Portside

New Year's coming, a moment for memories, and a gift seldom appreciated until a person has lost the ability. Poet Jennifer L. Knox's Auld Lang Syne points to a sad irony.

The passage of UNSC 2334 marks the first occasion since 1980 that the Security Council has censured Israel's settler-colonialist practices, primarily because the United States had consistently threatened to use or exercised its veto power against similar initiatives for the past thirty-six years. On this occasion, Washington once again refused to support the resolution-but on account of its abstention, the Security Council was able to unanimously adopt the draft text.

Ultraconservative politics are bullying the state government, but there is hope in the numbers being rallied to the cause. Donald Trump's triumph across the South and Midwest, which won him the Electoral College and the White House, did not extend to Governor Pat McCrory in my home state of North Carolina.

Without the Medicaid expansion, low-income people across the country would be left with no pathway to affordable health coverage. Repealing the Medicaid expansion would eliminate health coverage for up to, and quite possibly more than, 11 million low-income Americans in the 31 states (plus the District of Columbia) that have taken up this option.

On March 16, 1968 American soldiers murdered 407 unarmed men, women, and children in My Lai. The same day, in the nearby village of My Khe, another unit of the same division murdered an estimated 97 additional Vietnamese civilians. I and my fellow Marines routinely killed, maimed, and abused Vietnamese on a near-daily basis, destroying homes, fields, crops, and livestock with every weapon available to us, from rifles and grenades to heavy artillery and napalm.

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Well over 150,000 miners lost their lives in the late 19th and early 20th century, more than in most wars in US history. Mother Jones would have argued that the problem was that the needs of the industry are prevailing above the needs of the earth and its people. For her and radicals of her generation, thinking of natural resources as belonging to the public was the great collective objection to the plunder for private gain.

At first glance, modern art and contemporary imperialism make strange bedfellows. The book under review both charts the history of the CIA's work in promoting US corporate interests through its manipulation of culture--what was then called cultural diplomacy-- while also working to define modernism. The reviewer congratulates the author on his first task, but criticizes him on the second.

There were the most minimum wage victories in 2016 of any year since Fight for $15 began. Campaigns are underway in more than a dozen additional jurisdictions to continue movement’s winning streak in 2017 and 2018.

The lesson for Democrats from the Republican coup in North Carolina is that public education is a cornerstone of our democracy, and closely related to the fight for voting rights, racial justice, and a more equal society.