Portside

The Thirteenth Amendment forbade slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

As commodity prices tumble, thousands of South African miners with HIV stand to lose access to treatment if the mining companies’ proposed 11,700 in job cuts go through. While HIV treatment is technically free in South Africa, according to the National Union of Mineworkers many of the workers who lose their jobs could lose access to antiretroviral therapy when they return to their rural communities that may not have adequate healthcare systems in place.

What is notable about the ‘Dieselgate’ scandal is not that corporate executives lie and cheat, but its environmental scope. By rigging the emissions tests, Volkswagen cars may have added nearly a million tons of air pollution to the atmosphere annually – roughly the same as combined annual emissions for all power stations, vehicles, industry and agriculture in England. And, according to the New York Times, VW executives might not face any U.S. criminal charges.

Last week the Los Angeles Times obtained a secret 44-page proposal drafted by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and other charter advocates, that according to one critic would "do away with democratically controlled, publicly accountable education in LA." With the aid of a billionaires’ club of supporters, the plan is designed to charterize 50% of LA public schools.

America’s rental housing crisis will worsen over the next decade with millions more struggling to make their monthly payments. According to a new study by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies and Enterprise Community Partners, the rental population in the U.S. will climb by 4 million over the next 10 years, and the percentage of Americans who are severely rent-burdened (paying 50 percent or more) will increase by 11 percent, to 13 million people by 2025.

In the second such episode in recent months, U.S.-trained Syrian rebels are reported to have handed over their weapons to al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra. The supposedly well-vetted fighters of Division 30, the “moderate” U.S.-backed rebel division, surrendered to Jabhat al-Nusra immediately after entering Syria on Monday. Last July, Jabhat al-Nusra routed the first group of Division 30 fighters to re-enter Syria, seizing their weapons and their commander.

New evidence confirms brain disease is widespread among former NFL players. But so far, the increased awareness and concern about concussions hasn’t impacted the NFL’s bottom line. In fact, the NFL is more popular than ever — the opening weekend of the 2015 season was the most-watched ever.

As the Volkswagen case shows, the more trouble caused by closed-off code embedded in an ever-increasing number of physical objects, the more the makers of those objects will struggle to shield themselves from calls for transparency. When code inflicts real harm, such as Volkswagen’s polluting cars, the creators of that code must be held accountable. It’s time to start demanding that smart things open up.

Whether or not the words “slave” or “slavery” appear in the text of the Constitution, they dominate its spirit. Slavery profoundly altered the four months of Constitutional debate with respect to how slaves would be counted for apportionment, how often the census would be taken, how a president would be elected. By the time the Constitution was signed on September 17, 1787, slavery had indeed become a national institution.

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