, young socialists, cabdrivers and the children of immigrants who bring your groceries to the fifth floor—is testing whether the city can still renew itself from the bottom up. History’s answer tends to be yes. When New York seems sealed, someone new finds the key. _Waleed Shahid is a Democratic strategist and movement organizer. He played a key role in launching the Green New Deal campaign and successfully recruiting and electing working-class progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, and Summer Lee.___Waleed’s Substack__ _is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ * Zohran Mamdani * Fiorello La Guardia * New York City (406 * Immigrants Subscribe to Portside

Zohran Mamdani speaks during victory speech at a mayoral election night watch party, Tuesday, November 4, 2025, in New York. | Credit: Yuki Iwamura/AP Photo // The American Prospect The watch party was packed full of Zohran Mamdani supporters, some of whom had just finished a canvassing shift that ended when the polls closed. When the results were announced, sooner than expected, the room broke into excited screams, hugs, and chants of “Fuck you, Cuomo.” Some were in tears. Many seemed relieved and ready for sleep. But as the evening’s speakers said, the fight isn’t over. Rest? “No, there’s too much to do. We’re facing the national guard, and ICE,” Jews for Racial & Economic Justice organizer Lexi Sasanow told me an hour earlier in Manhattan, 11 miles away. Standing with two others outside a polling place off 110th Street beneath the bright full moon, Sasanow described what people should do today: Find a political home, be it a nonprofit, mutual aid group, or a community garden, so you “have a network of people you want to be with as things get harder.” JFREJ, for example, is hosting a mass call tomorrow to talk about what comes next. Sasanow and fellow organizer Alessia Milstein, the organization’s digital and communications fellow, urged people to sign up. “We don’t elect saviors,” Milstein said. “We elect comrades.” And while progressive organizations may have more power under a Mamdani administration, the city is going to face real, material threats from President Trump that must be fought. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Mamdani beat former governor and sex pest Andrew Cuomo, 50.4 percent to 41.6 percent as of late Tuesday night. The 8.8-point lead meant that even if Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa had dropped out and sent his 7.1 percent to Cuomo, Cuomo still would have lost. “We are breathing in the air of a city that has been reborn,” Mamdani said in his acceptance speech. “We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible.” _**Mamdani’s 104,400 volunteers took nothing for granted, canvassing until polls closed.**_ More than 735,000 people cast ballots during early voting alone, quadruple the number of voters who did in 2021. By 3 p.m., voters had already surpassed the turnout of any mayoral election since 2001, casting 1.4 million votes. By the end of the night, the tally was up to two million, the highest mayoral race turnout since 1969. At the Synod Hall polling site, where JFREJ organizers were getting out the vote, a poll worker said the turnout was the most intense she’d ever seen in her 15 years on the job, and that it was especially busy at lunchtime. “It’s like five times the amount of people coming out,” she said shortly before polls closed, as voters stood beneath the prayer house’s vaulted ceiling and candelabra. Mamdani’s 104,400 volunteers took nothing for granted, canvassing until polls closed. The campaign knocked on another 1.4 million doors across all five boroughs as of 2 p.m. yesterday, on top of the 1.6 million during the June primary. Now they vow to continue organizing to help Mamdani achieve his agenda. **ELECTION DAY WAS CLEAR AND COLD.** Mamdani’s army of volunteers began before dawn, turning out for 6 a.m. shifts near polling places, subway station entrances, and cafés across the city. Some supporters had already been thinking about the day after the election, and were intent on heeding the lessons from other headline-grabbing campaigns built by volunteers. 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 Obama for America, for example, organized 2.2 million volunteers to get Barack Obama to the White House in 2008. But in the months after he became president, volunteers said they felt discarded and disenchanted because he had no further use for them, even though they wanted to keep fighting for health care and other policy proposals. “The failure of the Obama era was , ‘Oh, he’ll take care of it from here,’” David Duhalde, former political director of Our Revolution, said ahead of the election. A better move is to keep organizing. Duhalde suggested that anyone who volunteered to get Mamdani elected should rest first, then keep pushing. “You want to keep fighting the hard battles,” he said, such as flipping seats to progressive candidates, and continuing to agitate for progressive policies until they are implemented. Much of Mamdani’s agenda hinges on cooperation with the state legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul, and persuading Albany will be instrumental to the mayor-elect’s success. But Hochul herself is up for re-election next year. “It’s not lost on her that a mandate for a Democratic Socialist agenda focused on affordability has grown in the city,” said Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of NYC Democratic Socialists of America. “I think that will be on her mind when she’s campaigning, that hundreds of thousands of people have made their views clear and will be expecting the governor to deliver.” Several organizations that helped elect Mamdani were already organizing for policy changes similar to his major planks, and leaders told the _Prospect_ yesterday that they intend to keep going. That’s the plan at CAAAV Voice, a New York Communities for Change coalition member that organizes to build working-class power for Asian immigrants, tenants, and young people. Speaking on Election Day, CAAAV Voice organizing director Alina Shen said her group decided to help get Mamdani to Gracie Mansion as a tactical move in the long battle to make New York more affordable, especially on housing. His candidacy was an opportunity for CAAAV Voice to highlight its priorities, and engage community members who didn’t previously want to get involved in politics. One of its first volunteer efforts for Mamdani was canvassing small businesses in Chinatown, Shen said, where multiple owners were initially not all that interested in what they had to say. But because some of the volunteers spoke Fujianese and had lived in the neighborhood for years, it was possible to build small, skeptical interactions into trusting relationships. “We had to earn people’s trust,” Shen said. “There are instances where we’ve had to transform and move people, because we need every single person in this city to move towards this vision together.” Isaac Kirk-Davidoff, a DC 37 union member and Crown Heights Tenant Union volunteer, also has housing on the mind. Like CAAAV Voice, volunteering for Mamdani was a chance for him to advance his goals of activating renters and getting closer to the goal of organizing across the entire city. “We don’t just need a new mayor, we need a new system,” he said yesterday. “It’s a window of opportunity and I really want to seize it and see what we can push through.” Continuing to organize is not as simple as just saying you’ll do it, he said; long-term organizing takes time and stamina. His day-after suggestion is to find or stay with a group and to talk to neighbors, especially for those living in a building with problems. “My advice is to find that space where you can think, act, and do politics,” he said, “and build from there.” _**Whitney Curry Wimbish** is a staff writer at The American Prospect and can be reached at _[[email protected]__ _. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletter division for 17 years and before that was a reporter at The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey.]_ _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._ * Zohran Mamdani * New York City mayoral election * New York City * New York * Andrew Cuomo * Democratic Party * DSA * Democratic Socialists of America * WFP * Working Families Party * 2025 Elections * Politics * Elections 2026 * 2026 Midterms Subscribe to Portside

NEWS 31 October 2025 Powerful new antibiotic that can kill superbugs discovered in soil bacteria Surprise discovery could pave the way for new treatments against drug-resistant infections. By Miryam Naddaf Twitter Facebook Email Close up of a colony of St | Dr Jeremy Burgess/Science Photo Library By studying the process through which a soil bacterium naturally produces a well-known drug, scientists have discovered a powerful antibiotic that could help to fight drug-resistant infections. In experiments described in the _Journal of the American Chemical Society_ on Monday1, the team studied the multi-step pathway that the bacterium _Streptomyces coelicolor_ uses to make the antibiotic methylenomycin A, which was first identified in 19652,3. They discovered an intermediate compound — called premethylenomycin C lactone — whose antimicrobial activity was 100 times stronger than that of the final product. Tiny doses of it killed strains of bacteria known to cause hard-to-treat infections. The discovery was a ‘surprise’, says study co-author Gregory Challis, a chemical biologist at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK. “As humans, we anticipate that evolution perfects the end product, and so you’d expect the final molecule to be the best antibiotic, and the intermediates to be less potent,” he says. But the finding “is a great example of what a ‘blind watchmaker’ evolution is. And it’s a good way of exemplifying it in a very molecular way,” adds Challis. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Antimicrobial resistance is a growing threat, projected to cause 39 million deaths worldwide over the next 25 years. Researchers say that the discovery of a potent antimicrobial compound might lead to fresh drugs to tackle resistance. The work underscores “the potential of such studies to identify new bioactive chemical scaffolds from ‘old’ pathways”, says Gerard Wright, a biochemist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. ## **Accidental discovery** In 2006, Challis and his colleagues began studying the molecular pathway through which _Streptomyces coelicolor_ produces methylenomycin A. To do this, they deleted the genes encoding enzymes involved in each step, one by one. Their work built on earlier efforts in 2002 to sequence the bacterium’s genome4. By 2010, the team had mapped the mechanism that the bacterium used to make methylenomycin A and identified several intermediate molecules that it produced along the way. “We were just doing very fundamental blue-sky research,” says Challis. “We discovered these intermediates, and we left them for a while because we didn’t quite know what to do with them.” It was several years later — around 2017 — that a PhD student at Challis’s laboratory tested these intermediate molecules for antimicrobial activity. 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 These tests revealed that two molecules, including premethylenomycin C lactone, were much more effective than methylenomycin A at targeting seven strains of Gram-positive bacteria, including _Staphylococcus aureus_ , which infects skin, blood and internal organs, and _Enterococcus faecium_ , which can cause deadly bloodstream and urinary infections. The lowest concentration of premethylenomycin C lactone needed to kill drug-resistant strains of _Staphylococcus aureus_ was just 1 microgram per millilitre, compared with 256 micrograms per millilitre of methylenomycin A. The compound could also kill bacteria at much smaller doses than those needed for vancomycin, a ‘last line’ antibiotic used to treat infections caused by two _Enterococcus faecium_ strains, to be effective. The team then tested whether _E. faecium_ could develop resistance to the newly discovered antibiotic. They treated bacteria with increasing concentrations of premethylenomycin C lactone for 28 days and compared the results with those of vancomycin. Vancomycin-treated bacteria mutated and developed resistance — after 28 days, eight times higher doses of the drug were needed to stop their growth. But the amount of premethylenomycin C lactone that was effective did not change over the course of the experiment, suggesting that _E. faecium_ does not easily develop resistance to the new molecule. The work “is a lovely example of how basic research on a chemically interesting antibiotic can have unexpected benefit”, says Christopher Schofield, a chemist who studies antibacterial resistance at the University of Oxford, UK. ## **Future directions** Earlier this year, another research group collaborated with Challis’s team to develop a cost-effective way to synthesize the antibiotic using commercial materials5, which might help to produce it at scale. But the researchers first plan to explore how exactly the molecule works against bacteria. “We still don’t really know where it targets. We think it targets the cell wall in some way,” says study co-author Lona Alkhalaf, a chemical biologist at the University of Warwick. Challis adds that further research is needed to test the molecule’s toxicity in mammalian cells. Understanding the mechanism of action and toxicity could allow researchers to engineer analogues “where we retain the activity against the target in the bacteria, but we engineer out any other activities that might be causing toxicity in humans”, he says. _doi:https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03595-3_ ## **References** 1. Corre, C. _et al._ _J. Am. Chem. Soc_. https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.5c12501 (2025). **Article********Google Scholar****** 2. Wallhausser, K. H., Nesemann, G., Prave, P., & Steigler, A. _Antimicrob. Agents Chemother._ **5** , 734–736 (1965). **PubMed********Google Scholar****** 3. Huber, G. _et al._ _Antimicrob. Agents Chemother._ **5** , 737–742 (1965). **PubMed********Google Scholar****** 4. Bentley, S. D. _et al._ _Nature_ **417** , 141–147 (2002). **Article********PubMed********Google Scholar****** 5. Wright, A. _et al._ _J. Org. Chem._ **90** , 11230–11236 (2025). **Article********PubMed********Google Scholar****** **Download references** **‘Tis the Season** **Jess Steier, DrPH, Amy Gragnolati, PharmD, and Elana Pearl BenJoseph, MD, MPH** **Unbiased Science** New vaccines and antibodies mean fewer hospital stays and more holiday celebrations October 29, 2025 * Science * Medicine * antibiotic-resistant infections Subscribe to Portside

