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Ambassador Recalled: Airbnb’s Chip Conley’s Mexican Misadventure

Rex Weiner Capital and Main
After the defeat of San Francisco Prop F, Airbnb's Conley celebrated Silicon Valley media’s “Glowing perspective on Airbnb’s prospect,” tweeting, ”With Prop F Gone, Airbnb Is Now Unbeatable.” Less well known has been Conley’s side job, before and during his Airbnb tenure, as visionary leader and chief pitchman for Tres Santos, a mega-resort under construction in Todos Santos, a small Mexican fishing and farming town on Baja’s Pacific Coast.

Happy Birthday, Guantánamo

Belen Fernandez teleSUR
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.

Doubling Down on a Failed Strategy The Pentagon’s Dangerous “New” Base Plan Ring War in the Middle East

David Vine TomDispatch
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.

Canoas: A Government of, for and by the People

Ruth Needleman Portside
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?

Demand Airbnb Stop Listing Rentals in Israeli Settlements

U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
Did you hear all the buzz around Airbnb, the online accommodation service, listing homes in illegal Israeli settlements for people to rent?

How 'Friedrichs' Could Actually Unleash Unions from Decades of Free Speech Restrictions

Shaun Richman Working in These Times
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.

Why the B-52 Failed: Dispatch from Hanoi

David Bacon The Reality Check
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."

NLRB rejects Shurat HaDin complaint against United Electrical Workers

Annie Robbins Mondoweiss
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.”