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Trump and Santos at the White House

By Chelsey Dyer NACLA
As protests in Colombia rage on, President Trump’s meeting with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos could point towards a deepening of militarized drug war policies over investing in Colombia's peace process.

The Birthmark of Damnation: Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Black Body

By R.L. Stephens Viewpoint Magazine
What we find all too often in Coates’s narrative universe are bodies without life and a racism without people. To imbue race with an ontological meaning, to make it a reality all its own, is to drain it of its place in history and its indelible roots in discrete human action. To deny the role of life and people — of politics — is to also foreclose the possibility of liberation.

Class, Race and Political Strategy in the Rust Belt

Glenn Perusek The Stansbury Forum
Through much of the United States, Washington is viewed with deep suspicion. When unconnected with a higher purpose, said Augustine, the state is nothing more than highway robbery on a larger scale. (2) When was the last time the American state seemed connected to higher purpose? This sensibility is acute in the rust belt, with our towering hulks of shuttered steel mills, machine shops, auto assembly plants and so on.

‘If You Don’t Want Us, Tell Us To Go Back’: The Making of a California Prison Town

Sarah Tory, High Country News High Country News
Adelanto, a town of 32,000, is home to three prisons. This was not a coincidence. With a history of agriculture, excessive water use, the Great Depression, cheap vacant land filled with a military base which closed in the 1990s, Adelanto turned to prisons. During the 1980s, under increasingly stringent drug laws and harsh sentencing policies, demand for new prisons had grown. So had the belief that prisons could nourish economic development in rural communities.