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Slavery and the American University

Alex Carp New York Review of Books
From their very beginnings, the American university and American slavery have been intertwined, but only recently are we beginning to understand how deeply.

Opioid Makers Funneled Millions to Patient Advocacy Groups

Julia Lurie Mother Jones
The groups that received pharmaceutical funding—like the US Pain Foundation and the Academy of Integrative Pain Management—in turn issued guidelines minimizing the risks of opioid addiction, lobbied to change laws aimed at curbing opioid abuse, and sought to protect doctors sued for overprescribing painkillers, according to a Senate report released Monday by Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill (D).

The Ugly Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike

DeNeen L. Brown Washington Post
Jerry Wurf, the national president of the public workers union American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, considered the Memphis sanitation workers’ protest more than a strike; it became a social struggle, a battle for dignity. Wurf called the strike a “race conflict and a rights conflict.”

Bonds of Memory and the Fight for Economic Justice

Michael Honey Commercial Appeal
Sanitation workers marching in Memphis threatened by national guards.
The bonds of memory and today’s vast disparities in wealth and well-being tell us that we must continue the struggle launched by workers and by King in the spring of 1968. Today, more people live in poverty in America than in 1968. Now as then, the majority of the poor are “white” but poverty’s heaviest concentration is among people of color, especially young people and women. Poverty exists in part because most of the new jobs in Memphis, as in America, do not pay a living wage.

If We Bring The Good Life To All, Will We Destroy The Planet?

Nurith Aizenman NPR
rice harvesting outside Hanoi, VN
Only one country comes even close to delivering the good life in a sustainable way: Vietnam succeeds on six social indicators — including a life expectancy above 65 years and providing sufficient nutrition — while staying within its limit on every environmental threshold except carbon emissions.