Portside

Many countries and treatment providers like MSF rely on affordable quality generic medicines to treat life-threatening diseases. But the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) would make it much harder for generic companies to produce cheaper drugs that are vital to people’s health. The TPP would give pharmaceutical companies longer monopolies over brand name drugs and the ability to charge high prices for critical drugs for longer periods of time.

Salon reporter Lindsay Abrams speaks with biologist Tyrone Hayes, subject of a new mini-documentary, and the director, Jonathan Demme. Agrochemical giant Syngenta has followed Hayes, besmirched his reputation, and threatened him and his family’s well being for revealing the potential health dangers of one of our most commonly used herbicides.

Labor officials in California have passively watched Democratic Governor Jerry Brown put California's state workplace health and safety agency-Cal/OSHA on a starvation diet. The agency has less enforcement resources than under Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, but state labor officials appear to have employed a strategy of maintaining access and friendly relations with Brown and his appointees at all costs, relinquishing the fight for workplace safety.

The British Broadcasting Corporation’s endless trumpeting of the threat of “Russian aggression” gives one cause to fear we are being softened up for war. The anti-Russian propaganda by the BBC and other news outlets, including what they consciously don’t tell us, is all at the service of the world’s most powerful military and propaganda regime. But, there is recent evidence the essential sanity and peacefulness of ordinary people and families can still prevail.

Anti-vaxxers, your children don’t catch measles and then take it home like a jar of fireflies to enjoy alone or with a few close friends. Instead, they may unwittingly spread it to babies, people with certain medical issues, and a small percentage of the people who have done all they can to try to protect themselves but in whom the vaccine doesn’t work.

A Review of Muhammad Idrees Ahmad’s book ‘The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War.’ The central question Ahmad attempts to answer is: Why did the 2003 Iraq War happen? In one of the book’s most valuable sections, felicitously titled ‘Black Gold and Red Herrings’, he goes through several prevalent explanations/theories and takes them apart one by one.

Half of the members of the US Senate don't believe humans cause climate change. This is a national embarrassment.

Runaway CEO Pay in 30 Seconds. Jimmy Greene -- Where Is the Love? Delta Flight Attendants: Vote Union. Baba Brinkman – So Infectious. Vindicating Freedom Fighters.

California State University Northridge Professor Rudy Acuna relates current campus privatization plans to past and on-going struggles to build and learn from "community" with a challenge to all who resist capital and work for alternatives to institutionalized racism, genocide, Manifest Destiny, urban renewal and privatization.

Reader Comments - Boehner, Netanyahu, Israel and Iran; Labor in the 21st Century; Public School Poverty; Billie Holiday; Pete Seeger; The New Europe - SYRIZA and Podemos; 'American Sniper'; Social Security; Agent Orange; Ukraine; Martin Luther - Militant Radical for Our Times; more... Resource: Energy Democracy in Greece; Announcements (New York)- Sri Lanka Killing Fields documentary; Anniversary of Malcolm X Assassination