Teamsters president Sean O'Brien on 3 April. Richard Hooker Jr of Philadelphia's Local 623 on 27 October. | Composite: Stuart Cahill; Kriston Jae Bethel/Getty; The Teamsters International president, Sean O’Brien, is putting the “working class in jeopardy” by allying with Donald Trump, according to a prominent labor activist challenging his leadership of the powerful union. O’Brien has “no business being a labor leader” and “shouldn’t be trusted”, Richard Hooker Jr – who is running against O’Brien’s re-election next year – told the Guardian. Hooker has emerged as a leading critic of O’Brien, who described Trump as “our enemy” during his first term in the White House**,** while criticizing the Teamsters leadership at the time for lack of opposition to Trump, and said it was “unfortunate” so many Teamsters members voted for Trump during his victorious campaign to lead the union in 2021. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail As Trump marched back to power, however, O’Brien pivoted. He met privately with the president last January, and hailed him as “one tough SOB” during an unprecedented address at last summer’s Republican national convention. “When he was running, the first time he was saying the truth about Trump,” Hooker said, suggesting O’Brien made his early attacks on Trump just to win election as Teamsters president. “Now that he’s elected, he has decided to go along with Trump and everything that he’s done. But not just Trump, also the ruling class, the employer class, billionaire class, because that’s who Trump represents. He doesn’t represent the workers.” After O’Brien’s convention speech, the Teamsters – one of the largest unions in the US, representing more than 1.3 million workers – controversially declined to endorse a candidate in November’s presidential election. The union had endorsed every Democrat on the ticket since 2000. The Teamsters deferred comment to the O’Brien slate’s campaign. O’Brien and his campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment. With O’Brien up for re-election next year, Hooker, the secretary-treasurer and principal officer of Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia, is leading a rival slate of other union leadership candidates against O’Brien’s slate. The election will take place November 2026. Hooker’s campaign is currently gathering union signatures to make the ballot for the Teamsters national convention in June, where they will vie for 5% of delegates to make the ballot for the November election. 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 Born and raised a preacher’s son around Fayetteville, North Carolina, Hooker began working at UPS shortly after high school in 1999 while attending Drexel University. As a package handler at a UPS warehouse near Philadelphia international airport, he became disillusioned with union leadership as a shop steward with the Teamsters when grievances about their contract were dismissed. His bid to lead Local 623 came up short in 2016. But in 2020, the married father of four became the first Black man to ever lead the union, which represents workers at companies including UPS and Greyhound. Now Hooker is running to replace O’Brien at the top of one of the most influential unions in the US, due to frustrations over his decision to align with Trump, the 2023 UPS contract as UPS recently reported cutting 48,000 jobs, and allegations of intimidation against criticizing O’Brien’s administration. “You have your supposed leader flirting with someone who does not care if you have a pension – someone who does not care if you have healthcare, who does not care if you have the National Labor Relations Board], if you have protect protections at the [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] or [[Occupational Safety and Health Administration],” said Hooker. “If you align yourself with someone who is OK with being in a relationship with that type of person, then they have no business being a labor leader, because what you’re doing is you’re putting your members and the rest of the working class in jeopardy. “I get the whole bipartisanship, I get working across the aisle. I get that. But when someone has a history of annihilating workers and the working class, then we have no business being with that person.” Hooker also wants the Teamsters to re-affiliate with the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US. He would be the first Black man to lead the union. He has already started to receive harassment after launching his campaign, including an anonymous voicemail left at his office earlier this week which used racist language**.** Republicans and Trump have often cited O’Brien in claims that Republicans are making inroads with labor and the working class, including from the Republican senator Markwayne Mullin, who sparred with O’Brien during a Senate hearing in 2023, but recently appeared on his podcast. Since Trump took office in January, the fallout from O’Brien’s relationship with Trump has intensified. Teamsters has also faced criticism for hiring Peter Cvjetanovic – whose face became a symbol of the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia – for an administrative job at the union’s headquarters in Washington DC. Cvjetanovic was later reportedly fired. O’Brien has maintained regular communication with Trump throughout his presidency, he claimed in an interview earlier this year with the Hollywood Reporter, while making several appearances on conservative media shows, including podcasts led by Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Bari Weiss, where he said Trump’s presidency so far was “a solid B” grade for the Teamsters. Under O’Brien, Teamsters has also significantly shifted its political donations, pouring money into Republican congressional candidates and groups rather than predominantly Democrats. “What has the union got from Trump? What have we got? We haven’t gotten anything now,” said Hooker. “Reaching across the aisle to some Republicans who have an issue of working with labor and making things better for labor, I understand that, and I agree with that. “But Trump does not have that résumé or history of doing anything for workers. Not one single thing. He comes in and eliminates contracts for workers. Even before he got elected, he told Elon Musk that he likes what he does when people go out on strike, he eliminates them. That’s who he is.” * Teamsters * Trump Subscribe to Portside

Tidbits - Reader Comments, Resources, Announcements AND cartoons - Oct 30, 2025 | Portside * #### **Neighbors and Canada Tariffs - The View from Our Northern Neighbor -- Cartoon by Michael de Adder** * #### **Re: Can Nonviolent Struggle Defeat a Dictator? This Database Emphatically Says Yes****(Jessica Benjamin)** * #### **Re: After No Kings, It’s Time To Escalate****(Robert Laite)** * #### **Re: Gaza ‘Scholasticide’: We Mourn Our Universities as One Mourns an Old Friend****(Dave Lott)** * #### **First They Came... -- Cartoon by Pat Bagley** * #### **Federal Worker -- Cartoon and Commentary by Rob Rogers** * #### **Migrants -- A poem by Seymour Joseph** * #### **Re: We Can’t Rebuild the Labor Movement Without Taking On Big Targets****(Allan Baluyot)** * #### **Let Them Eat Cake... -- Cartoon and Commentary by Benjamin Slyngstad** * #### **A Track Record -- Cartoon by Nick Anderson** * #### **I never thought this would happen -- again -- Nuclear tests****(Jay Schaffner)** #### . **Resources:** * #### **What We Need Is a Popular Front Against Fascism****(J. Patrick Patterson / In These Times)** * #### **The U.S.-Born labor force will shrink over the next decade****(Josh Bivens / Economic Policy Institute)** . #### **Announcements:** * #### **Forum - Lessons from 100 Years of Black Labor Activism: Fighting Racial Authoritarianism and Building Cross-Movement Solidarity - New York - November 7****(CUNY School of Labor & Urban Studies)** #### * #### **Book Talk - Aaron Leonard's Menace of Our Time on American Communism - New York - November 13****(Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives)** . . **Neighbors and Canada Tariffs - The View from Our Northern Neighbor -- Cartoon by Michael de Adder** Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Michael de Adder October 26, 2025 Neighbours **Re: Can Nonviolent Struggle Defeat a Dictator? This Database Emphatically Says Yes** Correction: The Berlin Wall came down on November 9 1989 anniversary if Kristallnacht not 1988. Jessica Benjamin 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 **Re: After No Kings, It’s Time To Escalate** General strike is the next logical step. The GOP and their Oligarchy masters don't really care if you assemble and wave signs. What will make them notice is workers of all types grinding the economy to a hault, even for a day. The losses of even one day from EVERYONE not working would scare them. Robert Laite Posted on Portside's Facebook page **Re: Gaza ‘Scholasticide’: We Mourn Our Universities as One Mourns an Old Friend** My friend Shahd, who remained in Gaza City before the ceasefire and the return of displaced people from the south, told me what became of the university after Israeli forces withdrew. "The library became a place for cooking over open fires," she said. "Books and doctoral dissertations were scattered on the ground, used by the displaced as kindling." In times of hunger and war, knowledge itself loses its value. Books and dissertations, once symbols of Gaza's intellect and promise, became fuel for survival. Dave Lott Posted on Portside's Facebook page **First They Came... -- Cartoon by Pat Bagley** Pat Bagley October 29, 2026 https://www.sltrib.com/resizer/v2/6HVKOMUNRREFXFKAA7A2FWPAAA.jpg?auth=8… Pat Bagley October 29, 2025 The Salt Lake Tribute **Federal Worker -- Cartoon and Commentary by Rob Rogers** _Trump is trying to extort $230 million from the government (during a shutdown) while the people who voted for him are still waiting for him to lower prices and hoping they can afford health care._ Rob Rogers October 23, 2025 TinyView **Migrants -- A poem by Seymour Joseph** October 25, 2025 A world of people, A world of differences: Color, language, customs. But all we call the human race. They move about, Here, there and everywhere, If moving is their decision. A wonderful mixture enriching all. Yet now there's a break in the chain, Ill will by some for others — Fomented by those who gain by division. Exclusion replaces inclusion. Our lamp has been doused, On the welcome we call emigration. Seymour Joseph **Re: We Can’t Rebuild the Labor Movement Without Taking On Big Targets** (posting on Portside Labor) Absolutely right. Let's also re- establish our own Party to be the vanguard of our struggle to transform the outlook of the trade union movement as well as politics and ideology, from pro-Capitalist to pro-Worker in thought, in words and in deeds. Long live the genuine union! Long live the Worker's Party! Long live the Working Masses of USA. Allan Baluyot **Let Them Eat Cake... -- Cartoon and Commentary by Benjamin Slyngstad** Sure people are about to lose food assistance but Trump Antoinette wants a ballroom. Benjamin Slyngstad October 28, 2025 slyngstad_cartoons **A Track Record -- Cartoon by Nick Anderson** Nick Anderson October 29, 2025 Pen Strokes **I never thought this would happen -- again -- Nuclear tests** I was ten years old. I would go, with my mother to the weekly vigils of Women Strike for Peace in downtown Chicago, in protest against nuclear tests being carried out by the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union. We were citizens of the United States we could pressure our government, and we did. We were able to build a movement that forced the end of nuclear testing; We were part of an international peace movement that was able to force all countries and all governments to halt all above-ground testing of nuclear weapons and later was powerful enough that led to the signing of treaties that banned their use. Now the wannabe fascist dictator of the United States has declared that he is ordering the soc-called Department of War to resume the testing of nuclear weapons. It is time to do what my mother and thousands of other mothers did, to protect our children and grandchildren, to take to the streets, to defend our immigrant neighbors, to defend our children and grandchildren, to defend our babies, to put an end to this monstrous disaster. Going to those peace marches more than sixty years ago, I returned to my fourth grade classroom and wrote this poem (which hung outside the principal’s office, and was published in among other places, _The International Teamster_ (my father was a milkman), _Liberation Magazine,_ _The Freheit_ , _Jewish Currents_ , and _The Worker_.) #### The Bomb and Tom If I had a plane, I'd fly it down a green lane. I'd see the presidents, At their residence. I'd talk to them about the bomb That might save the life of Tom. It would be nice for children to grow up, Not BLOW UP! And try to read books, try! And sigh when the tests begin, Just wonder why? And save little Tom, just save Tom From the mighty atom bomb. Jay Schaffner **What We Need Is a Popular Front Against Fascism (J. Patrick Patterson / In These Times)** As fascism’s grip only grows tighter, the popular fronts of yesterday can become blueprints for solidarity today. J. Patrick Patterson October 28, 2025 In These Times Illustration by Kazimir Iskander #### **pop • u • lar front** _noun_ 1. a broad political alliance united against fascism or authoritarian rule 2. a big, messy group of people affiliated through common cause #### **Has this ever worked?** Kind of famously, yes — at least for a while. In the 1930s, as fascist movements stomped across Europe, popular fronts emerged to block the spread. In France and Spain, leftists, centrists and anti-fascist liberals joined forces to beat back the far right, sometimes literally. In the United States, the Communist Party helped bring broad, anti-fascist politics into public life, forming coalitions among Black writers, labor organizers and progressive cultural workers. As historian Bill Mullen writes in Popular Fronts, the period saw ​“an extraordinary rapprochement” between Black and white members of the U.S. Left — not just in protest, but in culture, art and publishing. In Chicago, a ​“companion front” developed through a radical Black cultural infrastructure with institutions like the Chicago Defender and the South Side Community Art Center. To Mullen, this front was ​“mutually constitutive,” meaning the cultural and political fed each other. You couldn’t separate the protest from the poetry. _"We share a common interest, survival, and it cannot be pursued in isolation from others simply because their differences make us uncomfortable." — Audre Lorde_ #### **What’s this got to do with now?** A lot. Democracy is being hollowed out in real time — through voter suppression, surveillance, the criminalization of protest, the scapegoating of migrants, anti-LGBTQ laws, book bans. The far right is openly organizing to take permanent power, not just win elections. A popular front today wouldn’t mean everyone is suddenly best friends. It means movements stop playing defense in isolation and start fighting together, as if something bigger is at stake. Because it is. #### **What would a modern popular front look like?