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Future of Milwaukee Depends on Raising Poverty Wages

By Matthew Finnell Wisconsin Jobs Now!
Through outreach, organizing, and advocacy workers can improve their wages, hours, and benefits through direct action and by enacting pro-worker policies. The only reason manufacturing jobs paid well in the first place was because workers demanded that they did decades ago.

Syria and the Monarchs: A Perfect Storm

Conn Hallinan Foreign Policy in Focus
The United States is now a direct participant in the war to bring down the Damascus regime, thus shedding any possibility that, along with Russia, it could act as a neutral force to bring the parties together.

Dispatches from the Culture Wars - June 25, 2013

Portside
Shocking Collaboration Between Hollywood and Hitler; High-Paying Lure of the Sea; Selling Guns to Fund the Anti-Abortion Fight; Vacation Camp with Israeli Commandos; Power of Political Comics; Kickstarter Kicks Out Abuse Manual

This Really Is Big Brother: The Leak Nobody's Noticed

Digby Hullabaloo
The Insider Threat Program is sweeping in its reach. It has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of “insider threat” give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a range conduct

The Last Mystery of the Financial Crisis

Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone
What about the ratings agencies? Isn't it true that almost none of the fraud that's swallowed Wall Street in the past decade could have taken place without companies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's rubber-stamping it? Aren't they guilty, too? Man, are they ever. And a lot more than even the least generous of us suspected.

Fast Food Strikes: What's Cooking?

Jenny Brown Labor Notes
Fast food is an unlikely union target, due to high workforce turnover and layered franchise ownership. And the path forward is uncertain, say organizers. The only thing that seems sure is that typical union elections won’t work. Nonetheless, the strikes have caught the imagination of fast food workers around the country, who toil in one of the economy’s few growth sectors.

The NSA's Metastasised Intelligence-industrial Complex is Ripe for Abuse

Valerie Plame Wilson and Joe Wilson The Guardian
Where oversight and accountability have failed, Snowden's leaks have opened up a vital public debate on our rights and privacy. The relevant issue should be: what exactly is the US government doing in the people's name to "keep us safe" from terrorists?