Portside

Bertolt Brecht, War Primer. London and New York: Verso, 2017. 104pp. $19.95/£12.99 paperback.

As Louis Celli, a top staffer for the American Legion, told the Associate Press, a merger would siphon off funds from VHA hospitals and clinics and eventually shift costs directly to veterans, through co-pay and other possible fee increases.

Work at Amazon's distribution warehouses in Italy is backbreaking, and thousands of employees are part time and permanently on call. "It is a grim form of exploitation."

NY AG probing ‘massive scheme’ to influence FCC with fake net neutrality comments.

City election dominated by a left-leaning wave .

Amazon is a devilishly simple everything-store. You buy it. It shows up. Fast. But, at the bottom of its complicated machinery is a nearly invisible workforce tasked with getting those orders to your doorstep. It’s a network of supposedly self-employed, utterly expendable couriers enrolled in an app-based program which some believe may violate labor laws. It’s Amazon Flex, and it makes Amazon’s “last-mile” deliveries—the final trip from a local facility to the customer.

A petition drive has been launched in San Francisco rename Justin Herman Plaza after the renowned poet, Maya Angelou. Presently, the plaza honors Justin Herman, who was head of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency during the period when it displaced thousands of low-income residents from the South of Market and Fillmore districts. This latter displacement, which critics attacked as “Negro Removal,” is one of the most shameful episodes in San Francisco history.

In its expansive report, the AFL-CIO reports 4,585 U.S. workers were killed on the job and 50,000 died from occupational diseases in 2013. U.S. workers suffer from 7.6 million to 11.4 million injuries each year. Workplace violence continues to be the second leading cause of job fatalities, with women workers suffering 70% of the lost-time injuries related to workplace violence. Latino workers continue to be at increased risk of job fatalities.

On nearly all indicators of mortality, survival and life expectancy, the United States ranks at or near the bottom among high-income countries. Pick almost any measure of social cohesion over the last four decades and you will find the United States took a wrong turn along the way. The bloated incarceration rates and rock-bottom life expectancy, the unraveling families and the stagnant college graduation rates amount to an existential threat to the nation’s future.

Last month, when Pope Francis described Ottoman Turkey’s slaughter of between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians during World War I as “the first genocide of the 20th century,” the Turkish government predictably denounced his characterization. However, those who assert the first genocide in the 20th century was carried out by Germany against the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia (South-West Africa) have also raised concerns about the Pope’s statement.