** It’s the Movement for Black Lives linking arms with climate activists and unions, knowing their fights are connected. It’s the People’s Climate Movement bringing together frontline communities and labor to take on big polluters. It’s housing coalitions in Seattle, Chicago and LA organizing with immigrant rights activists and elected officials for social housing. It looks like survival. The other side already has a front, known as the Heritage Foundation. #### **Isn’t this just ​****“****lesser evilism”?** Not if done right. A popular front isn’t about diluting politics, but sharpening priorities. We don’t need to agree on everything, but we do need to agree that authoritarianism, white nationalism and rule-by-billionaire are worth fighting — and we can’t fight alone. _[This is part of ​“The Big Idea,” a series offering brief introductions to progressive theories, policies, tools and strategies that can help us envision a world beyond capitalism.]_ _Reprinted from_ _In These Times_ _._ _Portside is proud to feature content from_ _In These Times_ _, a publication dedicated to covering progressive politics, labor and activism. To get more news and provocative analysis from In These Times,__sign up_ _for a free weekly e-newsletter or_ _subscribe_ _to the magazine at a special low rate._ _Never has independent journalism mattered more. Help hold power to account:__Subscribe to In These Times magazine_ _, or_ _make a tax-deductible donation to fund this reporting_ _._ **The U.S.-Born labor force will shrink over the next decade (Josh Bivens / Economic Policy Institute)** Achieving historically ‘normal’ GDP growth rates will be impossible, unless immigration flows are sustained By Josh Bivens October 7, 2025 Economic Policy Institute It is often underrecognized how much population aging is currently reducing the growth rate of the U.S. labor force and will continue to pull it down in coming decades. The share of the population that is over the age of 65 (when labor force participation tends to take a steep fall on average) is rising rapidly. This share was 12.4% in 2007, 17.9% in 2024, and will hit 21.2% by 2035 (CBO 2025b). A recent EPI report (Gould et al. 2025) assessed trends in U.S. labor force participation and reviewed the research literature about their drivers and the potential effects of policy changes on these trends. One upshot of this research literature is that even the most ambitious policies to boost the labor force participation rate of the current U.S. workforce would not materially change these trends. Any decline in labor force growth necessarily leads to a decline in the rate of growth of gross domestic product (GDP). GDP is the product of the number of hours worked in an economy multiplied by productivity (the average amount of output generated in an hour of work). If the number of work hours falls because the labor force shrinks, this essentially translates one-for-one into slower aggregate growth. Policymakers who do not want to see the pace of GDP growth shrink relative to the past history of U.S. growth really only have one option: allowing larger flows of immigration. Absent this, other policies to boost the U.S. labor force—while they might be wise along many margins—will not restore overall GDP growth to anywhere near its historic pace. In the rest of this policy brief, we lay out some of the larger trends in U.S. labor force growth and the implications of population aging for the future path of the labor force and economic growth. #### **U.S. labor force growth has slowed a lot in recent decades, and U.S.-Born labor force growth has slowed even more** **Figure A** shows the average annual growth rate of the overall labor force for a number of historical periods. We pick endpoints for these periods that correspond with business cycle peaks to make sure that sharp cyclical differences are not driving these trends. For two recent periods (2007–2019 and 2019–2024), we also show the average annual growth of just the _U.S.-born_ labor force. Between 1948 and 1979, labor force growth averaged 1.8% annually. From 1979 to 2007, this pace slowed, but only slightly, averaging 1.4% annually. However, in the two business cycles since 2007, labor force growth averaged just 0.5%–0.6% annual growth. For the two most recent business cycles, we have data on growth in the U.S.-born labor force, and this growth is just 0.3% on average. [Read the Full Report](https://PDF https://files.epi.org/uploads/U-S-born-labor-force-will-shrink-over-the-next-decade.pdf) -- [Download](https://PDF https://files.epi.org/uploads/U-S-born-labor-force-will-shrink-over-the-next-decade.pdf) **Economic Policy Institute****https://www.epi.org/** **1225 Eye St. NW, Suite 600** **Washington, DC 20005** **Phone: 202-775-8810 •****[email protected]** **Forum - Lessons from 100 Years of Black Labor Activism: Fighting Racial Authoritarianism and Building Cross-Movement Solidarity - New York - November 7 (CUNY School of Labor & Urban Studies)** **Friday, November 7** **12:30pm - 2:00pm** Free and open to all. Lunch will be served. In-person-only: CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies **25 West 43rd Street** **18th floor** **New York, NY 10036** Click here to register. https://slucuny.swoogo.com/7november2025/register Please register to receive event info and reminders. (slucuny.swoogo.com/7November2025/register) **The achievements of Black union activists in the U.S. labor movement over the last 100 years offer powerful lessons for anyone seeking to build a multiracial, democratic working-class movement today.** Black labor leaders consistently challenged both white supremacy within unions and economic injustice and racial authoritarianism from employers and the government. Since the 1920s and the early organizing of A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Black labor activists have insisted that racial justice is core to class struggle. That Black leadership in the labor movement was deeply rooted both in working-class communities and other freedom struggles—most notably the Black Freedom / Civil Rights movement—played no small part in the gains made by working-class African Americans and Black-led unions. Join us to learn from a panel discussion with **Cedric de Leon** , Professor of Sociology and Labor Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; author and activist **Bill Fletcher Jr.** ; **Tamara Lee** , Associate Professor, Labor Studies and Employment Relations, Rutgers University; and moderated by **Cameron Black** , Assistant Professor, Labor Studies CUNY SLU. The speakers will discuss what today’s labor movement can learn from this history to strengthen its organizing tactics and build solidarity for a multiracial working-class democracy and how historically tensions between or within movements have helped to build a movement’s power and how we might imagine using tensions today to strengthen our movements. **Book Talk - Aaron Leonard's Menace of Our Time on American Communism - New York - November 13 (Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives)** **Thursday, November 13 · 5:30 - 6:30pm EST** **Bobst Library** **70 Washington Square South** **2nd Floor -- Room 251** **New York, NY 10012** **REGISTER TODAY** From Rutgers University Press: "Beginning at the turn of the century, and ending only with communism’s collapse, the US government and major elements in the wider society undertook an unrelenting effort to suppress and criminalize domestic communism. This book tracks those efforts; from the state laws of the twenties that imprisoned the fledgling communist leadership, the efforts by police and local authorities against communists as they fought for unions, racial equality, and the unemployed, the trials and imprisonment of communist leaders mid-century, the extra-legal efforts of the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) in the sixties, and the ongoing, relentless attention by the FBI afterward. This is a long-overdue book about the most extensive, repressive effort ever undertaken by US authorities against a political organization that, however problematic, was largely operating within the scope of constitutionally mandated freedoms." _**[Aaron J. Leonard** is an author and historian. Among his books are Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists, The Folk Singers & the Bureau, and Meltdown Expected: Crisis, Disorder and Upheaval at the End of the 1970s (Rutgers University Press, 2024).]_ * Reader Comments * Donald Trump * nuclear weapons * U.S. nuclear testing * nuclear tests * Canada * Tariffs * Trade Tariffs * Trade * trade wars * No Kings Day * mass protest * Popular Front * No Kings * Enemy Within * Authoritarianism * dictatorship * dictators * Kings * Fascism * Trump 2.0 * MAGA * Democratic Rights * Red Scare * McCarthyism * migrants * Immigrants * deportations * workforce * Gaza ceasefire * Ceasefire * Gaza * Israel * Palestine * Israel-Gaza War * Genocide * war crimes * IDF * Benjamin Netanyahu * Black workers * Black Labor * African Americans * Activism * Cartoons * resources * Announcements Subscribe to Portside

President Donald Trump and Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, during a meeting in the Oval Office | Shawn Thew/Getty Images Baseball fans who watched the World Series over the past week saw Addison Barger pinch-hit a grand slam to capture Game 1 for the Toronto Blue Jays and Yoshinobu Yamamoto retire 20 consecutive batters for a complete game to secure a Los Angeles Dodgers win in Game 2. In between those feats, they also witnessed a minor international incident. The government of Ontario, one of Canada’s provinces, aired a commercial during the games that centered on a 1987 speech by then-President Ronald Reagan about trade policy. In the speech, Reagan condemns tariffs and other protectionist measures that restrict free trade and lower Americans’ quality of life. “High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars,” Reagan said in the remarks. “The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers, and less and less competition. So, soon, because of the prices made artificially high by tariffs that subsidize inefficiency and poor management, people stop buying. Then the worst happens: Markets shrink and collapse; businesses and industries shut down; and millions of people lose their jobs.” Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail The ad was clearly meant as a critique of the Trump administration’s trade policy, and Trump—who gets reliably worked up any time the television isn’t nice to him—reacted accordingly. “The sole purpose of this FRAUD was Canada’s hope that the United States Supreme Court will come to their ‘rescue’ on Tariffs that they have used for years to hurt the United States,” he claimed on his personal social media website. “Now the United States is able to defend itself against high and overbearing Canadian Tariffs (and those from the rest of the World as well!).” Trump also quoted from a statement by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that denounced the ad. “Their Advertisement was to be taken down, IMMEDIATELY, but they let it run last night during the World Series, knowing that it was a FRAUD,” Trump continued. “Because of their serious misrepresentation of the facts, and hostile act, I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now.” Three things stand out about the president’s statement. One is the legal threats made by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and endorsed by Trump over the ad’s supposed misuse of Reagan’s remarks. As the Associated Press noted over the weekend, Reagan did occasionally levy import taxes on countries like Japan and on products like semiconductors, in response to foreign trade policies, but did not “love” tariffs as Trump claimed. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library doesn’t have any “legal options,” as its statement suggested. The library is a museum and archive, not some extension of his now-deceased person. It can’t sue Canada for defamation on someone else’s behalf, or for a dead person, or for something that is objectively true. Reagan really did give that speech and say those words and have those policies. Indeed, if I were a member of the Reagan family, I might be a little annoyed that a presidential library seems more interested in placating a sitting president than honestly representing its namesake’s legacy. Another thing that stands out is Trump’s reference to the Supreme Court. His stated fear is that the advertisement could influence the justices. Oral arguments in the tariffs case are scheduled for November 5, and their outcome is clearly on the president’s mind. (He even threatened to attend in person.) But the ad made no mention of the court itself, nor did it appear to be directed toward the justices. If influencing the justices was Ontario’s goal, it was a poorly planned effort. The ads did not air during the Yankees’ now-finished postseason run, where lifelong fan (and 1995 season savior) Sonia Sotomayor might have seen them. Nor did they appear when the Dodgers trounced Samuel Alito’s beloved Philadelphia Phillies in the divisional round. Neither Elena Kagan’s Mets nor the Washington Nationals, whose fans include Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, even made it to the postseason. (I do not believe any of the other four justices are Dodgers or Blue Jays fans, though they are free to request a correction via email.) 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 also not illegal or improper to air commercials with the hope of influencing Supreme Court justices. Nobody does it because it would be absurd and extremely inefficient; there is no way to guarantee that anyone on the court will be watching TV when your hopeful spot airs. If Ontario officials wanted to be sure that they had the justices’ ears, they’d have done better to file a friend-of-the-court brief in the current case. Foreign governments have done so in previous cases with international implications. None have been filed yet in in the tariffs case, likely because it would prompt the sort of backlash from Trump that we are witnessing now. If nothing else, Trump’s mention of the Supreme Court would seem to betray a churning sense of concern that the justices might rule against him. That would be a seismic blow for his administration: Trump’s domestic economic agenda is built on the premise that he can impose trillions of dollars in tariffs on imported goods to punish foreign trade practices, stimulate domestic manufacturing, and raise revenues for the federal government. Without that freewheeling power, Trump would have to rely on Congress to pass new tariffs as he cajoles, bullies, threatens, and occasionally negotiates with foreign governments over new trade deals, which would be a near-fatal obstacle. The White House apparently began recognizing the possibility that it could lose these legal challenges when it sent an unusual series of letters to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in August warning of a second Great Depression if it ruled against him. (The court did rule against him, and economic collapse did not follow.) The most important thing about the ad is Trump’s response to it. Imposing an additional 10 percent tariff on Canadian goods because one of their provinces ran an ad during the World Series demolishes the legal justifications for Trump’s tariff policy. The Trump administration’s first wave of tariffs—the ones challenged by the plaintiffs in _Learning Resources v. Trump_ —came after Trump issued declarations of national emergency about various harms that the tariffs would supposedly remedy. Trump’s claimed authority comes from the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, of 1977, a Cold War–era law that sought to clarify and harmonize certain trade-related powers that presidents could wield at Congress’s behest. After declaring a national emergency, the president can take a wide range of actions on foreign trade, investment, currency exchanges, and so on. That includes the power to “regulate importation.” What counts as a national emergency is up to the president’s discretion. In its brief for the Supreme Court, for example, the Justice Department told the justices that “the President, in his exercise of power over the military and foreign affairs, has determined are necessary to rectify America’s country-killing trade deficits and to stem the flood of fentanyl and other lethal drugs across our borders.” It is unclear how raising prices on Canadian lumber and steel would affect, let alone reduce, illegal drug smuggling. Trump has played fast and loose with these national security justifications before. In a memorable exchange during his first term, then–Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reportedly asked the president what national security threat Canada could possibly pose to justify his imposition of IEEPA tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum. According to CNN, Trump replied, “Didn’t you guys burn down the White House?”