Portside

Thousands of fast food workers across 150 U.S. cities walked off the job on Thursday. Hundreds of those workers — nearly 500 of them, according to a public relations firm supporting the strikes — willfully committed civil disobedience as part of their protest, and were subsequently arrested by the police.

The country's largest private prison firms are experiencing strong increases in the price of their shares as a result of the incarceration of thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children in recent months. While these firms have no experience in child welfare, investors nonetheless "see this as an opportunity." For private firms with existing federal contracts to detain immigrants, the increased jailing of unaccompanied minors is "a potentially untapped market."

The Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD) reports the long-term unemployed in the world's major economies has increased by 85% since the financial crash of 2008, and the "structural reforms" and austerity measures imposed in its wake. The OECD, which supported many of these measures, now warns cyclical unemployment has become structural, and any further cuts in wages or jobs would be "counterproductive" and threaten social cohesion.

On September 10th advocates for "net neutrality" will launch a global day of protest, the Battle for the Net's Internet Slowdown, simulating what the world wide web may soon look like without concerted action. The action is part of the campaign to prevent the Federal Communications Commission from bowing to the giant cable companies' demand for a two-tier internet system, with arbitrary fees and slow and fast lanes for internet traffic.

Israel's attack on Syria shows how volatile this conflict is. A political solution is now urgent.

In light of the report that the economy contracted in the last quarter of 2012 due partly to cutbacks, Ezra Klein notes that one man's big government socialism is another man's premature and destructive fiscal retrenchment.

Most Greeks want an end to austerity; they also want real reform. The worst outcome for Greece would be the further rollback of workers' rights and the social safety net without a purge of the corrupt elites and their clients in the media, in business and in the unions-a nightmare of exploitation policed by the lads from Golden Dawn. Greece,

Mairead Corrigan Maguire, 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland, calls for support for Julian Assange. His only crime is that he embarrassed the U.S. and other powerful governments with WikiLeaks' release of documents in which the U.S. military appear to have deliberately killed civilians.