Portside

“Some in Congress want to underfund the VA so they can say that government doesn’t work,” says Dusten Retcher, a 29-year old Air Force veteran, who processes veterans’ benefit claims in Minneapolis. “Then they want to turn it over to the private market.”

Here are two articles about the Wall. An Israeli arms maker has been picked by the US Department of Homeland Security to build a prototype of the wall President Donald Trump has vowed to build along the full length of the US-Mexico border. After delays — due in part to contractor battles — preliminary work on construction has begun in California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas, leading to concerns ranging from states’ rights to environmental destruction.

The military is one of the country’s largest polluters, with an inventory of toxic sites on American soil that once topped 39,000. At many locations, the Pentagon has relied on contractors like U.S. Technology to assist in cleaning and restoring land, removing waste, clearing unexploded bombs, and decontaminating buildings, streams and soil.

September's #RenterWeekOfAction made clear that the new 21st century renter movement is organized, coordinated & visionary. As renters from small rural towns to large urban centers continue to be squeezed by rising rents and low wages as resurgent renter-led movement is uniting around a city and state strategy to build power from below, win universal rent control, and advance a vision of community control over land, housing and development.

While Flint battles a water crisis, just two hours away the beverage giant pumps almost 100,000 times what an average Michigan resident uses into plastic bottles.

This is not the history of a climate refugee family. It is the history of capitalism in America—disaster capitalism-- with an alliance of police force and wealth, where machinery is supreme, where honest labor is not enough, and where the family is secondary--a worthy reread in modern American times.

A grassroots resistance to Trump Administration VA privatization schemes is being mounted by AFGE union members many of whom, at the VA, are veterans themselves,

Lean-in feminism and other variants of corporate feminism have failed the overwhelming majority of us, who do not have access to individual self-promotion and advancement and whose conditions of life can be improved only through policies that defend social reproduction, secure reproductive justice, and guarantee labor rights.

Bill Moyers in conversation with author James Whitman about his new book that uncovers how the Nazis used Jim Crow laws as the model for their own race laws.

Rep. Barbara Lee: “Now look at Facebook allowing ads by the Russian government to create this kind of environment. That’s a problem. I don’t know if they’re even aware of the history and how dangerous allowing the promotion of division and racial animosity and racial hatred can be.”