Portside

The Fed encourages its employees to keep their heads down, to obey their managers and to appease the banks. That is, bank regulators failed to do their jobs properly not because they lacked the tools but because they were discouraged from using them.

Complexity and uncertainty create extra difficulty for experts in explaining their results, and for non-experts in understanding them. Climate science is not sound bite science.

Five years ago, Hyatt Hotels in Boston fired workers after making them train their replacements. HERE Local 26 has backed these non-union workers in their fight. After five years they have won.

A new report from Yesh Din, Volunteers for Human Rights, denounces the Israel Defense Force's (IDF) privatization of law enforcement in the occupied territories. The Israeli Human Rights group accuses the IDF of transferring the power to arrest, search, question, and detain West Bank Palestinians to settler militias "who are motivated by an aspiration to seize additional Palestinian land and who refuse to recognize Palestinian land rights.".

This week 35 Congressional Democrats demanded the Obama Administration act to protect children laboring on U.S. tobacco farms. The U.S. Representatives announced their support for a letter to Labor Secretary Thomas Perez September 23rd from U.S. Representatives David Cicilline (D-RI) and Matt Cartwright (D-PA), calling for the Department of Labor to close the loophole in U.S. labor law Labor which allows children over the age of 12 to work in tobacco fields.

Banned Books Week, the annual end of September "celebration of the freedom to read," brings to light the fact that around 11,300 books have been challenged since a consortium of literary-minded sponsors established the event in 1982. Challenges are defined as attempts to remove the title from libraries or schools, and in 2013, 307 were reported to the American Library Association's (ALA) Office of Intellectual Freedom.

For years, Muslim New Yorkers have been spied on, not heard; now they're finding their political voice. As the gears of federal government have ground to a halt, a new energy has been rocking the foundations of our urban centers. From Atlanta to Seattle and points in between, cities have begun seizing the initiative, transforming themselves into laboratories for progressive innovation. This is the latest in the The Nation's series, Cities Rising.

What were you thinking? Everyone in the family noticed that anti-war status you posted this summer, and the hasbara video they sent that you didn't `like.' Tonight they are going to air it all. The keyword of the evening: ISIS. You're going to hear it a lot. Because the Israeli leftist is a specimen: an object to identify, educate, and if that doesn't work, to chop up and make meatballs out of.

A response to Chelsea Manning's strategy to leave `self contained' enclaves for IS to rule - it is a crude, self righteous, inhuman lack of consideration for the populations involved, on the ground, and for what they want for themselves. (Response to original piece in The Guardian and re-posted on Portside.)

Some of the U.S. corporations most known for their so-called commitment to fighting climate change are actively supporting lobbying organizations and politicians most active in the movement for climate change denial. According to a recent report, "pro-sustainability companies" are pouring millions of dollars into the coffers of the "climate denier caucus" in the U.S. Congress in exchange for support of legislation that benefits their bottom line.