Portside

While the fast-food movement may not be close to persuading McDonald’s to adopt a $15 minimum wage, even the campaign’s critics acknowledge it has achieved some of its goals by prompting a national debate about low-wage work and nudging various cities and states to raise their minimum wage.

"Ida" swept the European awards and finally won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Its director, Pawel Pawlikovski, resorted to an aesthetic of the 60s (Wajda, Godard) not because of mere retro desire, but because the events the film depicts and the resulting emotional impact occurred at the beginning of that decade. Betancourt writes: "Ida", with its aesthetic of loneliness masterfully portrayed in a black and white format, is a "tour de force".

The four American Jews above are on a national campus tour. All in their 70s, they are veterans of the civil rights movement; they went south 50 years ago to help free our country from Jim Crow, risking their lives for equal rights.But they have been banned from speaking at Hillel, the Jewish campus organization, because they have come out in favor of Palestinian human rights.

Steve Howard, executive director of the VSEA, told NPR recently, “Before you take money out of the paychecks of snowplow drivers, nursing assistants, custodians and administrative assistants … we believe you have a moral obligation to ask for a greater contribution from a broad-based revenue source paid mostly by the wealthiest Vermonters who have had all the economic gains of the last decade.”

Indiana takes the heat; Keeping STEM male; Economics of me first; Ask not for whom the joke cracks; Chuy-gilantes

One product of the corporate-defined trade rules is that the United States has run unprecedented trade deficits, totaling more than $8 trillion since 2000 alone. Trade deficits cost jobs. Worse, companies have used the threat to move jobs abroad to drive down wages here at home. These corporate trade policies contribute significantly to the reality that, as Joseph Stiglitz writes, “the real median income of a full time male worker is lower now than it was 40 years ago."

By leading a Sunni coalition Saudi Arabia will internationalise the Yemen conflict and emphasise its sectarian Sunni-Shia dimension. US policy across the Middle East looks contradictory. It is supporting Sunni powers and opposing Iranian allies in Yemen but doing the reverse in Iraq. Whatever happens in Iraq and Yemen, the political temperature of the region is getting hotter by the day.

A major agricultural labor action is entering its second week in Mexico, where such walkouts are rare. But workers report that they gained experience in the US - via the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, or with the UFW on the west coast - and those lessons helped inspire workers to organize and fight for their rights in Mexico.

While hysteria and panic reign over the barbaric acts of the faraway Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, U.S. involvement in the “war on drugs” in a neighboring country gets just passing attention here. Curiouser and curiouser, hysteria and panic over Mexico only seem to rise when ISIS is reputed to be involved (at least in the fantasy worlds of various right-wingers). Consider it all part of the true mysteries of our strange American age of repetitive war.

If Billie Holiday and Ethel Rosenberg were alive, they’d both celebrate their 100th birthdays this year. At first glance they may seem an unlikely couple, but a closer look reveals surprising parallels.