Portside

While the US hasn’t publicly confirmed specifics – which are still being negotiated – an Israeli cabinet minister told Defense News that the Obama package would see US military aid jump to more than $40 billion over the 10-year period beginning in 2018, from the $30 billion in the program that began in 2008.

The FDA announced that it will withdraw its approval for three chemicals used to make grease, stain, and water repelling food packaging and consider banning seven food additives used in both “artificial” and “natural” flavors. This raises much larger questions about one of the agencies with the most control over the safety of what we eat.

Almost from the very beginning of human history, there were markets.

“A veritable tour de force in archival and oral history documenting 1950s Cuban worker activism, and in the process, compelling us to revisit the nature and extent of the role of labour in the Cuban Revolution then, and now.” Professor Emerita Jean Stubbs, Queens University, UK, author, Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History and Cuba: The Test of Time.

USLAW is pleased to announce that it will convene its next National Labor Assembly this April 15-17 in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Honduras, Venezuela, Argentina… is Brazil next? Will the progressive policies initiated by the Workers’ Party’s mythic hero Lula, carried forward by Pres. Dilma Rousseff, end in what many left and radical activists are calling “coups” without the military? The most repeated slogan at this year’s 15th World Social Forum in Porto Alegre was: “Not another coup.”

Pfizer – one of the world’s wealthiest pharmaceutical companies – recently announced that it is moving its tax address offshore so it can claim foreign citizenship and dodge taxes here at home.

Antonin Scalia was quite simply a narrow-minded, mean-spirited man who propagated an intellectually absurd judicial theory known as "originalism."

This poem is about my personal journey as a working class Jewish kid form Philadelphia who traveled to NYC in 1968 to get out of the draft, not knowing that I was stepping into a tornado of social conflict. As a graduate of an elite college I found out that I could avoid the draft if I was willing to do what was considered by many as unthinkable – teach in a poor neighborhood of NYC.

Here’s my twenty-first-century rule of thumb about this country: if you have to say it over and over, it probably ain’t so. Which is why I’d think twice every time we’re told how “exceptional” or “indispensable” the United States is.