—an apparent reference to the War of 1812. This is not to say that fentanyl isn’t a dangerous threat to American life or that an increase in domestic manufacturing capacity would be bad for the country. The problem is that tariffs don’t really address those problems while imposing severe economic consequences on Americans along the way. The Trump administration nevertheless insists that its judgment on what counts as a national emergency cannot be second-guessed by the courts. “The president’s determinations in this area are not amenable to judicial review,” the Justice Department insisted. “Judges lack the institutional competence to determine when foreign affairs pose an unusual and extraordinary threat that requires an emergency response; that is a task for the political branches.” This is not incorrect; courts have historically given broad deference to the other two branches on foreign policy matters for that exact reason. What Trump is asking the court to agree to goes beyond the ordinary judicial discomfort toward meddling in diplomatic matters. Raising tariffs on Canadian imports—to be more clear, raising import taxes on Americans—because a provincial government ran a commercial during the World Series that embarrassed the president is not a national emergency. If it is one, then anything can be a national emergency. This article could be a national emergency for criticizing the president, as well. (Fortunately I do not import any raw or finished goods into the United States, so I am beyond IEEPA’s scope.) If it is willing to do so, the Supreme Court could easily end the tariff madness—and its ever-escalating costs to ordinary Americans. The justices could hold that the power to “regulate importations” does not extend to tariffs, which are a core Article 1 power for Congress. The court could apply the “major questions” doctrine, which holds that Congress must “speak clearly” when writing laws of “vast economic and political significance,” to rule that IEEPA does not allow presidents to impose trillions of dollars in tariffs on any country for any reason at all. I do not expect the court to curb its historic reluctance to second-guess executive and legislative decisions on foreign policy. But it would not hurt if at least some of the justices noted, perhaps in a concurring opinion, that “deference” does not obligate the American judiciary to believe that up is down, or north is south, or that tariffs are paid by foreign countries, or that the president’s personal sense of embarrassment amounts to a national emergency. Chief Justice John Roberts famously once said that the court’s job was akin to that of an umpire who calls “balls and strikes.” That should also mean not calling a touchdown just because the president claims he scored one. === Matt Ford is a staff writer at _The New Republic._ * Tariffs; Canada; World Series Ad; Supreme Court; Subscribe to Portside

Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo gives his mayoral campaign kickoff speech at a carpenters union headquarters in SoHo, March 2, 2025,Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY “This story was originally published by THE CITY. Sign up to get the latest New York City news delivered to you each morning.” At the final mayoral debate of the general election late Wednesday, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo vowed to end the “hatemongering and division that is tearing this city apart.” Not 12 hours later, Cuomo participated in a conversation with the conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg where the two laughed about a hypothetical Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim state Assembly member leading the race for mayor, cheering on another Sept. 11 attack. Share this article on * __Twitter * __Facebook * __Mail “Any given morning there’s a crisis and people’s lives are at stake,” Cuomo told the radio host in criticizing Mamdani, 34, as inexperienced. “God forbid another 9/11. Can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?” Rosenberg responded, laughing, “Ya, I could. He’d be cheering.” Cuomo laughed and said, “That’s another problem.” And at a Harlem event announcing his endorsement of the former governor on Thursday, Mayor Eric Adams urged New Yorkers to reject Mamdani by invoking Islamophobic dog-whistles: “New York can’t be Europe, folks. I don’t know what’s wrong with people. You see what’s playing out in other countries because of Islamic extremism — not Muslims, let’s not mix this up. But those Islamic extremists that are burning churches in Nigeria, that are destroying communities in Germany.” Cuomo entered the Democratic race for mayor earlier this year as a perceived favorite, but after losing to Mamdani in the primary and continuing to trail in polls ahead of the Nov. 4 general election, he’s been ratcheting up his rhetoric against him. Over months, Cuomo has repeatedly criticized Mamdani’s stances on Israel and Gaza. But until recently, Cuomo declined to call Mamdani antisemitic — saying in interviews and at a recent debate that he doesn’t know what’s in Mamdani’s heart. In an interview on Monday, Cuomo called Mamdani’s stance on Israel “antisemitic.” 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 He and some Jewish leaders have seized on Mamdani’s refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” (a term he himself has not invoked but whose use he said he would discourage), and his characterization as Israel’s actions in Gaza as a “genocide,” as leading scholars on the subject and human rights groups have concluded. At the same time, Cuomo has also boosted his attacks on Mamdani’s Muslim bonafides, stirring the pot on longheld tensions between Hindus and Muslims, and going so far as to say last week that he doesn’t think Mamdani “is representative of the Muslim community.” On social media, Cuomo’s campaign has been featuring dystopic, artificial intelligence-created videos of an imagined Mamdani mayoralty, the latest of which featured criminals — including a shoplifting Black man wearing a keffiyeh — voicing their support for Mamdani’s policies. The video was pulled down from X shortly after being posted. In another campaign video, a group of Cuomo supporters who called themselves “Muslims against Mamdani” suggested that the Democratic candidate, whose mother is Hindu, is not Muslim enough because he is of mixed heritage. Mamdani, who rose the ranks in New York Democratic politics in part through his work trying to elevate Arabs and fellow Muslims to public office, called Cuomo’s remarks with Rosenberg “disgusting” and “racist” in an interview on PIX 11 on Thursday. “Frankly, it’s not about me, it’s about the fact that there are more than one million Muslims who live in New York City,” Mamdani said. “And to have our faith be smeared and slandered by someone who at one point was considered a leader in the Democratic primary showcases the fact that bigotry and racism is not exclusively a Republican problem, it’s also a problem within our own party.” Mamdani added, “It’s time to turn the page on Andrew Cuomo and on those who endorse this kind of rhetoric from him as well.” Cuomo’s remarks on Thursday drew swift condemnation from elected officials from Gov. Kathy Hochul to U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler, as well as Muslim leaders — including the leaders of a Bronx mosque who welcomed the former governor to their congregation last month. “We condemn his remarks completely, it’s very hurtful to hear,” said Zahra Thiam, a spokesperson for Imam Mohammed Ndiaye of the Masjid Ansarudeen Islamic Center, which hosted Cuomo on Sep. 20. The imam later endorsed Mamdani, Thiam said. “What Mamdani said — that it was Islamophobic — is what we all feel. Sept. 11 was such a horrific event, it impacted all of us,” said Thiam, noting the NYPD’s Muslim surveillance program and hate crimes against the community that took place as a result of the attacks on the World Trade Center. “Mamdani is a New Yorker and was also impacted, like all New Yorkers.” The executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a leading national Muslim civic group, condemned Cuomo’s remarks as “despicable, dangerous, and disqualifying.” “By agreeing with a racist radio host who suggested a Muslim elected official would ‘cheer’ another 9/11, Cuomo has crossed a moral line,” CAIR executive director Basim Elkarra said in a statement. “This rhetoric is not only deeply Islamophobic — it’s reckless and life-threatening to Muslim, Arab, and South Asian New Yorkers who still live with the trauma of the post-9/11 backlash.” At a press conference later in the day Thursday, where he received Adams’ endorsement, Cuomo said he wasn’t the one who made the comment. “That’s the host,” he said. “Go talk to the host about that.” Cuomo said his response about there being “another problem” referred to an issue he’s been highlighting for weeks concerning Mamdani’s recent appearance on the podcast of Hasan Piker, an influencer who during a 2019 critique of U.S. foreign policy said that “America deserved 9/11.” “I did a press conference weeks ago and asked him to denounce that statement and he refused. He refused,” said Cuomo. “That is an insult to New Yorkers, and yes, I have a problem with that.” Piker’s name never entered the conversation between Cuomo and Rosenberg, and Mamdani did condemn Piker’s comments as “reprehensible” last week at the first general election mayoral debate. At the same time that Cuomo has ratcheted up his rhetoric against Mamdani, he has courted conservatives, appearing on Fox News and Rosenberg’s show several times in the past week and openly calling on Republicans to vote for him instead of Curtis Sliwa, the GOP candidate, claiming that a vote from Sliwa is a vote for Mamdani. In turn, several prominent conservative figures — including Rosenberg and billionaire grocery magnate John Catsimatidis, a major GOP donor — have called on Sliwa to drop out and clear the field for Cuomo. Sliwa’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment about Cuomo’s remarks on Rosenberg’s show. Just as backlash was brewing over Cuomo’s comments about Mamdani, a political action committee that’s backing Cuomo, For Our City, unveiled a new ad that attacked Mamdani for a recent photo-op with a controversial imam. The 30-second piece features the phrase “Jihad on NYC” written in all caps under Mamdani’s smiling face. The phrase is ripped from a recent New York Post headline that claimed the imam, Siraj Wahhaj, had called for a “jihad” of Muslims in the city in the 2000s. The story notes that Wahhaj specified that he was actually calling for a gun-free march of hundreds of thousands of New York’s Muslims to rally support for Muslims in other countries. Mamdani wrote on X later on Thursday that one of the PAC’s biggest donors, Joseph Gebbia — who contributed $1 million — has retweeted anti-immigrant messages. _Additional reporting by Samantha Maldonado._ Yoav Gonen is a senior reporter for THE CITY, where he covers NYC government, politics and the police department. [email protected] Claudia Irizarry Aponte is a senior reporter covering labor and work for THE CITY. [email protected] PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/10/23/cuomo-911-islamophobia-mamdani-musli…", urlref: window.location.href }); } } * Zohran Mamdani * Andrew Cuomo * Islamophobia * New York City * elections Subscribe to Portside

