Portside

In the popular imagination, opposition to the Vietnam War was driven largely by the privileged, while supposedly reactionary blue-collar workers supported the war effort. That memory is wrong.

As Republicans insist on tarring an idea they came up with as the resurrection of Lenin, Democrats find themselves defending a policy they would have scoffed at a decade ago.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is set to review a case involving graduate assistants at New York University. If it is favorably reviewed it could reopen the door to unionizing thousands of graduate employees at private universities.

“I don’t think you have to make this choice about being on one side or the other side. My feeling is that when we are committed to growing the economy and making sure that our public employees have a place at the table through collective bargaining, everyone wins.” -- Mary Burke

Asked whether the court had gotten its ruling wrong, Judge Posner responded: “Yes. Absolutely.” Back in 2007, he said, “there hadn’t been that much activity in the way of voter identification,” and “we weren’t really given strong indications that requiring additional voter identification would actually disenfranchise people entitled to vote.” The member of the three-judge panel who dissented from the majority decision, Terence T. Evans, “was right."

Anti-government hysteria has fueled everything from congressional kamikaze attacks on Obamacare to actual kamikaze attacks on federal buildings, and those who get hurt are inevitably people doing their jobs.

The debt ceiling, the dollar and hegemonic currencies

“The taxpayer costs we discovered were staggering,” said Ken Jacobs, chair of UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education and coauthor of a report about the cost of the low-wage fast-food industry to U.S. taxpayers. “People who work in fast-food jobs are paid so little that having to rely on public assistance is the rule, rather than the exception, even for those working 40 hours or more a week.” Fast food is a $200 billion-a-year industry.