Portside

Thousands of farmworkers went on strike in Mexico to protest low wages. The strike, the first of its kind in decades, had a wide impact, as workers blocked highways and stopped the harvest at the height of the season. Workers not only want higher wages, but their own independent union.

International and European trade union bodies are calling on the European Union to bolster action on workers’ rights and safety in Bangladesh’s garment industry. The Bangladesh government has failed to implement vital labour law reforms, and a compensation fund for victims of the Rana Plaza disaster still remains US$ 9 million short of the target.

Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism details how financial speculation is baked into the American economy. Baptist explains 185 years ago, acquisition of slaves, like other "property", could be financed by mortgages; that bonds were sold to investors based on the value of those mortgages; and, securities based on enslaved human beings produced a “slave asset bubble” not unlike the 2008 financial crisis.

According to a new independent report from the Economic Roundtable, raising the minimum wage to $15.25 will create $5.9 billion for LA’s economy, generate 46,400 new jobs, and increase state and local tax revenue by $414 million.

In honor of International Women’s Day, Activestills (http://activestills.org/) paid tribute to more than a quarter century of anti-occupation activism by the ‘Women in Black’ group in Israel. Every Friday since 1988, the women have stood in the main squares of cities or at highway junctions with signs calling to end the Israeli occupation. Often spat at, cursed or violently harassed by passersby, they have become a symbol of persistence.

In an exclusive interview with teleSUR, Julian Assange talks about why he chose Ecuador for asylum and the ongoing U.S. investigation into WikiLeaks.

With AMC's Halt and Catch Fire's second season arriving soon, a reflection on the first. Halt and Catch Fire's finale reveals it was anti-capitalist all along. For all the early technical bells and whistles, Halt has a straightforward, pleasing story arc—a ragtag team that against long odds and many obstacles does the near impossible—that toward the season’s end ran into a genuinely thought-provoking hurdle: capitalism.

Due, in part, to the environmental concerns posed by unsafe refineries, strikers quickly gained the support of green groups.

The latest sanctions, like the ones approved in December . . . represent a victory for a political faction that wants to prevent the normalization of diplomatic relations with Venezuela. It was not a result of pressure from the right in Congress, but came from deep within the Obama administration.

The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that health insurers spend at least 80-85 percent of premiums on actual medical care had no impact in the law’s first three years