Portside

Sandra Bland died in police custody in a Texas jail after a traffic stop. In a video shot by a passer-by, Bland protests that her head is being slammed to the ground during her arrest. Local authorities are calling her death a suicide, but friends and family do not believe that explanation. Twitter users have launched the hashtag #IfIDieInPoliceCustody to counter the narratives that often follow the deaths of unarmed black men and women in police custody.

Unions have discovered that there are other ways to deal with workers who are not on their membership rolls. For example, for the first half of last year, AFSCME set out to organize as full members 50,000 of the fair share payers or other non-members in workplaces where they had contracts. They organized 90,000.

A Lebanese poet from Dubai, Zeina Hashem Beck offers two poems, Thirty-Two and in a Different Country and The Invented Mothers, both touching the deep trauma of warfare on civilians.

The Euro Summit statement (or Terms of Greece's Surrender - as it will go down in history) follows, annotated by yours truly. The original text is untouched with my notes confined to square brackets (and in red). Read and weep.

Bernie Sanders is campaigning on behalf of the 99 percent against the 1 percent. And, he is getting lots of supports, drawing thousands to his campaign rallies. Sanders is not running an explicit socialist campaign for public or worker ownership of major firms. Sanders's socialist values underpin his argument that the economy should serve the needs of the people and be governed not by corporate oligarchs, but by democratic means.

Hillary Clinton's record in office suggests that she is more liberal than either her husband or Barack Obama, and in a Monday speech outlining her economic vision she set out to confirm that. However, still lacking is much policy detail as to how this difference might look in practice. A future Clinton administration might help change the norms of corporate governance to foster the kind of labor relations that everyday workers have not experienced in decades.

As a political symbol and an athletic powerhouse, Serena Williams is 'the greatest' in her sport. After her Wimbledon victory, Serena Williams was asked which athlete she admired the most. She said that it was Muhammad Ali. Not for his boxing but for 'what he stood for' outside the ring. For years people have asked who would be "the next Muhammad Ali." If we dare to lift our heads, it will be clear that she is right in front of us.

Reader Comments: Response to Occupy; Greece and Debt Forgiveness; Why Bernie Sanders; Confederate Flags, Symbols, and Racism; U.S. Torture Program; Death Penalty; and more... Announcements: Benefit Concert for Civil Rights; Rally for Eric Garner; NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and The Voting Rights Act at 50; Rosenberg Case Bombshell - Key Witness Lied; Robert Meeropol statement

The book under review examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts by workers to resist and the housebreaking of a long-running anti-capitalist ethos from imaginative, frenzied opposition to diffuse, angry, but ultimate accommodation. While a residual 19th century fight-back culture built the CIO and defended the New Deal into the 1960s, it lacked the same emancipatory charge it had earlier, and unions shifted to cautious monitors of the working class