In the ever-evolving world of technology, where innovation once promised endless prosperity, a darker trend has taken hold. Cory Doctorow, the prolific author and tech critic, has long sounded the alarm on what he calls “enshittification”—the gradual degradation of services and products as companies prioritize profits over users, workers, and quality. This phenomenon, Doctorow argues, isn’t accidental but a deliberate shift in corporate strategy, particularly in Big Tech, where monopolistic practices squeeze value from every corner. Doctorow’s latest call to action targets the heart of the industry: its workforce. In a recent piece published in Communications of the ACM, he urges tech workers to unionize as the primary defense against this downward spiral. He points to the mass layoffs that have rocked Silicon Valley, from Meta to Google, leaving skilled engineers and developers feeling as disposable as gig economy drivers. **The Roots of Enshittification** Share this article on * __Twitter * __Facebook * __Mail Enshittification, a term Doctorow coined in 2022, describes a predictable cycle: platforms start by wooing users with superior experiences, then pivot to extracting maximum revenue from suppliers and partners, and finally turn on their own users with ads, paywalls, and diminished functionality. As detailed in his book “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It,” published by Verso Books, this process is exacerbated by lax antitrust enforcement, allowing a handful of giants to dominate without fear of competition. For tech workers, the implications are profound. Doctorow highlights how companies like Amazon treat employees as interchangeable parts, with grueling conditions and minimal protections. He draws parallels to historical labor struggles, noting that without collective bargaining, workers bear the brunt of corporate greed—evident in the recent waves of tech layoffs that have eliminated tens of thousands of jobs since 2023. **Unions as a Counterforce** Unionization, Doctorow contends, offers a bulwark against such exploitation. In the Slashdot coverage of his ACM article, he emphasizes that organized labor can enforce fair wages, job security, and ethical standards, preventing companies from “enshittifying” their internal operations. He cites successes like the Alphabet Workers Union at Google, which has pushed back against unethical projects and discriminatory practices. Moreover, Doctorow argues that unions empower workers to influence product decisions, potentially halting the enshittification of user-facing services. Imagine engineers collectively refusing to implement invasive surveillance features or predatory algorithms—this collective power could realign corporate priorities toward sustainability rather than short-term gains. The push for unions comes at a pivotal moment, with antitrust actions heating up against tech behemoths. As reported in The American Prospect‘s review of Doctorow’s work, deregulation has fueled this “brown stage capitalism,” where platforms decay into profit-extracting machines. Tech workers, often siloed in high-paying roles, have historically resisted unionizing, but Doctorow warns that the era of golden handcuffs is over. 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 He envisions a future where unionized tech labor collaborates with regulators and users to dismantle monopolies, fostering interoperability and competition. In his Democracy Now! interview, Doctorow stresses that without such bottom-up resistance, enshittification will only accelerate, eroding innovation and worker dignity alike. **Challenges and the Path Forward** Yet, organizing in tech faces hurdles, from anti-union campaigns to the freelance nature of much work. Doctorow, drawing from his Medium post on “The Enshittification of Tech Jobs,” notes that companies exploit legal loopholes to misclassify workers, denying them benefits. Overcoming this requires solidarity across roles, from coders to content moderators. Ultimately, Doctorow’s message is one of empowerment: tech workers hold the keys to reversing enshittification. By joining unions, they can demand accountability, ensuring that the industry’s future benefits creators, not just shareholders. As tech continues to shape society, this labor resurgence could redefine power dynamics for generations. * tech workers Subscribe to Portside

A protestor dressed in an inflatable pig costume in Washington DC, October 18, 2025. ,Kirstin Garriss/The Guardian Millions are expected to show out for protests on Saturday at more than 2,500 locations across America, from small towns to large cities, to speak against the Trump administration. Share this article on * __Twitter * __Facebook * __Mail No Kings, the coalition behind a mass demonstration in June, is again calling people to the streets to send the simple message that Donald Trump is not a king, pushing back against what they see as increasing authoritarianism. Several US cities now have a militarized presence on the ground, most against the will of local leaders. Trump has promised to crack down on dissent as part of an ongoing retribution campaign. Still, organizers say they expect to see one of the largest, if not the largest, single day of protest in US history. * * * ## What are the No Kings protests? A coalition of left-leaning groups is again leading a day of mass demonstrations across the US to protest against the Trump administration. The coalition spearheaded a previous No Kings protest day in June, drawing millions to the streets to speak out against the president on the same day Trump held a military parade in Washington. The protests are called No Kings to underscore that America does not have kinds of absolute rulers, a ding against Trump’s increasing authoritarianism. “‘NO KINGS’ is more than just a slogan; it is the foundation our nation was built upon,” a website for the protests, nokings.org, says. “Born in the streets, shouted by millions, carried on posters and chants, it echoes from city blocks to rural town squares, uniting people across this country to fight dictatorship together.” * * * ## Where are they happening? Organizers say there are more than 2,500 protests planned across the country, in the largest cities and in small towns, and in all 50 states. It is part of a distributed model where people protest in their own communities rather than traveling to large urban hubs to show that discontent with Trump exists in all corners of the US. 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 For the 18 October day of action, organizers have identified several anchor cities: Washington DC; San Francisco; San Diego; Atlanta; New York City; Houston, Texas; Honolulu; Boston; Kansas City, Missouri; Bozeman, Montana; Chicago and New Orleans. The protests start at different times depending on location. The No Kings website has a map with details for each location. Washington DC Oct 18, 2025 Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for No Kings * * * ## Why are organizers asking protesters to wear yellow? No Kings protesters are being asked to wear yellow by organizers to signal unity in a visually striking way – and to align with other pro-democracy movements in Ukraine, Hong Kong and South Korea. As organizers put it: “Yellow is our shared signal, bright, bold and impossible to ignore, a reminder that America’s power belongs to our people, not to kings.” * * * ## Who organized the protests? More than 200 organizations are signed on as partners for the protests. Indivisible, the progressive movement organization with chapters around the US, is a main organizer. The American Civil Liberties Union is a partner, as is the advocacy group Public Citizen. Unions including the American Federation of Teachers and SEIU are in the coalition. The new protest movement 50501, which began earlier this year as a call for protests in all 50 states on a single day, is a partner. Other partners include the Human Rights Campaign, MoveOn, United We Dream, the League of Conservation Voters, Common Defense and more. Home of the Brave, a group affiliated with the Trump critic George Conway that describes itself as a “community of Americans who refuse to be silenced”, announced a $1m ad campaign to promote the rallies. * * * ## How many people were at the last No Kings protests? And how many are expected this weekend? Several million people showed up for the June protests, though numbers vary depending on the source. Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium, which uses publicly available data to estimate the size of political crowds, said the June event was “probably the second-largest single day demonstration since Donald Trump first took office in January 2017”, second to the Women’s March in 2017. The Harvard consortium estimated that between 2 and 4.8 million people participated in more than 2,150 actions on 14 June, though the group notes that it wasn’t able to confirm figures for 18% of protest sites, nearly all in small towns. This was a significantly larger turnout than a Hands Off protest in April, the first big day of protest of Trump’s second term. Another estimate, by data journalist G Elliott Morris of the Substack newsletter Strength in Numbers, calculated turnout between 4 and 6 million. For context, the 2017 Women’s March drew an estimated 3.3 million to 5.6 million. So far, 2025 has seen “far more protests” than during the same time period in 2017, the consortium noted. Organizers anticipate millions will turn out for the 18 October protests. More locations have signed on to host events than for the June day of action, and organizers expect to see an overall larger number of people in the streets than in June. * * * ## Why now? What are the organizers’ messages? The No Kings coalition has cited Trump’s “increasing authoritarian excesses and corruption” as motivation for the protests, including ramping up deportations, gutting healthcare, gerrymandering maps and selling out families for billionaires. The movement describes itself as pro-democracy and pro-worker, and it rejects “strongman politics”, vowing to fight until “we get the representation we deserve”. The coalition is highlighting what it sees as several major concerns about the second Trump administration: Trump is using taxpayer money for power grabs, sending in federal forces to take over US cities; Trump has said he wants a third term and “is already acting like a monarch”; the Trump administration has taken its agenda too far, defying the courts and slashing services while deporting people without due process. “Whether you’re outraged by attacks on civil rights, skyrocketing costs, abductions and disappearances, the gutting of essential services, or the assault on free speech, this moment is for you,” the No Kings website says. “Whether you’ve been in the fight for years or you’re just fed up and ready to take action, this moment is for you.” The goal is to “build a massive, visible, nonviolent, national rejection of this crisis” and show that the majority of people are taking action to stop Trump. * * * ## What have Trump and the GOP said about the protests so far? Trump himself has not weighed in on the 18 October protests. After the June protests, though, he said, “I don’t feel like a king, I have to go through hell to get stuff approved.” Other top Republicans have cast blame on the protests for prolonging the government shutdown, smearing them as anti-American. Some of Trump’s cabinet members have piled on to unsubstantiated claims that Democrats won’t agree to a budget deal to keep the government open for fear of backlash from their base at the protests. “‘No Kings’ means no paychecks, no paychecks and no government,” the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said. Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, said Democratic leaders weren’t running the show in the Senate, but protesters were. He also repeated a common false refrain that protesters were being paid. Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of Indivisible, wrote on Bluesky of Duffy’s comments: “This is what it looks like when you’ve fully lost control of the message and you’re panicking.” The House speaker, Mike Johnson, said the protests would be filled with the “pro-Hamas wing” of the Democrats and the “antifa people”. “They’re all coming out,” Johnson said. “Some of the House Democrats are selling T-shirts for the event, and it’s being told to us that they won’t be able to reopen the government until after that rally because they can’t face their rabid base. I mean this is serious business hurting real people … I’m beyond words.” Tom Emmer, a Minnesota congressman, also called the protests the “hate America rally” and said Democrats were beholden to the “terrorist wing of their party”. The No Kings coalition said Johnson was “running out of excuses for keeping the government shut down” and decided to attack “millions of Americans who are peacefully coming together to say that America belongs to its people, not to kings”. * * * ## What is the 3.5% rule in protest? Organizers and protesters this year have repeatedly drawn on research that showed if 3.5% of a population protests non-violently against a regime, the regime will fail. This theory has been dubbed the “3.5% rule”. Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan created a database of civil resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006, analyzing whether non-violent or violent movements were more likely to succeed and whether there was a tipping point in terms of size for protests to actually expel the party or person in power. The results showed non-violent campaigns were often much larger and were twice as likely to succeed than violent movements. They were more representative of the population, and, they found, active and sustained participation by 3.5% of a population meant a movement would succeed, with very few, specific exceptions. In the US, 3.5% of the population would be more than 11 million people. So far, these mass days of action have not hit this threshold, though the threshold is not a magic number. Chenoweth noted in 2020 that the figure was a “descriptive statistic” derived from historical movements, “not necessarily a prescriptive one”, meaning it is not necessarily a guarantee to organize around, as some are explicitly doing now. While the exact number isn’t magic, the basics behind the statistic hold true: sustained, mass, non-violent resistance can topple governments. Protesters in Washington DC. Photograph: Kirstin Garriss/The Guardian * * * ## Are there safety plans? The 18 October protests come as Trump is cracking down on dissent, targeting immigrants who have participated in protests and going after pillars of civil society he sees as standing in the way of his agenda. They also come amid increasing instances of political violence. In response to questions about whether immigration enforcement officials will be at protest sites, the homeland security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said: “As it does every day, DHS law enforcement will enforce the laws of our nation.” In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott said he will deploy national guard troops to Austin, the capital city, though there will be protests in cities and towns throughout the state. The No Kings coalition is committed to non-violent action. On its website, the coalition says it expects all participants in its protests to “seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events”. The group has seen tens of thousands of participants on safety planning calls. Events will have designated people in charge of safety and marshals who will make sure people are able to safely exercise their rights. The coalition also said it will hand out “know your rights” cards or codes to download them so that attenders know how to advocate for themselves if there are issues. * No Kings Day Subscribe to Portside

