Portside

“It is one thing for the US and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal US secrets and play them back to US legislators to undermine US diplomacy,” the Wall Street Journal quoted a senior US official as saying.

Company documents show VW’s management method is modeled on “lean production,” the philosophy created at Toyota, then popularized across the auto industry and beyond. In fact, VW is trying to out-Toyota Toyota. The German company aims to overtake its Japanese competitor and become the world’s most profitable automobile manufacturer by 2018. So the Chattanooga plant provides a window into the state of the art of brutal productivity-maximizing management schemes.

“Taxi” is Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s third film since he was arrested in 2010 and charged with making anti-government propaganda. He was barred from making films for 20 years, from leaving the country and from speaking to the foreign media. He got around some of these restrictions this time by filming inside a taxi driving through the streets of Tehran, producing a beautifully humane fable. "Taxi" took the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival.

Adjuncts make up about 70% of the American professoriate. Adjuncts usually make $20,000–$25,000 a year, often by teaching courses at various institutions each semester. They have no job security, and frequently receive no health or retirement benefits. But they have begun fighting to improve their lot. SEIU is organizing in several states.

Yet another bio-engineered solution without (much of) a problem: inserting extra genes into apples turns off the enzyme responsible for apples turning brown.

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.