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Friday Nite Videos -- December 23, 2016

Portside
A Two Minute Guide to Swamp Creatures. Patti Smith | A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall. Merry Christmas Never Left the White House. Top Science Breakthroughs of 2016. The US Nuclear Arsenal Is a Gigantic Accident Waiting to Happen.

Calling Working People of All Colors

Ebony Slaughter-Johnson OtherWords.org
Bringing white voters who defected to Donald Trump into the fold would make the Democratic Party a formidable force, but not if it means marginalizing the concerns of people of color.

Christmas and Resistance to Slavery in the Americas

Yesenia Barragan African American Intellectual History Society
Across the Americas, stories abound of enslaved peoples utilizing the small window of “a little restricted liberty” afforded by the Christmas season to escape bondage.

Interview

Lee Rossi Mas Tequila Review
Looking for a job sometimes seems a little like trying to join a secret society whose rules and requirements are not discernible to the naked eye, as Lee Rossi shows in his mordant poem “Interview.”

Lead Level Disaster - Thousands of Areas Are Worse Than Flint

M.B. Pell and Joshua Schneyer Reuters
Off the Charts -- The thousands of U.S. locales where lead poisoning is worse than in Flint. A Reuters examination of lead testing results across the country found almost 3,000 areas with poisoning rates far higher than in the tainted Michigan city. Yet many of these lead hotspots are receiving little attention or funding.

Retirement Pay Scandal, Trump Vow to Kill Medicare

Lawrence S. Wittner; Tierney Sneed LA Progressive
100 corporate CEOs possess company retirement funds totaling $4.7 billion - an amount equivalent to the entire retirement savings of 41 percent of U.S. families. Things were not always like this. From 1946 to 1980, a combination of union action and government policy led to the expansion of pension benefits for American workers. Now, Donald Trump's pick to direct the Office of Management and Budget says: We have to end Medicare as we know it.