Portside

This “constant campaign” carried into the community as well, with Local 236 at the forefront of battles in the late 1940s and early 1950s to desegregate Louisville. But to Jim Wright, perhaps the FE’s biggest impact came at the personal level, as those whites who had come into the Harvester plant as “real racists” became friends with black workers there.

In January, Louisiana received a $48 million grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to move the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw and Houma Nation tribal members to more solid ground and reestablish their communities, making tribal members the first climate change refugees in the U.S.

Those challenging the pardon understand there is no precedent for this — but neither is there a precedent for a pardon of this type. “While many pardons are controversial politically, we are unaware of any past example of a pardon to a public official for criminal contempt of court for violating a court order to stop a systemic practice of violating individuals’ constitutional rights,” Fein says.

While your staff has not shared with us the details of the current draft, we understand from colleagues in other single-payer advocacy groups that it mandates copayments for medical services for most Americans and proposes a four-year delay before the implementation of the single-payer reform.

Opioids killed more than 33,000 Americans in 2015 and certainly more last year. Half of deaths involved prescription painkillers. And most of those who overdose on heroin or synthetic opiates, such as fentanyl, first became hooked on legal pills. The US, with 5% of the people, consumes 80% of the global opioid pill production. This is an American crisis, caused by Big Pharma, politicians who colluded with it, and regulators who approved one opioid pill after another.

What happened in Atlanta this week is not a matter of Southerners blindsided by unpredictable weather. This snowstorm underscores the horrible history of suburban sprawl in the United States and the bad political decisions that drive it. It tells us something not just about what's wrong with one city in America today but what can happen when disaster strikes many places across the country. It's not an act of nature or God - this fiasco is manmade from start to finish.

Open letter to Mayor de Blasio from prominent New York City Jewish leaders" "the needs and concerns of many of your constituents - U.S. Jews like us among them - are not aligned with those of AIPAC, and that no, your job is not to do AIPAC's bidding when they call you to do so. AIPAC speaks for Israel's hard-line government and its right-wing supporters, and for them alone; it does not speak for us." (The following letter was shared with Mondoweiss)

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett's administration has decided to sign a 40-year contract to privatize the state's crumbling bridges, but there has been little to no media coverage of the deal and what it will mean for two generations of Pennsylvanians.

Brooklyn College and the Center for Workers Education continues to be in the news. Recently, the New York Times ran what many feel to be a "one-sided" expose on the controversy. Here John Yong, attorney for Joseph Wilson responds to the Times' story. This was previously sent to the Times, but they have refused to print it. Previously Portside ran numerous articles on the controversy.