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The Victory in Alabama - Black Voters Crucial - How Roy Moore Was Defeated (four perspectives)

Bill Fletcher,Jr; Ally Boguhn; Kira Lerner; Douglas William Portside
98 percent of black women and 93% of black men voted for Democratic Senator-elect Doug Jones yesterday in Alabama, a state where black people make up a quarter of the population. Black voters made up 28% of the electorate on Tuesday, a turnout that hasn’t been seen since President Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. Since those numbers started to trickle in late last night and early this morning, one thing became clear: black voters saved America from Roy Moore.

Sheryl Crow Criticizes Country Stars for Not 'Taking a Stand' on Gun Control

Lois Beckett The Guardian
Sheryl Crow, who is releasing a song dedicated to Newtown victims, says country musicians are afraid of speaking about gun laws and losing their audience. Money and fear have kept country music artists from speaking out about gun laws, the nine-time Grammy Award-winner said, even after thousands of country fans were targeted in October in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.

Asia’s Other Nuclear Standoff

Conn Hallinan Foreign Policy in Focus
By roping India and Japan into its standoff with China, the U.S. is raising the nuclear stakes in Asia — including, dangerously, between India and Pakistan. With the world focused on the scary possibility of war on the Korean Peninsula, not many people paid much attention to a series of naval exercises this past July in the Malacca Strait, a 550-mile long passage between Sumatra and Malaysia through which pass over 50,000 ships a year.

Tidbits - December 14, 2017 - Reader Comments: Alabama Black Voters Key; GOP Tax Bill; Jerusalem; Jeremy Corbyn; Red Cross; Genocide and Hitler; Nobel Peace Prize Award; Why contribute to Portside; Announcements; and more....

Portside
Reader Comments: Alabama Grassroots and Black Voters key to Defeating Trumpite Racist Sex Offender; GOP Tax Bill is Class War Against the People; Jerusalem; Jeremy Corbyn; Holiday contributions to charity other than Red Cross; Genocide and Hitler; Nobel Peace Prize Award; Why contribute to Portside; Resources; Announcements: Los Angeles, New York, Washington, DC, Houston; and more....

Saggio da San Frediano # 8 – Lost in Translation – Strike at Amazon in Italia

Peter Olney The Stansbury Forum
Amazon has become a symbol of the new economy in Italy and the unions are determined to make these new workplaces, union fortresses. While Italian labor law has many advantages compared to our own, patient worker based organizing remains the fundamental building block of organizing.

Was Aaron Burr the Embryo Caesar?

Eric Foner London Review of Books
Little is known about the veracity of the so-called Burr Conspiracy, the alleged effort by Aaron Burr to split off the western territories to form a separate nation in the early 1800s. People, the book's author writes, clung to familiar stories; they ‘embraced different certainties’ regardless of new information and revelations. Burr was judged on what was viscerally believed in a politically divided United States, whose easy acceptance of felt truths resembles our own.

Big Soda’s New Campaign to Buy Silence and Inaction

Casey Hinds Beyond Chron
Fearing the federal government’s new recommendations against added sugars will embolden cities to adopt soda taxes, Big Soda is using tobacco industry tactics to stop cities like Seattle from regulating their products. Seattle was one of six cities awarded a grant from the American Beverage Association (ABA) and the U.S. Conference of Mayors to fight childhood obesity, which is like getting a grant from the tobacco industry to fight cancer.

On-Demand Taskers: Expanding the Ranks of the "Precariat"

Guy Standing Working-Class Perspectives
Revolutionary changes are taking place in the global labor process. Observers predict that within the next decade, one in every three labor transactions will be done online, carried out by “taskers” with no job security, low and fluctuating incomes, perpetual uncertainty, and no control over time. British social scientist Guy Standing describes the role of these taskers, who are expanding the ranks of the “precariat” in the so-called “sharing” economy.

Israel’s Peace Now: Illegal Settlements Designed to Make Two-State Solution Impossible

Al Akhbar English Mint Press
The number of homes under construction in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank rose last year by 40 percent, the Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now said Monday. Peace Now said the construction of 3,100 “residential units” began last year in illegal West Bank settlements, while 4,485 tenders for construction there and in annexed East Jerusalem settlement districts were launched in 2014 — “a record high for at least a decade.”