Skip to main content

Dispatches from the Culture Wars - June 25, 2013

Portside
Shocking Collaboration Between Hollywood and Hitler; High-Paying Lure of the Sea; Selling Guns to Fund the Anti-Abortion Fight; Vacation Camp with Israeli Commandos; Power of Political Comics; Kickstarter Kicks Out Abuse Manual

A vision on the verge of realization

Carla D. Washington The Hill
Tuesday marked the 75th anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which ended some of the worst abuses of American workers by establishing the 40-hour work week, restricting child labor, setting a minimum wage and requiring overtime pay for hours worked beyond 40 in a given week. When will home care workers receive these most basic labor protections?

Syria and the Monarchs: A Perfect Storm

Conn Hallinan Foreign Policy in Focus
The United States is now a direct participant in the war to bring down the Damascus regime, thus shedding any possibility that, along with Russia, it could act as a neutral force to bring the parties together.

Pain

Jen Sorenson gocomics.com

World Climate Crisis and Organized Labor

Joe Uehlein and Jeremy Brecher, Rebecca Burns
With atmospheric carbon dioxide levels having reached the 400 ppm point - way above the 350 ppm considered to be the upper limit for avoiding environmental catastrophe - organized labor is struggling with the tension between the immediate need for jobs in a crisis-ridden economy and the perils to humanity's future of avoiding the sacrifices required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The following two articles discuss those tensions from different angles.

Terracide and the Terrarists, Destroying the Planet for Record Profits

Tom Engelhardt TomDispatch
"Terracide." A new word - it's meant to encompass the almost unimaginable -- what the big energy companies are doing on and to our planet right now. Their execs are consciously destroying/melting it for profit and if that doesn't make them terrorists -- or terrarists - what does? And if that doesn't also make the companies themselves the biggest criminal enterprise in history, then how would you define that term?