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.