Portside

Frackers think pink; Gamer rage; Myths about black voters; Pulling the plug on Emma; Warrior cops; Euroleft dreams

Putin has just delivered a speech every American deserves to hear and consider. Few will have done so for the simple reason that our media declined to tell you about the Russian leader’s presentation to an annual gathering of leaders and thinkers called the Valdai International Discussion Club, a Davos variant. Readers can now decide: What they think of the speech and what they think of the American media for not reporting it.

"The disparity in education resources has created an educational caste system that the Commonwealth must eliminate." —Wade Henderson, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

A Richmond Rattlesnake The scale of Chevron’s own spending–to defeat low-budget municipal candidates–was so jaw-dropping that it drew national media attention. From Bay Area newspapers and The L.A. Times to Bill Moyers and Rachel Maddow and a visiting U.S. Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, everyone agreed that Richmond was ground zero for corporate-funded negative campaigning in the post-Citizens United era.

Malek and Hoke spent four years, 2010 to the summer of 2014, conducting more than 250 hours of interviews in the West Bank and Gaza and ultimately culled the material into 16 chapters. The range is broad and includes a Jewish Israeli who moved to the West Bank in solidarity with her Palestinian friends and a middle-aged Palestinian professor who helped found the International Solidarity Movement.

On Friday, November 7, COSATU (the Congress of South African Trade Unions), the country’s main federation of trade unions and organisations of the working class, has expelled one of its founders, the militantly socialist National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA). This has major implications for political movements in South Africa.

The list of “accidents” in Bangladesh factories is long and painful. These factories are a part of the landscape of globalization that is mimicked in the factories around the world in other places that opened their doors to the garment industry’s savvy use of the new manufacturing and trade order of the 1990s. Those who died in Bangladesh are victims not only of the malfeasance of the sub-contractors, but also of 21st century globalisation.

In most descriptions of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, he’s described as a “one-time boxer.” That doesn’t quite tell the story. Tsarnaev was a two-time New England Golden Gloves Heavyweight Champion. Understanding Tsarnaev’s motivations is critical. Just as we shouldn’t accept the racist argument that “culture” is the root cause of gun deaths in Chicago, we should reject the idea that Islam bears any sort of collective responsibility for Tsarnaev’s crimes.

So often there's an apparent conflict between jobs and the environment. There's a way to resolve our differences. Every environmental campaign should have a jobs program and every jobs program should be designed to address our climate catastrophe.

Lest anyone imagine that corporate crimes being unreported by the mainstream media and punished with a wrist slap are anything new, legendary labor reporter James Lerner's account of the GE - Krupp conspiracy trial of 1947 is an eye-opener.