Portside

One product of the corporate-defined trade rules is that the United States has run unprecedented trade deficits, totaling more than $8 trillion since 2000 alone. Trade deficits cost jobs. Worse, companies have used the threat to move jobs abroad to drive down wages here at home. These corporate trade policies contribute significantly to the reality that, as Joseph Stiglitz writes, “the real median income of a full time male worker is lower now than it was 40 years ago."

By leading a Sunni coalition Saudi Arabia will internationalise the Yemen conflict and emphasise its sectarian Sunni-Shia dimension. US policy across the Middle East looks contradictory. It is supporting Sunni powers and opposing Iranian allies in Yemen but doing the reverse in Iraq. Whatever happens in Iraq and Yemen, the political temperature of the region is getting hotter by the day.

A major agricultural labor action is entering its second week in Mexico, where such walkouts are rare. But workers report that they gained experience in the US - via the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, or with the UFW on the west coast - and those lessons helped inspire workers to organize and fight for their rights in Mexico.

While hysteria and panic reign over the barbaric acts of the faraway Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, U.S. involvement in the “war on drugs” in a neighboring country gets just passing attention here. Curiouser and curiouser, hysteria and panic over Mexico only seem to rise when ISIS is reputed to be involved (at least in the fantasy worlds of various right-wingers). Consider it all part of the true mysteries of our strange American age of repetitive war.

If Billie Holiday and Ethel Rosenberg were alive, they’d both celebrate their 100th birthdays this year. At first glance they may seem an unlikely couple, but a closer look reveals surprising parallels.

The Ukraine conflict has become a complex proxy war involving four of the world’s five original nuclear armed countries: the United States, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom. It’s time to step back from the brink.

Our own progress against racism in the United States remains too recent, too fragile, and too incomplete to go on abetting apartheid in Israel.

Cuba to be certified by WHO as first country to eradicate the transmission of HIV and syphilis from mother to child.

For the next week, we can concentrate on basketball and marvel at the remarkable athletes playing their hearts out and set politics aside. But perhaps, maybe during the commercials, we can reflect on the fact that the vast majority of these games are being played by teams from public universities in states whose governments are hostile to public universities and whose policies increase the already considerable financial burden on the students at these universities.

Viewing war as an engineering problem focuses on technology (which benefits contractors) and destructive physical effects, but ignores and is offset by the fundamental truth of war: Machines don’t fight wars, people do, and they use their minds.