Portside

Dateline Standing Rock; Sailor's not saluting; Busted for asking; Pockets and sexism; Trump tromps; State murder less popular

While the mainstream media focuses on losers and winners in the race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, a largely unreported debate is going on over the future course of U.S. diplomacy. Its outcome will have a profound effect on how Washington projects power—both diplomatic and military—in the coming decade.

Honeywell and the UAW resumed talks this week after reaching a stalemate but tempers are high. The company has embraced a weapon that has grown increasingly popular across corporate America as organized labor has grown weaker: locking out workers to throw the union on the defensive and perhaps break the union’s and the workers’ will.

In Tennessee it was through this office, charged with overseeing the state’s purchases and contracts, that Governor Bill Haslam concocted the biggest privatization scheme you’ve never heard of. And he would have gotten away with it, too—if it weren’t for a tough campus-workers union that discovered his plans and launched a raucous fight.

Thousands of women in over 60 cities refuse to work in protest over restrictive laws. 'I am doing it for my daughter,' says one woman.

Sometimes the real news is in the details -- or even in the discrepancies. Take, for instance, missions by America's most elite troops in Africa.

We acknowledge that many workers do not get what they have earned. Interlaced with vulnerability and structural racism, the rampant rate of wage theft is one of the lesser known labor violations that far too many low-wage workers endure.

"To educate is to give man the keys to the world, which are independence and love, and to give him strength to journey on his own, light of step, a spontaneous and free being." - Jose Marti, Cuban independence leader, 1853-1895.

As the Hyde Amendment turns 40 in September, activists and legislators are seeking to permanently end the prohibition on federal funds from covering abortion care. According to sexual and reproductive health rights nonprofit group the Guttmacher Institute, between 18 percent and 35 percent of people insured by the federal Medicaid program who have experienced an unwanted pregnancy have been forced against their will to carry that pregnancy to term under Hyde.

Liberal Americans like to think of Donald Trump as an aberration and believe that his idea of building a great wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to prevent immigrants from entering the country goes against American values. After all, as Hillary Clinton says, “We are a nation of immigrants.” In certain ways, in terms of the grim history of this country, they couldn’t be more wrong.