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What Could Possibly Go Wrong? - Seven Worst-Case Scenarios in the Battle with the Islamic State

Peter Van Buren TomDispatch
President Obama speaking at the Air Force Academy in 2012, told the assembled cadets that they should "never bet against the United States of America... [because] the United States has been, and will always be, the one indispensable nation in world affairs." On that basis, he suggested, the twenty-first century, like the twentieth, would be an American one. You get idea. We are... go ahead, chant it: indispensable! (Tom Engelhardt)

U.S. Jews Debate Israel and 'Open Hillel'

Naomi Dann; Alice Rothchild
A student-led movement is seeking to `open' a prominent U.S. Jewish campus group to a broader range of voices, and it's gaining ground. Last weekend, Open Hillel will seek to model an inclusive Jewish community that embraces marginalized voices. The treatment of and solidarity with Palestinians has now become the civil rights issue of the day for modern Jews, especially younger Jews who will be here long after the older post-Holocaust generation has moved on...

Ebola Didn't Have to Kill Thomas Eric Duncan, Nephew Says; Statement by RN's at Texas Health Presbyterian

Josephus Weeks; National Nurses United Dallas Morning News
Thomas Eric Duncan was a victim of a broken system. Why would the hospital would send home a patient with a 103-degree fever and stomach pains who had recently been in Liberia?. Inside story from some registered nurses at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas who have familiarity with what occurred - following the positive Ebola infection of first the late Thomas Eric Duncan and then a registered nurse who cared for him Nina Pham.

When the Guy Making Your Sandwich Has a Noncompete Clause

By Neil Irwin The New York Times
American businesses are paying out a historically low proportion of their income in the form of wages and salaries. But the Jimmy John’s employment agreement is one small piece of evidence that workers, especially those without advanced skills, are also facing various practices and procedures that leave them worse off, even apart from what their official hourly pay might be.

The Making of Ferguson

By Richard Rothstein The American Prospect
Long before the shooting of Michael Brown, official racial-isolation policies primed Ferguson for this summer’s events.

CIA Finally Admits that Arming Rebels Does Not Work

By Joshua Keating Slate
In the context of the Cold War, there’s an argument to be made that this strategy worked—the Soviet Union collapsed, after all—but in the actual conflicts, the outcomes were ambiguous and the wars longer and bloodier than they might have been otherwise. (Angola’s civil war lasted 27 years.)

In N.C., Populist Mobilization Buoys Democrat Kay Hagan

By Katrina vanden Heuvel The Washington Post
Hagan presents herself as above the fray, but she is propelled by a populist mobilization that will help get out the vote, despite the voting changes and despite the off-year malaise afflicting voters generally and Democratic voters particularly.

People’s Veto of a Union-Busting Law Holds Lessons

John McNay Labor Notes
The people’s veto of SB 5 was a triumph of organization, and of labor’s ability to tell its story to ordinary people. I draw out its lessons for organizers in my book, Collective Bargaining and the Battle of Ohio: The Defeat of Senate Bill 5 and the Struggle to Defend the Middle Class. Worse than simply “right to work,” the 500-page SB 5 was designed to destroy public unions’ ability to operate—or even, in some cases, to exist.

Globalization and NAFTA Caused Migration from Mexico

David Bacon Political Research Associates
U.S. trade and immigration policy are linked. They are part of a single system, not separate and independent policies. Since NAFTA’s passage in 1993, the U.S. Congress has debated and passed several new trade agreements—with Peru, Jordan, Chile, and the Central American Free Trade Agreement. At the same time, Congress has debated immigration policy as though those trade agreements bore no relationship to the waves of displaced people migrating to the U.S.,...