Portside

“Strategic communications” or Stratcom, a propaganda/psy-op technique that treats information as a “soft power” weapon to wield against adversaries, is a new catch phrase in an Official Washington obsessed with the clout that comes from spinning false narratives, reports Robert Parry.

So Obama wants al-Assad to stand down as a prerequisite for effective US action against Daesh in Syria (a few air sorties and even fewer air strikes are ineffectual). Putin thinks al-Assad is key to defeating Daesh and that everyone should ally with Damascus. Putin is blind to the ways that al-Assad and his military brutality is prolonging the civil war. Backing his genocidal policies will just perpetuate that war.

The September election was a consequence of fundamentally undemocratic maneuvers by Tsipras designed (in the words of the DEA, a Popular Unity component) to “confirm the balance of political forces and reestablish the viability of the SYRIZA-led government before workers and popular classes realize through their own bitter experience the actual content of the agreement that was signed with the creditors on July 13.”

Tennessee taxpayers have financed hundreds of millions of dollars in economic incentives for VW to locate and expand a plant in Chattanooga that manufactures one of the vehicles involved in the emissions cheating scandal. What happens to that money now?

The fact that a majority of representatives in Congress don’t accept abortion as an essential part of reproductive healthcare makes millions of Americans say, “Really? Is this still the conversation we’re having?” It's like we haven’t moved forward in 40 years—not since Congress passed the Hyde Amendment in 1976, banning Medicaid from covering the cost of abortions. Access to abortion and reproductive healthcare isn’t something that should be a luxury for the rich.

Imagine for a moment a genuine absurdity: somewhere in the United States, the highly profitable operations of a set of corporations were based on the possibility that sooner or later your neighborhood would be destroyed and you and all your neighbors annihilated. And not just you and your neighbors, but others and their neighbors across the planet. What would we think of such companies, of such a project, of the mega-profits made off it?

We are now at an important crossroad in the long term struggle for sustainable electronics. It is clear that Apple and Samsung are the global kingpins and both have been severely challenged by mismanagement and human tragedy in their manufacturing supply chains. The future of technology development hangs in the balance.

Movement activists discuss strategy and tactics in #BlackLivesMatter.

Both candidates have been mislabeled as populists. The movement of that name was a genuine people’s rebellion that reinvigorated democracy. We can do it again.

A new analysis supports the hypothesis that viruses are living entities that share a long evolutionary history with cells.