Portside

Ossian Sweet rose from humble beginnings and became a doctor who tried to help the poor. His story is admirable. In a better world, it would be fairly unremarkable. But Dr. Sweet was African American in the 1920s, and his life tells the story of race struggles in this country—then and now. Unfortunately, his life also shines a light on issues still facing black Americans today: not just segregation, but also injustice at the hands of those meant to keep the peace.

The hacker group CyberBerkut has recently published online letters allegedly written by New York billionaire George Soros that expose him as a puppet master behind the US-backed Ukraine government, involved in the minutest details of the workings of the Kiev regime. They also reveal his machinations with the US Government and the officials of the European Union in a scheme where, if successful, he could win billions through the plunder of Ukrainian assets.

Despite the hype and brinkmanship, Germany doesn’t want to Greece to leave the Eurozone. The true objective is to undermine popular support for the Syriza government to get a new more compliant regime, a “slow-motion coup d’etat.” Germany, the other EU countries, and the U.S., will try to give Greece enough oxygen to avoid default and exit, which they really don’t want, but not enough for an economic recovery, which they also don’t want.

Pope Francis’ long awaited and controversial encyclical on the environment repeatedly challenges the reliance on capitalist market forces to address climate change, and links the root causes of the environmental crisis to the causes of global inequality and “human and social degradation.” According to Ian Angus, editor of Climate and Capitalism, Pope Francis has now positioned the Catholic Church as an ally in “fighting the number one crisis facing humanity today.”

Reasonable people cannot deny that the Charleston shooting was a racially driven act of terror. To deny the connection between Roof’s actions and extremist rhetoric that tells young people like him that black people are inherently violent and criminal is to be complicit in the actions that such rhetoric inspires.

The Charleston massacre is the latest in the long record of attacks on Southern black churches. Historically law enforcement officials have refused to consider them hate crimes unless the suspects had direct ties to Klan-like groups, thus ignoring the societal role of racism. But most of these hate crimes are committed by unaffiliated young white males who grow up in a pervasive culture of racism that scapegoats African Americans and others for their economic hardship.

More than 2,000 Air Force veterans and reservists are set to receive over $47.5 million for exposure to the harmful chemical. Ending years of wait, the government agreed Thursday to provide millions of dollars in disability benefits to as many as 2,100 Air Force reservists and active-duty forces exposed to Agent Orange residue on airplanes used in the Vietnam War.

Today I mourn with the families and community of the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Charleston, S.C. I mourn for the living and the dead. I mourn for Black life. But simultaneously, I rage. I rage against the executions, beatings, dispersals, and assassinations of Black people everywhere. I am calling out the current manifestation of Black genocide, racial cleansing, and white terrorism happening in the U.S.

Former CA Governor Schwarzenegger once called it “stuff [I] used to blow up in the movies.” America’s infrastructure—highways, railways, bridges and thruways—now face a doom worse than the Terminator ever imagined: destruction from the rust, decay and corrosion of trillions of dollars worth of old tracks, canals, ports, structures and causeways that carry our trade and traffic all over the United States. Every $1 billion of federal investment creates about 13,000 jobs.

An increasing number of United States military veterans are counseling United States military drone operators to refuse to fly drone surveillance/attack missions – the veterans are even helping sponsor prime time television commercials urging drone operators to “refuse to fly.”