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Ted Cruz leads way as candidates discuss carpet-bombing and attacking terrorists’ families, despite Geneva Conventions ban on ‘indiscriminate attacks’

The Sanders campaign is resurrecting socialist electoral politics and paving the way for a more radical public discourse. Only the revival of a decimated labor movement and the rebirth of socialist political parties that can bring them all together could result in the major redistribution of wealth and power that would allow real movement on these individual issues.

Whatever party ends on top in the Spanish election, it will have to form a coalition, thus ending the reign of the two-party system that has dominated the country since Franco. Late polls show the right-wing PP taking a beating, dropping from 44 percent that it won four years ago to 28%, but it will still win the largest number of votes of any one party. Followed by the Socialists, at 21%, the center-right Ciudadanos Party at 19%, and the left-wing Podemos Party at 15.7%

The concerns of Front National voters are, in fact, much the same as that of left-wing parties, but the solutions the far right proposes could not be further from the values of trade unionism. The challenge is to deconstruct the discourse of the FN. It’s easier to blame refugees than to call into question the role of capital in the economic crisis. Unions must explain that to workers and to organise the mobilisation.

Universities giant and small, public and private, bring African-American men to campus at grotesque levels to earn the school millions in football and basketball revenues. Stories about academic freedom and free speech have been appearing in newspapers more frequently over the last few weeks. And curiously enough political actors on and off campus who traditionally have been least likely to be concerned about these subjects are becoming its major advocates.

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Using original source material Brian Dolinar arrives at a different explanation of why the popular front of 30s and 40s broke up, than that of mainstream media of that time, and since. The key agents of disunity were not the Communists but the manifold assault by the rightwing establishment. The US ruling class used opinion-molding Red-scare and Red-baiting campaigns in the mass media and culture. A lesson for today with the re-growth of the radical right.

One book that's making it onto lots of people's best-of-the-year lists is Counternarratives, a collection of stories and novellas by John Keene. It's an extraordinary collection that uses historical fiction to make visible the human beings that racism and imperialism have pretended were not there. Not only that, but, as McDowell shows us in his review, this is a set of awfully good stories, too.

UNITE HERE's Culinary Union Calls for Immediate Contract Negotiations. We voted yes to make our jobs good jobs with fair wages and job security, said Celia Vargas, a housekeeper at the property. We won that vote, so our voices and votes should be respected.

The pair talked pot, poverty, guns, social justice, universal healthcare and more in a wide-ranging conversation at Killer Mike's Atlanta barber shop.