Portside

If members run the local... what exactly is the union rep's job? We asked four experienced staffers how they approach their day-to-day tasks while keeping the rank and file in the driver’s seat.

Not only do patents push higher prices onto consumers, they burden the research world with the increased costs of paying for the intellectual property needed to do further research . . . If anything, the neoliberal approach to academic research is a return to the privately funded, pre-tenure origins of the university system when numerous schools were simply research labs and promotional arms for private industry

The vision of the 2002 movie “Minority Report,” based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, of “pre-crime” squads identifying people likely to commit crimes is getting less fantastic all the time.

In a remarkable job of reporting, Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post describes the creation of the Common Core standards. Two men–Gene Wilhoit and David Coleman–went to see Bill Gates in 2008 to ask him to underwrite national standards. He agreed, and within two years, the standards were written and adopted by almost every state in the nation. -- Diane Ravitch

When teachers at the Perelman Jewish Day School in Montgomery County were told in March that the private religious academy would no longer recognize their 60-member union, they filed a federal labor complaint - and then they went to a higher authority.

Mondragón has been justly cited as a leading example of what can be done through cooperative organization. But it recently announced that its most important unit, Fagor, was filing for bankruptcy. This raises important larger questions about the market, and longer-term strategies for moving beyond the failings of corporate capitalism and traditional socialism.

Today, Ireland is under a different sort of tyranny, one imposed by the banks and the troika--the EU, ECB and IMF. The oppressors have demanded austerity and more austerity, forcing the public to pick up the tab for bills incurred by profligate private bankers.

The objective of the ideological project of the economics profession in the current era is to provide a theoretical foundation for unregulated financial markets and unregulated capitalism. The fact that the project has succeeded in the face of logic and history is admittedly a fantastic conjurers’ trick, but it is ridiculous to award Nobel Prizes to the conjurers.

There are various things that conservatives and liberals disagree over, and for some insane reason, whether or not the Civil War was about slavery is one of them. Sure, the war ended with the abolition of slavery, but many individuals still claim that the entire war was over states’ rights as opposed to the tradition of owning another human being.

“As someone studying the economics of this, I can say that a financial transactions tax is a policy no-brainer,” Lynn Stout, a professor of corporate law at Cornell Law School, said at a Wednesday briefing on Capitol Hill. “It’s all upside, there’s virtually no downside, and it’s astonishing we don’t have one.”