With President Donald Trump floating potential military action within Venezuela and authorizing operations by the Central Intelligence Agency after launching several deadly strikes on boats near the South American country, three lawmakers from both sides of the aisle on Friday said they would force a new vote on blocking the White House from carrying out an attack there. Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) last week introduced a measure to rein in Trump’s bombing of boats in the Caribbean, which the White House has claimed are being used to traffic drugs into the US and present an imminent threat. The measure failed, with one Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.) joining most of the GOP in opposing it and two Republicans, Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), supporting it. Share this article on * __Twitter * __Facebook * __Mail Kaine and Schiff on Friday were reportedly hoping that a new bipartisan measure, introduced with Paul, would garner more support from the Republicans. They said they would force a vote on a war powers resolution to block the use of force by US troops “within or against” Venezuela unless it was “explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force.” The 1973 War Powers Act requires Congress to consider and vote on resolutions regarding a president’s power to enter an armed conflict without congressional authorization. “Congress has not authorized military force against Venezuela. And we must assert our authority to stop the United States from being dragged—intentionally or accidentally—into full-fledged war in South America,” said Schiff. “Americans don’t want to send their sons and daughters into more wars—especially wars that carry a serious risk of significant destabilization and massive new waves of migration in our hemisphere.” The lawmakers announced the resolution as it was reported that two survivors of the military’s most recent drone strike on a boat have been detained by US forces, with legal experts questioning whether they are prisoners or war or criminal suspects. 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 White House has insisted it is acting within its rights to defend US security by striking boats it believes are carrying drugs—even as details have emerged calling into doubt the allegations that the vessels pose a threat. Venezuela is not a significant source of drugs that are trafficked into the US—a fact that Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed when a reporter brought it up soon after the military began bombing boats, at least six of which have been struck so far. At least 27 people have been killed, and the grieving family of one victim spoke out Thursday and said they had not been involved in drug trafficking. Even if the vessels were carrying illegal substances, legal experts and critics in Congress have stressed in recent weeks that they should be dealt with, as in the past, by federal law enforcement agencies, as Congress has not authorized military action against Venezuela or drug cartels. “The American people do not want to be dragged into endless war with Venezuela without public debate or a vote,” said Paul. “We ought to defend what the Constitution demands: deliberation before war.” Kaine told reporters on Thursday the Congress’ knowledge of legal rationale for the boat strikes amounts to “a complete black hole.” Meanwhile, Trump has suggested this week he could further escalate attacks on Venezuela, saying the Caribbean Sea is “very well under control”—even though Vice President JD Vance has joked that the US could accidentally strike fishing boats in its operations there. “We are certainly looking at land now,” Trump said Wednesday. Kaine said he was “extremely troubled that the Trump administration is considering launching illegal military strikes inside Venezuela without a specific authorization by Congress.” “Americans don’t want to send their sons and daughters into more wars—especially wars that carry a serious risk of significant destabilization and massive new waves of migration in our hemisphere,” said Kaine. “If my colleagues disagree and think a war with Venezuela is a good idea, they need to meet their constitutional obligations by making their case to the American people and passing an authorization for use of military force.” “I urge every senator to join us in stopping this administration from dragging our country into an unauthorized and escalating military conflict,” said the senator. The _New York Times_ reported that Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) could potentially join the effort to pass the war powers resolution after voting against last week’s measure, which he said was too broad. “I am highly concerned,” Young said after the vote last week, “about the legality of recent strikes in the Caribbean and the trajectory of military operations without congressional approval or debate and the support of the American people.” _Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams._ __Common Dreams_ is a reader-supported independent news outlet created in 1997 as a new media model._ _Our nonprofit newsroom covers the most important news stories of the moment. Common Dreams free online journalism keeps our millions of readers well-informed, inspired, and engaged._ _We are optimists. We believe real change is possible. But only if enough well-informed, well-intentioned—and just plain fed up and fired-up—people demand it. We believe that together we can attain our common dreams._ * Venezuela * war powers * Adam Schiff * Tim Kaine * Rand Paul Subscribe to Portside

Cmmunity advocates pushing to end policies of electric and gas disconnections in San Antonio, Texas, (Image: Greg Harman). Standing before the United Nations last week, U.S. President Donald Trump unleashed long-held animosity for the body dating back decades to when his company was apparently rejected for a renovations gig. Trump swore he would have delivered mahogany walls and marble floors to the tower. And now look at the state of the place, he grumbled. “You walk on terrazzo. Do you notice that?” Something far worse than composite flooring is in store for nations that fail to rally to Trump’s hypernationalism, anti-immigrant fervor, and fawning embrace of fossil fuels. “Your countries are going to hell,” he said, apparently addressing his comments primarily to the “English-speaking world.” In a room filled with heads of state already reckoning with global warming as an existential threat, Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He dismissed the decades of warnings about an overheating planet**** and the increasingly frequent and extreme weather events**** that the World Economic Forum has estimated are costing the world $16M every hour. Share this article on * __Twitter * __Facebook * __Mail It was a do-as-I-say-and-as-I-do lecture, with Trump modeling a domestic climate response that can best be described as ecocidal. He is burning up the evidence of climate crisis while directly attacking renewable energy and other planet-cooling strategies that could keep more people safer the world over. This includes intentionally crashing**** climate-observing satellites, shutting down a Hawaii observatory that tracks atmospheric changes**** and a national climate monitoring network, closing federal environmental justice programs serving many of those most impacted by dirty fuels and climate disruption, curtailing federal assistance**** for disaster-struck communities, and more. > In the wake of the government shutdown, Trump just this week froze an estimated $26B in federal dollars for transportation and renewable-energy projects that had been headed to Democrat-led states, seeking revenge on Democrats who demanded that Republicans restore public healthcare services stripped in the federal budget bill. Of course, dismantling federal research efforts and denying assistance does nothing to slow climate harms. Instead it both accelerates warming and puts more people at risk of harm. Teams rooting out so-called DEI initiatives during the opening months of Trump’s term have targeted climate efforts tied to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and clawed back $16B granted under the Biden Administration to help local communities fight climate change. > If anything, these attacks only prove the wisdom of initiatives undertaken in partnership with city and county governments and nonprofits, which aim to foster community resilience not only in response to climate destabilization, but also from potentially unraveling governmental support. In San Antonio, Texas, for example, austerity measures in a tightening economy have already defunded two widely hailed efforts that are putting power—both literally and figuratively—into the hands of the community. But the project design and creative accounting born from legacies of distrust in government will likely see both efforts continue, even in the shadow of federal antagonism and potential local government retreat. 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 _Sarah Woolsey of the Impact Guild presenting about Climate Ready Neighborhoods earlier this year. Image: Greg Harman_ ### The ‘Beacon’ of Beacon Hill A few miles north of downtown San Antonio sits the Beacon Hill neighborhood, one of the earliest “suburban” neighborhoods for relatively affluent residents of a colonial city. Today it’s populated by older and often ornate single- and two-story homes in various states of repair, an area that has captured the attention of those looking for affordable housing as well as those looking to flip rundown homes at a profit. Its strength is in new and established residents, a vibrant homeowners association, and deepening social networks. In many cases, these are residents aware of the needs of their neighbors and already trained in disaster response. Elizabeth Eichhorn, for instance, knows two businesses within walking distances whose owners have agreed to open as unofficial warming or cooling centers in the event of extreme temperature shifts. She knows who on the block has gas stoves ready and available to cook or purify water if the electricity is knocked out. She also knows which local business always has a minimum of 80 gallons of drinking water set aside for her block in case the water system fails. It’s information her immediate neighbors share also. Such understandings arose from necessity starting in the hours after power failure during a 2021 winter storm. In February 2021, hundreds of thousands of residents across the city lost electricity, many for several days. Many others also lost water when the gas-powered generators at those water towers also failed. Sarah Woolsey, founder of the nonprofit Impact Guild, which at the time operated a brick-and-mortar community center in the area, was soon helping residents stage a door-to-door response to the disaster. > “What happened over those next few days changed me,” she said. “Mostly it was neighbors that needed boiled water but also brought a dozen eggs over. It was this really cool few days of mutual aid with people showing up with what they had, and others needing things, and everybody needing things and receiving.” That outreach taught her something else about her community. She learned that food insecurity was a daily reality for many before the freeze, with many already “hanging on by a thread,” she told _Deceleration._ Beacon Hill has since become a showcase community for the City of San Antonio’s Climate Ready Neighborhoods effort, led by the City’s Office of Sustainability. Impact Guild is a key partner in a program that has intentionally put power into the hands of community by helping them first and foremost deepen their social relationships, identify their resources and talents, and negotiate in advance how they will support one another when disaster hits. The neighborhood’s experiences in 2021 now inform some of the key literature being distributed by Climate Ready Neighborhoods as it seeks to activate “pods” across the city, neighborhood by neighborhood, teaching the power of interdependence at the level of the city block. _Climate Ready Neighborhoods Field Guide and Community Connections Plan and worksheets. See more at_ _the Impact Guild_ Image: Greg Harman > “It’s a matter of realizing that the city can’t be everything, so we have to figure out how to take our own responsibility,” Eichhorn told _Deceleration_. “Taking care of our neighborhood is shared.” These neighbors weren’t passively waiting for someone in government to help them prepare for the extreme weather of climate change. They started that for themselves, years before the birth of the Climate Ready effort. It was a natural shift for Eichhorn, who had lived in areas with frequent disruptions before. “I happened to live in Pasadena, California, where you have to learn to live with earthquakes and wildfires. Most every single person has a safety kit or recovery bag,” she said. In the world of disaster response, the local—that is, the neighborhood—has long been recognized as a determining factor as to whether someone lives or dies in the aftermath of climate shock. And that’s not lost on Beacon Hill’s City partners either. > “I think I’m really leaning into that aspect [of the project]. It’s just building up the community connections, the social capital, whatever you want to call it—get to know your neighbor and … build those systems,” said Kate Jaceldo,**** the City of San Antonio Office of Sustainability’s climate adaptation manager. Even before the Trump administration started regularly rejecting calls for FEMA assistance and lurching toward dismantling the agency entirely, Beacon Hill residents were asking each other: “What can we do as a community?” Eichhorn said. “How do we connect with people who are already suffering? Let’s say they don’t have access to food, water, or shelter. How do we help with that?” The summers of rising temperatures—and growing awareness of heat deaths in the city—has only validated the wisdom of those efforts. A recent assessment found the largest of the world’s capital cities are now experiencing 25 percent more extreme heat days than they were as recently as the 1990s. That heat is no surprise and likely to blame for more than 260,000 deaths since 2000. “The human case for climate change adaptation is obvious,” write the authors of the cities study at the International Institute for Environment and Development. “That’s why city administrations should get the funding boost they need to work closely with communities, civil society groups, and health and other policy experts, on solutions to the growing heat problem.” _Early arrival of summer temperatures in San Antonio in May 2025 showed temps approaching 110F outside a downtown homeless services center. Image: Greg Harman_ ### Gathering Heat Deaths About 20 years ago, thousands of people died tucked away in their homes without adequate air conditioning or living on the street without access to a cooling center or home to retreat to. “A week or so into the heat wave, city officials began running out of places to store bodies,”**** recounts Jeff Goodell, an Austin-based writer, in the online journal _Yale360_. All told, nearly 15,000 died from the heat across France. The year was 2003. Whether Paris, France or Paris, Texas, the heat has continued to rise virtually unabated as atmospheric levels of heat-trapping gases, caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, continue to increase. In 2024, sustained daily temps of 108 degrees Fahrenheit, which Save the Children said was roughly**** 16 degrees more than the annual average,**** shut down schools for more than 30 million children across Bangladesh—for the second year in a row. More than 1,300 taking the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia died the same year after walking in daytime temperatures that ranged**** between 117F and 120F. In the United States, more than 1,000 heat-related deaths were reported while efforts to secure a federal heat standard for workers floundered. > Such “once in a hundred years” extreme heat events now “need to be expected every 2–5 years in most locations,” due to industrially driven climate change, recent research shows. Heat-related deaths are just one obvious result of a hotter planet. Another