Portside

Gitmo is an offshore penal colony that’s close enough to administer with ease, but far enough away to exist on the margins of legality.

It’s worth asking what those special ops forces of “ours,” relied on ever more heavily from one administration to the next, and settling into so many bases, actually represent. It’s hard to argue that they are there for the defense of this country. Like the bases themselves, they are, it seems, carrying out the increasingly messy business of empire in the far reaches of the planet. They are, you might say, Washington’s imperial shock troops.

Texas is just one of 19 states to receive a failing grade on reproductive health according to a new report from the Population Institute, a nonprofit that provides family planning education.

Here in the states, we know what it means to see our democratic rights attacked. But do we have a vision of what an expansion of democracy and popular participation in government might look like?

Did you hear all the buzz around Airbnb, the online accommodation service, listing homes in illegal Israeli settlements for people to rent?

However, once those bargaining sessions between unions reps and their government employers are redefined by the Supreme Court to be political speech, any law restricting what can be said, what items can be raised, seems to be a restriction by the government on those union members’ free speech rights.

On the plane to Hanoi last December, I opened my copy of the NYT to find an article by Dave Philipps: "After 60 Years, B-52's Still Dominate the U.S. Fleet." The piece stuck with me as I traveled through north Vietnam, trying to unravel U.S. amnesia towards the people of this country and what they call "the American war." Philipps ends with a quote from a former South Vietnamese Navy officer, Phuoc Luong. "In Vietnam we didn't use it (B-52s) enough. That's why we lost."

UE National President Peter Knowlton said that UE in the past had “withstood attempts by the U.S. government to silence us during the McCarthy era in the 1950s,” and was “unbowed by the latest attempt of a surrogate of the Israeli government to stifle our call for justice for Palestinian and Israeli workers.”

Carter ordered Wal-Mart to offer 16 former workers their previous jobs and make them "whole for any loss of earnings and other benefits suffered as a result of the discrimination against them". Wal-Mart was also ordered to hold a meeting in more than two dozen stores to inform workers of their rights to organize under U.S. labor law.

According to a Tufts University report, "hazardous sites, municipal landfills, incinerators and other hazardous facilities are disproportionally located in poor minority neighborhoods".