Portside

Yankee Doodle goosestep; Angry soldiers; Trumpizing NYS; Papa’s brand new bag?; 50 Shades of yecchhhh; In Dave Zirin we trust

The U.S. has taken aim at China and Russia for at least the last four administrations. Now, higher ups on all sides are warning of heightened tensions and war.

From their very beginnings, the American university and American slavery have been intertwined, but only recently are we beginning to understand how deeply.

If the Court embraces the weaponization of free speech as a cudgel to beat up on unions, the possibility of other, unintended consequences is beginning to excite some union advocates and stir fear among conservative constitutional scholars.

The groups that received pharmaceutical funding—like the US Pain Foundation and the Academy of Integrative Pain Management—in turn issued guidelines minimizing the risks of opioid addiction, lobbied to change laws aimed at curbing opioid abuse, and sought to protect doctors sued for overprescribing painkillers, according to a Senate report released Monday by Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill (D).

The bonds of memory and today’s vast disparities in wealth and well-being tell us that we must continue the struggle launched by workers and by King in the spring of 1968. Today, more people live in poverty in America than in 1968. Now as then, the majority of the poor are “white” but poverty’s heaviest concentration is among people of color, especially young people and women. Poverty exists in part because most of the new jobs in Memphis, as in America, do not pay a living wage.

Only one country comes even close to delivering the good life in a sustainable way: Vietnam succeeds on six social indicators — including a life expectancy above 65 years and providing sufficient nutrition — while staying within its limit on every environmental threshold except carbon emissions.

From limiting abortion access to destabilizing the family planning safety net, Trump and social conservatives did considerable harm while also signaling their intentions for further attacks in the years ahead.

Records obtained through a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request reveal that the United States Army Corps of Engineers inappropriately attempted to guide the companies funding DAPL toward providing an environmental justice analysis of the pipeline that would conclude that there was no disproportionate impact on a racial minority. Internal Corps email excerpts -- received through discovery by Earthjustice -- show the decision makers behind the pipeline wearing lenses fogged with racism.

On Thursday, a federal court in California ruled that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) unlawfully detained thousands of suspected immigrants on the basis of unconstitutional requests from ICE known as immigration detainers. “The court’s decision vindicates years of work by the Los Angeles immigrant community to challenge the Sheriff Department’s abuses and throws a major wrench in the Trump administration’s deportation machine,” said Jessica Bansal, litigation director of NDLON.