Portside

Media face the ugly truth; VICE = Fox?; Google memo; Giant rightist media merger; Who’s killing Mexican journalists; Tracking attacks

The president’s decision to expand US military intervention condemns Afghanistan to escalating conflict, and its people to further misery and death.

When Mr. Trump identifies statues commemorating Confederate leaders as essential parts of “our” history and culture, he is honoring that dark period. (The dismantling of Reconstruction and rebirth of White Supremacy) Like all monuments, these statues say a lot more about the time they were erected than the historical era they evoke.

NAFTA is back in the news this month: On August 16, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer met with his counterparts from Canada and Mexico, the other two NAFTA nations, to open talks on renegotiating the pact.

In the new age of domestic terrorism, the right to display arms must be controlled.

It’s been almost a decade since the Great Recession, and America has witnessed a record 82 months of month-on-month jobs growth. The national unemployment rate now stands at a 4.3%, a 16-year low. But month after month, it is the low-wage sectors – fast food, retail, healthcare – that have added new jobs. Wage growth has barely kept pace with inflation. The national minimum wage ($7.25) was last raised in 2009.

Global capital despised Brazil's Lula and feared his return to power. In particular, the rich resented his nationalization of Brazil’s oil resources, making Petrobras the patrimony of all Brazilians. He strengthen the national bank and funded oil exploration that identified enormous oil reserves in the Atlantic off the country’ coast. Equally threatening were his efforts to establish a network of third world governments, especially in the Americas.

“No impression should be permitted in Latin America that they can get away with this, that it’s safe to go this way. All over the world it’s too much the fashion to kick us around.” * U.S. President Nixon. Right now it is critical for the U.S. public to get some lessons on U.S. imperialism and Latin American history, and for progressive voices to condemn U.S. intervention in elections throughout Latin America and, in particular, in funding violence in Venezuela.

Trump was always, at heart, both the pitchman of, and a con artist for, American abundance, or rather for a particularly American version of conspicuous consumption. His greatest pitch and what may be the greatest selling scam in history has gotten so little attention in these last six months: to open the gold-plated spigot on American fossil fuels and sell the country’s oil and natural gas abroad in far greater quantities than at present.

On July 25 and 27, two explosions shook the island and released poisonous chemicals into the air.