are the sudden storms known as “cloud bursts**”** or “rain bombs,” which have wreaked havoc across India and Pakistan but are no longer unfamiliar in Texas. The link between climate change and flash flooding is easy to understand if we think of the atmosphere as a sponge. Because warmer air holds more water, climate change means a bigger sponge—and when it finally gets wrung, the accumulation can be disastrous. This is how hundreds can be swept away in Kashmir in one day. It is how 12 inches of rain can fall**** in just a few hours**** in the Texas Hill Country and spark a flood that would ultimately claim more than 130 lives. Texas this year didn’t blow past our recent summer scorchings, thankfully, although summer temps arrived early and have continued to run hotter than normal, well into the upper 90s, despite the arrival of fall. Around the world, temperatures recorded across land and sea continue to show an Earth moving deeper into unprecedented territory, with some of the hottest temps ever experienced**** by humans recorded in recent years. In spite of Trump’s slurs against the science, this has all played out as the decades of climate models said it would. It is for this reason that Trump’s UN climate denialism prompted Ilana Seid, an ambassador from the island nation of Palau and head of the organization of small island states, to call the US reversal on climate under Trump “a betrayal of the most vulnerable,” a sentiment echoed by Evans Davie Njewa of Malawi, who said: “we are endangering the lives of innocent people in the world.” Some long-committed climate activists see that betrayal too—and have started calling for local communities to take survival into their own hands. _Daily surface air and water temperatures continue to break records around the world. Source:__Climate Reanalyzer_ , via University of Maine Climate Change Institute ### ‘Dagger in the Heart’ > “It’s too late.” This pronouncement about averting worst-case climate outcomes by Canadian scientist David Suzuki, also one of the world’s leading environmental activists, shook anyone paying attention to climate. The basic science behind global warming has been understood since the late 1800s. Exxon’s own scientists understood at least since the 1970s that their products were changing the chemistry of the atmosphere, threatening to dangerously overheat the planet, and stating that humans had **“** a time window of five to 10 years**** before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.” _David Suzuki_ Shell knew too. In the 1980s its scientists confirmed****that “global changes in air temperature would … ‘drastically change the way people live and work.’ All told, Shell concluded, ‘the changes may be the greatest in recorded history,’” as the Guardian recounts. It would take decades more before any tangible federal legislation advanced to tackle the problem. President Obama got behind a proposal known as “cap and trade,” which—for better or worse—aimed to use market mechanisms to wean the nation off fossil fuels. San Antonio’s Valero Energy helped beat that effort back, warning customers in pumpside placards of the cents it would add to the price per gallon. Another 13 years would transpire before President Biden advanced a federal vision of energy transition that sent an unprecedented hundreds of billions of dollars to the states to reduce energy demand and facilitate the transition to renewable energy and battery systems. Now, with MAGA’s return to power, we’re facing what Suzuki experienced like a “dagger in my heart.” Trump’s decision to prize the perceived needs of fossil fuel companies while demonizing and attacking lower-carbon alternatives—power sources credited with keeping the power on in Texas since its near grid collapse of 2021—has “flatlined” US climate pollution rates with an expected 7B tons of additional climate emissions over the coming five years, according to _Carbon Brief_. (Before Trump’s election, the same publication estimated he would inject 4B tons of emissions into the atmosphere and thereby push beyond reach international climate goals of limiting global warming beneath 1.5 degrees over 1990 levels.) For those who had been warning for years of a “last call” on climate action, this policy lurch backwards within the largest economy on Earth dashed all hopes that we might avert the so-called “worst manifestations” of industrially driven climate change. > “Trump’s win was the triumph of capitalism and neoliberalism, and he’s going to wreak havoc,” Suzuki told Davis Legree at Canada’s iPolitics in July 2025. “For me, what we’ve got to do now is hunker down. The units of survival are going to be local communities, so I’m urging local communities to get together.” While not surrendering the struggle to move beyond fossil fuels, Suzuki stressed that local adaptation efforts are now imperative, while citing the efforts of the Finnish government on emergency preparedness in particular. > “Governments will not be able to respond on the scale or speed that is needed for these emergencies, so Finland is telling their citizens that they’re going to be at the front line of whatever hits and better be sure you’re ready to meet it. … **_You’re going to have to inventory your community, and that’s really what we have to start doing now.”_** In San Antonio, the Climate Ready Neighborhoods and another effort rooted on the South Side have been seeking to do just that. Both were defunded by San Antonio’s City Council under the new city budget, with funds from a recently established resilience fund diverted to pay local firefighters. However, the city’s Chief Sustainability Officer Doug Melnick said a week before the budget vote that these programs would continue through 2026 by drawing forward dollars from the previous year’s budget. After that, their future is uncertain. “2025 dollars will be setting the stage for implementation through 2026,” Melnick told Council members at a budget hearing. “I think it will be a different conversation as we go forward into the future. But this year’s work … will continue.” _Nancy Parrilla, Fuerza Unida’s chief financial officer, said that local efforts can’t grow overly reliant on government assistance—lest those forces fail them. Image: Greg Harman_ ### Withering FEMA In South San Antonio, Fuerza Unida’s small office and clothing alterations shop is abuzz with climate activity. Maps on the wall denote zones to be planted with mid-sized trees, jobs for arborists are being advertised, and the last homes being gifted heat pump cooling systems are being checked off. Although the role of fossil fuels tends to grab most of the attention in discussions of global warming, climate change is also a product of deforestation. Both are the targets of neighborhood-based climate work on San Antonio’s Southside, undertaken beneath the banner of the South San Heat Resiliency Project (PDF). Here demographics dramatically shift from those of Beacon Hill. The per capita income drops significantly as the number of immigrant families rises. Homes here are mostly not yet buffeted by the waves of would-be gentrifiers prowling other quarters of the city. Instead they bake within the dust, heat, and fumes of ubiquitous scrap metal recyclers and auto salvage yards. Southside residents also persist on the edge of the former Kelly Air Force Base and its toxic legacy that many blame for high levels of cancer in the area, which claimed the lives of beloved community organizers Lupe and Robert Alvarado in recent years. Led by a team of Latina workers who began collectively working to support local women after aLevi’s factory closedin 1990, Fuerza Unida (“united strength”) has served residents for more than 30 years. The city was never a partner here, said Nancy Parrilla, the organization’s chief financial officer. “ never saw them as an ally before,” she said. A couple years ago, however, the organization was approached by the Office of Sustainability about a climate resilience project. > “The City came knocking on our door. We didn’t go looking for them,” Parrilla said. “They came and were like, ‘We need a stakeholder in the neighborhood’ because everything they had been trying had been unsuccessful.” Community meetings followed that sparked interest among local homeowners, where temperatures in some homes—suffering from lack of insulation, cooling, and elevated street temperatures due in part to a lack of green space—routinely topped 100F degrees during peak summer. The effort began building trust and attracted the attention of Austin-based Adaptation International, which bills itself as a woman-owned business helping bridge the gap between climate science and community efforts. Adaptation International’s work is intended to “identify climate vulnerabilities and develop sustainable cooling strategies that enhance resilience,” the organization writes on their website. “By integrating climate science with local knowledge, the project advances environmental justice and empowers communities to shape solutions through storytelling, research, and collaborative planning.” This summer the effort was awarded an additional $96,000 from the nation-wide Climate Smart Communities Initiative. While the project clearly emphasizes climate adaptation, it also promotes the language of “workforce development.” While similar projects have suffered elsewhere under Trump’s targeting of projects rooted in equity concerns, the inclusion of more favorable buzzwords has had no impact on the actual work, said Celine Rendon, a climate resilience specialist with Adaptation International. “That’s not really changing the way that we’re engaging with community members that are on the frontlines of the climate crisis,” said Rendon. “It’s not really stopping the work.” While the San Antonio Office of Sustainability dodged layoffs this budget, colleagues working elsewhere, including for the City of Denver, didn’t fare as well. * * * _A resident holds up a poster documenting recent fires at a local metal recycling yard during a “toxic tour” of San Antonio’s South Side. Image: Marisol Cortez_ * * * Data released earlier this month by the U.S. Government Accountability Office suggests these sorts of community efforts will be more valuable than ever—especially as FEMA cuts back its operations. Workforce reductions and loss of training capacity have severely compromised FEMA’s reliability as a partner in disaster response, GAO researchers write. FEMA’s slow mobilization to the July Hill Country floods that claimed more than 130 lives in a few days is well documented. But the GAO makes another fact clear: When the rain began to fall over Kerr County, only 15 percent of FEMA’s incident management workforce were available. That number was a mere 12 percent at the start of the year’s hurricane season, according to the GAO. It’s bad news as the country today moves through peak hurricane season. As the GAO report concludes: > “Should the U.S. experience a similarly catastrophic peak hurricane season in September and October 2025, as it did in 2024, meeting response needs could be a major challenge. Moreover, no concrete changes to disaster response roles have yet been made. FEMA and other federal agencies spreading a reduced number of staff across the same or higher number of disasters nationwide could reduce effectiveness of federal disaster response for upcoming disasters.” The government shutdown is not expected to further erode FEMA’s response capacity(such as it is). However: “If the agency required additional funds to respond to serious damage caused by a natural disaster during the shutdown,” Simmone Shah writes at _Time, “_ they would be unable to appeal to Congress.” Fuerza’s leadership say they have experienced the benefit of partnering with the City and Adaptation International. It’s allowed them to install cooling systems to homes in need. But it also kindled hope among their neighbors and helped them to imagine alternative positive visions of the future, the absence of which had been among the project’s “biggest challenges,” Parrilla said. > “I think the saddest part is that they don’t know that [the wealth] you see on the Northside, it’s because that’s what the city has invested in. And they can do the same over here. They have just chosen not to.” But the program is being intentionally built to advance with or without a governmental partner. Meetings with fellow community-based organizations have increased. Skills and lessons learned are being shared. Parrilla said the driving goal behind the heat pump installation project, of advocating for better controls over local sources of pollution, of an ambitious urban forestry project now offering neighborhood youth $18 per hour, is for the community to learn how to be sustainable on their own. “We cannot depend on outside sources to keep our spaces green, to give us a safe environment,” she said. “When we leave it in their hands, we’re the ones who suffer.” _FEMA by the Numbers. Source: GAO Report, “Disaster Assistance High-Risk Series: Federal Response Workforce Readiness” (__GAO-25-108598_ _)_ _Percent of FEMA Workforce Available. Source: GAO Report, “Disaster Assistance High-Risk Series: Federal Response Workforce Readiness” (__GAO-25-108598_ _)_ ### **Adelante Juntos** Since the surge in heat deaths more than 20 years ago, the people of Paris, France, have put a tremendous amount of energy into responding to accelerating heat waves. A report from 2019 documents efforts to pull up pavement, plant thousands of trees, and cultivate networks of interlinked cool “islands” to help residents cool off. The intentional greening of Medellín, Colombia was also recently cited as inspiration by a Bexar County commissioner, as another example of concerted city-scale efforts that have brought down temperatures for their residents in a time of overheating. While San Antonio is putting more money than ever into “cool pavement” efforts this year, a practice with debatable results, there is also a burgeoning movement to green the city that is driven largely from the grassroots. Fuerza’s project is just one part of that. What participants in both city programs said they found most useful has been the power of deepening relationships with neighbors. Some also referenced the skills of flexibility and creativity—about how to be prepared for rapidly changing circumstances—including positive ones, such as when new potential partnerships present themselves. > “There’s still funding and resources available,” said Rendon, “you just have to be strategic and make sure you are ready when it comes.” In the world of adaptation under stress, partnerships deliver in different ways, added the Impact Guild’s Woolsey. Sometimes it is shared knowledge to help neighborhoods organize themselves, efforts that hinge exclusively on volunteer labor. Sometimes it is a check (whether from a public or private source) that facilitates purchases families couldn’t afford otherwise. Sometimes it is changing policies and large-scale infrastructure investments, which typically require massive public pressure on elected leaders. > “Just the way any ecosystem has a lot of biodiversity, our resources—the