Portside

WashPost disgraces itself; LAT disgraces itself; NYT disgraces itself; Google tax; Yay Jon

The “plan” will also toss the Kurds, one of Washington’s most reliable allies in the fight against the Islamic State, under a bus. “The Americans are not very clever in calculating this sort of thing,” Kamran Karadaghi, former chief of staff to Iraqi President and Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, told the Independent’s Patrick Cockburn. “Maybe they calculate that with Turkey on their side, they don’t need the Kurds.”

August 6 and 9 mark the 70th anniversary of the United States dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This mass destruction of civilians (not military targets, as President Truman alleged) has reverberated perversely across 7 decades, with the spread of nuclear weapons and the persistent pressure on Japan by the United States to abandon its post-war Peace Constitution.

In April every year, that pesky gender wage gap jumps to front-page news again as we mark Equal Pay Day. The date signifies the day when American women, on average, have finally earned as much as the average white American man did the past year. Last week is an equally important and depressing milestone: Black Women’s Equal Pay Day.

Jimmy Carter called war waged in Vietnam by the U.S -- a war that killed 60,000 Americans and 4,000,000 Vietnamese, without burning down a single U.S. town or forest -- "mutual" damage. Ronald Reagan called it a "noble" and "just cause." Barack Obama promotes the myth of widespread mistreatment of returning U.S. veterans, denounces the Vietnamese as "brutal," and has launched a 13-year, $65 million propaganda program to glorify what the Vietnamese call the American War.

Sessions LA, which began organically out of an desire to introduce turntables to youth at SIPA’s afterschool program, is a DJing, music writing, digital music production and recording program aimed at youth ages 15-20 that live in and around downtown LA. Its core mission is to develop community, foster critical thinking and promote youth development through the process of creating music.

The housing crisis is not over. Millions of families today face unjust eviction and foreclosure.

Phyllis Bennis' new book — the latest in her Middle East primer series — is on both ISIS and the new global war on terror. Like the earlier primers on Palestine and Afghanistan, the new book is written in a Frequently Asked Questions format -- great for use as an organizing tool..

The rap song, sung by Sofia Ashraf, exhorts Unilever to clean up the toxic site of its abandoned mercury thermometer factory and compensate hundreds of its workers who have been exposed to mercury poisoning. The factory moved to India after it was shut down in Watertown, N.Y., in the early 1980s when concern over mercury in the Great Lakes was at its peak.

The San Carlos tribe is fighting to block a massive mining project that would cut a two-mile wide crater through sacred land.