Portside

Mother knows best; Racial profiling made easy; Corporate users, customer losers; Facebook & Google's common market; Your emotional responses are a data goldmine

Attacks on civilians - like the ongoing drone attacks on the people of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia about which we hear next to nothing in mainstream media - are being perpetrated in our name, with our tax dollars and often with our blood, sweat and tears. Thus the buck has to stop with us. Let's hold US officials' feet to the fire.

In making this call, we wish to underscore that the Ankara massacre and the previous attacks are international in scope, and to make clear that we see the potential for such events to open the way to regional insecurity. AKP’s policy of relying on radical groups as proxies, . . . such groups as ISIS, Al-Nusra, and Ahrar Al-Sha, used particularly against Kurds in Rojava—is at the heart of today’s tragedy.

The movement dates back to 1990 when South Dakota became the first state to address the controversy over Columbus Day when they renamed the holiday Native American Day. Two years later, Berkeley, California introduced the first Indigenous Peoples Day. And while workers in 23 U.S. states enjoyed a paid day off in his honor, people across the country rallied online under the banner of #IndigenousPeoplesDay to call attention to the atrocities committed by Columbus.

 Despite the best efforts of political and media elites to dismiss and diminish socialist ideas, polls show that Americans are increasingly open to the ideology. Polls of millennials in recent years have found slightly higher levels of approval for socialism than capitalism. Although Bernie Sanders is asked "Are you a socialist?" The other contenders are not asked "Are you a capitalist?"

Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights have released an incredible new study systematically documenting growing suppression, on US campuses, of advocacy on behalf of Palestinian human rights. Describing nearly 300 incidents of such suppression in a period of a year and a half, the report describes false accusations of anti-Semitism and terrorism; baseless legal complaints and administrative disciplinary actions; firings of professors and harassment.

Analogously, we universally refer to gas drilled conventionally or fracked as "natural." True, gas found in deep rock and soil formations and biologically formed from dead animal and plant matter, is natural. Once drilled, transported, and combusted for heat and electricity, though, it is un-natural, even anti-natural, for reasons explored here.

Reflections on Prison Labor, Unions, and Whitney Benns' The Atlantic Article "American Slavery Reinvented"

FOIA documents reveal Agent Orange Dioxin, toxic dumps, fish kills on Okinawa Base. Two veterans win compensation, many more denied.

The US Department of Defense will work on compensating the families of the victims killed in a deadly American airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The strike “mistakenly” killed 22 people.