Portside

Fast-food workers plan to strike in 150 cities on Thursday, including 33 international sites. There's a protest planned at a Burger King in Germany, strikes are set for fast-food restaurants in Venice, Milan, and Rome. And a demonstration will take place at a Buenos Aires McDonald's. There are flash mobs planned at five McDonald's in the Philippines.

Economist Joseph Kile in written testimony has warned that "revenues from the users of roads and from taxpayers are the ultimate source of money for highways, regardless of the financing mechanism chosen." The significance of Kile's statement can be seen in the fact that one partner - the private sector - has almost no financial skin in the game. Meanwhile, the public partner - that is, the taxpayers - carries nearly the full financial burden.

This is publication day for Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Security State, about his last near-year swept away by the Snowden affair. It’s been under wraps until now for obvious reasons. This essay is a shortened and adapted version of Chapter 1 of Glenn Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Security State, and appears at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of Metropolitan Books.

Two scientific papers released on Monday by the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters came to similar conclusions by different means. Both groups of scientists found that West Antarctic glaciers had retreated far enough to set off an inherent instability in the ice sheet, one that experts have feared for decades. NASA called a telephone news conference Monday to highlight the urgency of the findings.

The Brown decision annihilated the “separate but equal” rule, previously sanctioned by the Supreme Court in 1896, that permitted states and school districts to designate some schools “whites-only” and others “Negroes-only.” But Brown was unsuccessful in its purported mission—to undo the school segregation that persists as a central feature of American public education today.

Billy Frank Jr, fishing rights fighter; Piketty and critics; Demystifying abortion; Lessons from old school labor; Deconstructing the fashion industry

Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization. But reason does not lift us upward to the heavens. It does not bring us into contact with the sacred. It does not permit us to curb our self-destructive urges. Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson mocked the myth of human progress and the folly of hubris.

In a weak macroeconomy, the employment rate is a better indicator of labour market strength, since it avoids the arbitrary distinction regarding whether someone is sufficiently "active" in their job search to qualify as being officially "in" the labour market. The erosion of Canada's labour market performance over the last couple of years is not surprising in light of the general stagnation of the main drivers of economic growth in our system.

The movie, Cesar Chavez, documents his life and his role in the 1965 Delano Grape Strike. An aspect of the film is the largely forgotten contributions of Filipino Americans to the farm labor movement. Since the 1920s, when Filipinos first learned to organize into unions in Hawaii, Filipinos were important leaders in organizing farmworkers to fight against unfair working conditions.

Why the verdict? There was the obvious and unrelenting hostility of the judge, the mild-mannered demeanor displayed by Officer Bovell on the witness stand, an inclination on the part of individual jurors to take the word of uniformed authority over that of protesters. That Cecily McMillan was the victim of a brutal sexual assault and wound up being tried as the aggressor - was too disturbing a reality for the jurors to come to grips with.