Portside

So often there's an apparent conflict between jobs and the environment. There's a way to resolve our differences. Every environmental campaign should have a jobs program and every jobs program should be designed to address our climate catastrophe.

In most descriptions of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, he’s described as a “one-time boxer.” That doesn’t quite tell the story. Tsarnaev was a two-time New England Golden Gloves Heavyweight Champion. Understanding Tsarnaev’s motivations is critical. Just as we shouldn’t accept the racist argument that “culture” is the root cause of gun deaths in Chicago, we should reject the idea that Islam bears any sort of collective responsibility for Tsarnaev’s crimes.

The list of “accidents” in Bangladesh factories is long and painful. These factories are a part of the landscape of globalization that is mimicked in the factories around the world in other places that opened their doors to the garment industry’s savvy use of the new manufacturing and trade order of the 1990s. Those who died in Bangladesh are victims not only of the malfeasance of the sub-contractors, but also of 21st century globalisation.

Conspiracy theorists of the world, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. A series of related corruption stories spilling out of the financial sector, suggests the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.

According to arrest numbers obtained from the Metropolitan Police Department and crunched by a statistician, between 2005 and 2011, D.C. cops filed 30,126 marijuana offense charges. A staggering number of those—27,560, or 91 percent—were filed against African-Americans. Only 2,097 were filed against whites. Folklore contends that pot-arrest asymmetries are about Blacks smoking outside and getting their getting their pot on street corners. Recent studies contradict that.

The creation of OSHA proved to be one the greatest victory in American history for workplace health but OSHA’s ability to protect workers has severe limitations due to underfunding. The explosion at the West Fertilizer plant in Texas on April 17 that killed at least 14 people demonstrated the agency’s very real limitations. There are so few OSHA inspectors that it would take 129 years to inspect every workplace in the country at current staffing levels.

Extending the current model of free trade agreements is at odds with a factory renaissance. The trickle of reshoring has raised public hopes, as well as valid doubts about the infallible wisdom the stampede offshore with little appreciation of the needs or potential of. A real renaissance in American manufacturing will require energetic, high-road government intervention with an eye to innovation, not simply fatter paychecks in Guangzhou province.

The ancient Maya benefited from contact with other peoples across Mesoamerica between 1,000 to 700 BCE. This wider world of cultural experience may have helped shape Mayan culture.