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Friday Nite Videos | September 8, 2017

Portside
The Racist Eugenics Roots of Anti-Immigrant Policy. Steely Dan | Do It Again. Antifa: Antagonists of the Alt-Right. The Mastermind Behind Trump's Travel Ban. How Coffee Affects Your Brain.

Making Their Own History

Ingo Schmidt Solidarity
Historians of the bourgeois persuasion tend to focus on the doings of major figures in history. Less emphasis is placed by them on the role of working people, often nameless and ill-remembered. Edward Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class was a methodological breakthrough in showing how a working class made itself. The book under review follows that precedent, charting how ordinary Europeans from the Middle Ages to post-Soviet Europe made their own history.

Tidbits - Sept 7, 2017 - Reader Comments: Long Arc of Protest; DACA; KKK Terror; Differing views: How Should We Protest Neo-Nazis; Health Plan that We Need; Spam Filtering; Healthcare Growing - Workers Not Sharing; Children's Book to get; Announcements; a

Portside
Reader Comments: The Long Arc of Protest; DACA; Korea; KKK Terror; Differing views: How Should We Protest Neo-Nazis; Fukushima Leak; The Health Plan that We Need, With No Copays; Spam Filtering is a free speech issue; Resources: Healthcare Sector is Growing, But Workers Aren't Sharing; Children's Book Celebrating Labor Movement; Anti-BDS legislation impacts You; Announcements: Conversation: "The Color of Law"; 60 Years of Peace Action; and Union Day of Action - Oct. 19

Who's Behind The Plot Against DACA

Center for New Community
Anti-immigrant organizations like FAIR, CIS, NumbersUSA, and IRLI, all of which have ties to white nationalists, have long taken a hardline stance that the federal government should dramatically restrict immigration and make life as difficult as possible for undocumented immigrants already living here. Their harsh viewpoints make no exception for young undocumented individuals who have been living in the U.S. since childhood.

Colin Kaepernick’s Protest is Part of a Patriotic Tradition; Protesters Plan to Block Traffic Outside Rams Opener

Jesse Jackson; Dennis Romero Chicago Sun-Times
Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, is being blackballed — itself a revealing phrase — from the National Football League with the collusion of the all-white owners. He is ostracized because a year ago he exercised his First Amendment right to free speech by taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem, as a symbol of protest against police shootings of unarmed African-American men.

Land Grabbing Responsible for Persecution and Refugee Crisis, in Myanmar and Central America

Saskia Sassen
The extreme violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar (Burma) is closer to extermination than religious persecution. One key factor insufficiently recognized is the massive land grabbing that is happening in Burma and has now reached into the poorest state, Rakhine. Land grabbing has become a major factor in multiple displacements, including in Central America. Too many explanations stop short from seeing a larger economic vortex of land grabbing.

Diplomacy With North Korea Has Worked Before, and Can Work Again

Tim Shorrock The Nation
The war hawks are wrong when they say that past negotiations, like the 1994 Agreed Framework, didn’t make a difference. August 2017 was a reminder of the scariest, and riskiest, days of the Cold War. All month long, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un engaged in a bitter war of words that escalated into tit-for-tat displays of military might and ended with mutual threats of mass destruction.

Bobby Rush Opposes Israel Anti-Boycott Act

Ali Abunimah Electronic Intifada
Although Rep. Bobby Rush's name appears on the list of co-sponsors of anti-BDS legislation, he is opposed to the legislation which would criminalize support for the boycott of Israel. Promoted by Israel advocacy groups to undermine the movement for Palestinian rights in the United States, it poses a civil liberties threat thaqt has led the ACLU to call for its defeat.

The Origins of Collective Decision Making

Geoffrey Kurtz Logos
It may surprise some to know that the origins of the kind of deliberative, representative, majority-rule democracy that characterizes modern legislatures in societies governed by representative democracy is actually a working class invention. Yet that is the claim, says Geoffrey Kurtz, that Andy Blunden is making in this study about how collective decisions are made.