Portside

Two items: Arlo Guthrie on Pete Seeger; and When will they Ever Learn? An Interview With Pete Seeger, by John W. Whitehead (2006)

“War on poverty”, “ladders of opportunity”, “upward mobility” and “fight against inequality”: How do the terms used to describe a basic social problem in the U.S. differ, and why is it important?

The Full Employment Caucus is formed amidst a cry for the President to address growing income inequality and as Democrats in Congress push for an increase to the federal minimum wage.

Racism and the end of net neutrality; Warrant-less cyber-search; Paramount Pictures go digital; Now it can be downloaded; Payment card data theft skyrockets

"Our Food Is Dishonestly Priced": Michael Pollan on the Food Movement's Next Goal of Justice for Food Workers

There is something wrong with how this journal and its editors engage 50% of the population (or 20% of scientists) and I believe in my right to say “this is not ‘ok’.”

We have passed the era of industrial capitalism and have entered finance capitalism based on expansion of the neoliberal economic model globally. This is fundamental to understand because it is this model that is driving all of our crises.

I was pleased, and rather surprised, when I saw that the U.S. Department of Labor—in honor of its one-hundred-year anniversary—is assembling a list of books that shaped American ideas about work.DOL officials, after seeing a 2012 “Books that Shaped America” exhibition at the Library of Congress, were inspired to make a similar call for books about work in order to emphasize the “significant role published works have played in the shaping American workers and workplaces.”

The first casualty of every war is the truth—and the Cold War was no exception to that dictum. Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own.

The CCSS have been adopted by 46 states and are currently being implemented in school districts throughout the United States. Today everything about the Common Core, even the brand name—the Common Core State Standards—is contested because these standards were created as an instrument of contested policy.