more diversity we have in them—the better off we are,” Woolsey said. In recent weeks, Woolsey has been operating outside of San Antonio, helping families collect the things they need to return to homes abandoned after July’s Hill Country floods. There too, she has found that some of the most valuable assistance is low cost, she said. It is more about organizing and time. “There’s a lot that we’re sourcing that’s in-kind. We need dollars to close the gaps to get people into their homes,” she said. “But also it’s the shared meals, it’s the volunteer hours, it’s people giving the furniture. “The bigger question we are all holding is like: How can be the manpower showing up for one another? … How can it be physical sharing of resources that are more this barter/exchange kind of thing? Then when can it be the dollars, as strategically as possible, to close the gaps where those other things can’t do it?” Far from the image of social breakdown so often depicted in Hollywood blockbusters, every disaster survived deepens a community’s knowledge of itself. It reinforces and strengthens the relationships people can actually rely upon. Each disaster is also “shared seeds,” Woolsey said. And the lessons that are reaped from those seeds often point toward something new, those interviewed told _Deceleration_. Lessons that point to deepening and rooting further in place, in belonging, in neighborhood—as the old world, oftentimes literally, washes away. _Deceleration Founder/Managing Editor Greg Harman is an independent journalist and community organizer who has written about environmental health and justice issues since the late 1990s. His journalism has been recognized by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, Houston Press Club, Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, Public Citizen Texas, and Associated Press Managing Editors. He holds a bachelor’s in English from Texas Wesleyan University and a master’s degree in International Relations (Conflict Transformation) from St. Mary’s University._ _Deceleration is an online journal responding to the roots of our shared ecological, political, and cultural crises—journalistically, academically, and creatively._ _Rooted in the greater South Texas bioregion, Deceleration is inspired by intellectual and political movements around the world for degrowth, buen vivir, the right to the city, and the rights of nature/mother earth._ This article originally appeared in Deceleration, a journal of environmental justice. You can subscribe to their newsletter Deceleration In Depth for weekly updates. _You can link to original here https://deceleration.news/trump-crushing-climate-efforts-local-projects-persevere-at-the-grassroots/_ _Click here for their newsletter _ * Climate Change * public utilities * power grids * mutual aid * neighborhoods Subscribe to Portside

Any California universities that sign the Trump administration’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” will “instantly” lose their state funding, California governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement. The Trump administration on Wednesday offered nine prominent universities, including the University of Southern California, the chance to sign a “compact” that asks the universities to close academic departments that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas”, limit the proportion of international undergraduate students to 15% , accept the administration’s definition of gender and ban the consideration of race or sex in hiring and admissions, in exchange for “substantial and meaningful federal grants”. Newsom’s office described the offer as “nothing short of a hostile takeover of America’s universities”. Share this article on * __Twitter * __Facebook * __Mail “It would impose strict government-mandated definitions of academic terms, erase diversity, and rip control away from campus leaders to install government-mandated conservative ideology in its place,” the governor’s office said in a statement. “It even dictates how schools must spend their own endowments. Any institution that resists could be hit with crushing fines or stripped of federal research funding.” “If any California University signs this radical agreement, they’ll lose billions in state funding – including Cal Grants – instantly. California will not bankroll schools that sell out their students, professors, researchers, and surrender academic freedom,” Newsom said in the statement. Cal Grants is the state’s $2.8bn student financial aid program. Trump’s proposed “compact” was offered to schools that were seen by Trump as “good actors”, May Mailman, a senior White House adviser told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, with a president or a board who were, in the Trump administration’s view, “reformer” who have “really indicated they are committed to a higher-quality education”. The “compact” requires universities to eliminate departments that are seen as hostile or dismissive to conservatives, limit the proportion of international students on campus, accept the Trump administration’s definition of gender and restrict the political speech of employees, as well as freeze their tuition fees for five years. It also demands that universities crack down on “grade inflation”, an increase in the proportion of students receiving top marks in their classes, the Wall Street Journal reported. The University of Southern California is a private research university with an $8.2bn endowment. Putting academic freedom aside, some of Trump’s proposals would be economically challenging for the school, the Los Angeles Times reported. More than a quarter of the 2025 freshman class is made up of international students, the newspaper notes, with more than half of international students coming from China or India. The Trump administration’s compact not only limits international student enrollment to 15% of students, but also requires that no more than 5% come from any one country. 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 “We are reviewing the Administration’s letter,” USC said in a statement in response to questions about Trump’s compact. The university did not immediately comment on Newsom’s statement. Most other US universities fall within the 15% cap, but about 120 exceed it, including USC, Columbia University, Emory University and Boston University, federal data shows. _Associated Press contributed to this report._ _Lois Beckett is a senior reporter who covers Los Angeles, with a focus on life, culture and communities. Twitter@loisbeckett. Click here for Lois Beckett's public key_ __The Guardian_ is globally renowned for its coverage of politics, the environment, science, social justice, sport and culture. Scroll less and understand more about the subjects you care about with the Guardian's _brilliant email newsletters_ , free to your inbox._ * higher education * Academic Freedom * gavin newsom * California Subscribe to Portside

Progressive Party VP candidate Charlotta Bass (right) and PP presidential candidate Vincent Hallinan, 1952 (Credit: Fair Use). At the heart of American anticommunism has been the conviction that communists seek to destroy American freedoms and institutions. Yet anticommunists, including today's conservatives, seek to create a culture that resembles their fever dreams about communism. The goal of today's right wing is to silence the media, destroy institutions that ensure equity, give the state control over bodily sovereignty, marginalize people of color and Queer people, dismantle educational institutions, illegally detain and deport legal and illegal immigrants, and redistribute wealth upwards. In other words, they seek to weaponize anticommunism to restrict individual liberty. This contradiction has always been at the heart of anticommunism; anticommunists seek only to secure the freedom of the elite capitalist class to abuse workers, control public policy, and silence critics. The agency that has most helpfully enabled this is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI has been not just undemocratic in its use of illegal surveillance and harassment, but it has been anti-democratic, actively silencing individuals and organizations that have worked toward democracy. During the Cold War, even as anticommunists claimed that Soviet citizens lacked basic rights, could not express themselves freely, and could not organize in democratic institutions like labor unions, the FBI with the blessing of the government, was actively suppressing freedom movements. As Nick Fischer argues "Anticommunist propaganda decried...the subjugation of trade unions; the deportation of millions of kulaks and ethnic minorities; the corrupt wealth of party members; and the ubiquity of the dreaded secret police." Anticommunists deployed "semantic contrivances" to claim the US was a model democracy and the envy of others; meanwhile, the FBI focused its energies on activists and described their freedom aspirations as conspiratorial while their international counterpart, the CIA, destroyed freedom movements abroad. The FBI's own documentation is evidence of its anti-democratic practices. Charlotta Bass' FBI file is an excellent example. The Bureau is no longer releasing the full file and instead will provide only an abridged fifty-page version that catalogues an insurance disagreement, not its surveillance. Bass was the editor of one of California's first Black Newspapers, The California Eagle. While never a Communist Party member (CPUSA), she grew increasingly radical in her politics, allied with communists and radicals, and openly challenged US Cold War policy. Even before the Cold War, she had garnered a reputation in Los Angeles as an advocate for equality who willingly faced off against the Ku Klux Klan. Bass' file was started during World War II. The Bureau claimed that she "follows the Communist Party 'Line.'" The Party "Line" according to the Bureau was: "advocating abolition of poll tax, immediate opening of second front, abolition of 'Jim Crow,' etc." The Bureau was linking goals that would eventually become public policy to a foreign conspiracy. The FBI believed that her newspaper was an organ of the CPUSA though it failed to substantiate that rumor and found no evidence that "would indicate that any financial support was being received" from the CPUSA. Lack of evidence of conspiratorial intent never dissuaded the Bureau in its assumption that a foreign inspired conspiracy existed. J. Edgar Hoover disagreed with a report from the SAG (Special Agent in Charge) in LA that her file be closed and instead instructed the LA office that even in the absence of evidence, Bass "is obviously collaborating with the Party" and that they should continue to surveil her so that "should the necessity arise, you will be in a position to take action against the paper and its owner without delay." As Charisse Burden-Stelly has argued, anticommunism is a "Durable Mode of Governance" that is both anti-red and anti-Black, and this is clear in Hoover's letter; he believed that Bass' paper was the "foremost means of influencing the Los Angeles Negro Community" to join the CPUSA. His evidence of this was that the Party advocated integrating the LA railroad, and Bass' paper did as well. Bass' paper reported on the case of Festus Coleman, a Black man falsely accused of rape and robbery who was sentenced to 65 years in San Quentin. The Party organized in his defense. Among other examples, Bass' leadership in the LA Black Freedom Struggle was enough evidence to secure her a place on the FBI's Security Index. Bass also appears throughout the Sojourners for Truth and Justice (STJ) FBI file. She was a founding member and the STJ chairperson. The organization was founded by radical Black women devoted to equity, ending racist violence, anti-imperialism, and opposition to Cold War anticommunism. Within weeks of its founding, the FBI had opened a file on it and monitored the women's first action, a meeting in Washington D.C. The Bureau was not alone in watching the STJ, it was surveilled by the Secret Service, Counterintelligence Corp of the US army, and Naval Intelligence. FBI informants infiltrated the organization and fed the Bureau exaggerated and manufactured rumors. Bass was followed by US intelligence when she traveled overseas. In 1950 she attended a peace conference in Prague, then used her press credentials to go to the Soviet Union. The CIA reported on her movement's there, then upon her return, instructed the State Department to seize her passport. Bass refused to turn it over and the Bureau reported that she had engaged the services of an attorney to fight its seizure. In 1952, Bass ran for Vice-President on the Progressive Party ticket. The FBI followed her campaign, noted its opposition to the Korean War, and her opposition to the segregated US military. She argued that the US could not spread democracy globally while Black America could not enjoy democracy. The FBI continued its monitoring even as the elderly and increasingly sick Bass became less politically active. It made pretext calls to her home and hospitals when she was bedridden noting her "crippling arthritis" and kept her on the security index. Bass' file is especially unusual because it continued after her death in 1969. The FBI monitored her estate lawyer Ben Margolis, worried that she left funds to the CPUSA. The last document in her file is dated 1990, over twenty years after her passing. Even as US policymakers, religious leaders, and business owners warned Americans that Soviet citizens were harassed and monitored by a secret police force, US intelligence did the same. During the Cold War and to the present, it treated citizen activists as a foreign scourge seeking to undo American freedoms. The Bureau has not demonstrated that it has abandoned its history of anti-Black harassment as it continues to target Black Lives Matter activists. Today's conservatives regularly deploy anticommunism to describe any policy or institution that stands in the way of their agenda, this includes the FBI. While Donald Trump has focused energy on condemning the Bureau, firing some of its agents, and questioning its mission, he does not seek to end its extralegal surveillance of citizens. Instead, he wants a Bureau that is malleable and accountable only to him, an agency that will surveil his political enemies and critics, imprison those most vocal, and use high-tech surveillance further enabled by the tech sectors obeisance. It is hard to sympathize with the Bureau as it comes under political attack, but this new version will be further weaponized against freedom struggles and it has a long history of anti-democratic practices to draw from. Thanks to the author for submitting this Blog to Portside. _Denise Lynn is professor and chair of the History Department and director of Gender and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Southern Indiana. She is the Vice-President of the Historians of American Communism and the editor of its journal American Communist History._ * Charlotta Bass * Anti-Communism * Racism * FBI * CPUSA * Progressive Party * Black press Subscribe to Portside