The BBC’s Drums of War and Meme of “Russian Aggression”

Oliver Tickell CounterPunch
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.

Labor Movement Malpractice: Relinquishing the Fight for Workplace Health and Safety

Garrett Brown New Labor Forum
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.

Chemical Company’s War on an Environmental Whistleblower

Lindsay Abrams Salon
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.

U.S. Trade Deal Will Devastate Poor Peoples' Access to Medicines

Medicins Sans Frontieres /Doctors Without Borders Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF)
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.

Foreign Domestic Workers Found Historic Union in Lebanon

Eva Shoufi Al-Akhbar English
Despite serious threats to their safety, more than 200 female migrant domestic laborers in Lebanon gathered January 25th to form the first trade union in the Arab world for domestic workers. Lebanese laws deny foreign workers the right to form their own unions, so the new union is aimed at all domestic workers irrespective of nationality. According to the United Nations, the Arab World is home to some 30 million migrant workers.

Dying Communities

Rudy Acuna LA Progressive
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.

Friday Nite Videos -- January 30, 2015

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

Jimmy Greene -- Where Is the Love?

From saxophonist Jimmy Greene’s new release, Beautiful Life, a celebration of the life of his 6-year-old daughter, Ana Márquez-Greene, whose life was tragically taken, along with 19 other children and 6 educators, on December 14, 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Delta Flight Attendants: Vote Union

For many of the 1,800 Delta flight attendants based at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, the upcoming vote to form a union is about more than wages, benefits and work rules. It’s about getting back what they lost after Delta’s merger with MSP-based Northwest Airlines four years ago.