Portside

Nearly two-thirds of Swarthmore’s 1,500 students signed a petition last December calling on the university to exit coal, oil and gas holdings. The Swarthmore Mountain Justice campaign is calling for an immediate freeze on new fossil fuel investments, followed by a staged withdrawal over five years.

Farewell to the News Dissector; Big Data Antebellum; Cables mapped; Techno-tariat; Cord cutting; Telecommunications and the Occupied Territories

Under the slogan, "Together to pursue the revolution of rights and dignity," over 4,000 organizations from 120 countries are attending the international gathering, which takes place from March 24 to 28. Groups range a wide breadth of nations and causes, from the global peasant movement La Via Campesina to the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women to the international feminist action movement World March of Women.

In an interview with Benjamin Schwarz, the editor of The American Conservative, and an ex Rand Corporation consultant, in which he is critical of the US hegemonic role in world affairs from a conservative, not a "right" point of view. So interesting that he uses Marx to describe the actions of US Foreign Policy to dominate the world for what we call neo-liberal economic domination.

“It is one thing for the US and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal US secrets and play them back to US legislators to undermine US diplomacy,” the Wall Street Journal quoted a senior US official as saying.

Company documents show VW’s management method is modeled on “lean production,” the philosophy created at Toyota, then popularized across the auto industry and beyond. In fact, VW is trying to out-Toyota Toyota. The German company aims to overtake its Japanese competitor and become the world’s most profitable automobile manufacturer by 2018. So the Chattanooga plant provides a window into the state of the art of brutal productivity-maximizing management schemes.

International and European trade union bodies are calling on the European Union to bolster action on workers’ rights and safety in Bangladesh’s garment industry. The Bangladesh government has failed to implement vital labour law reforms, and a compensation fund for victims of the Rana Plaza disaster still remains US$ 9 million short of the target.

Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism details how financial speculation is baked into the American economy. Baptist explains 185 years ago, acquisition of slaves, like other "property", could be financed by mortgages; that bonds were sold to investors based on the value of those mortgages; and, securities based on enslaved human beings produced a “slave asset bubble” not unlike the 2008 financial crisis.

According to a new independent report from the Economic Roundtable, raising the minimum wage to $15.25 will create $5.9 billion for LA’s economy, generate 46,400 new jobs, and increase state and local tax revenue by $414 million.

In honor of International Women’s Day, Activestills (http://activestills.org/) paid tribute to more than a quarter century of anti-occupation activism by the ‘Women in Black’ group in Israel. Every Friday since 1988, the women have stood in the main squares of cities or at highway junctions with signs calling to end the Israeli occupation. Often spat at, cursed or violently harassed by passersby, they have become a symbol of persistence.