Portside

Forty thousand Verizon workers have now been on strike for a month. These days, a strike of the Verizon action’s scale and duration is exceedingly rare. That’s largely because the stakes for workers are so high. Strikers don’t just lose their pay and benefits — they risk losing their job entirely.

Mayer charts the domestic far-right effort to remake the political system through foundations, think tanks, university institutes, paid political commentators and huge campaign contributions by heirs to energy giant Koch Industries. One strategist admitted, "We want to decrease regulations. Why? It's because we can make more profit, okay?" Yet selling that line is hard. So they pose that ameliorative legislation denies the "opportunity for earned success" to the poor.

In Banking on Words, Arjun Appadurai argues that the 2008 financial crisis was, in essence, a failure of language. Narendar Pani finds that argument somewhat overstated, while at the same time acknowledging this book's "path-breaking" analysis of the role language has come to play in the way markets behave and are managed.

Americans have often been told that meeting climate targets is impossible without threatening jobs and costing a fortune. But the Climate, Jobs, and Justice Project shows that the opposite is true. The Clean Energy Future represents a pathway away from climate destruction that is far better for workers and consumers than our current economy based on fossil fuels.

The trending hashtag #DontPayDante emerged minutes after news broke that Servin had quit. Activists took to social media and the streets of Chicago to rally support for their cause.

Organizers with the Free Alabama Movement say—a network of prison activists—officials retaliated against prisoners who participated in the work stoppage by leaving dorms in filth, not taking out trash, leaving showers and soiled laundry unclean. For more, we go directly inside the bars to Kinetik Justice. He joins us by phone from solitary confinement in Holman Correctional Facility.

If safety is the concern in transgender bathroom fights, then why does the identity of a person behind a locked stall even matter?

The change -- which has been criticized as too drastic by many employers -- will go into effect on Dec. 1, 2016. It is intended to expand access to overtime pay for otherwise low-salaried workers who log long hours but have been treated as exempt from overtime because they perform some managerial duties.

California Sen. Barbara Boxer says that Sanders faces a “test of leadership” in cooling out his supporters and bringing them into the party. But the real test of leadership – as it has been throughout this campaign – isn’t about Sanders; it is about Clinton. Will the Clinton campaign be smart enough to understand the importance of learning from him, embracing a bolder vision and speaking clearly to a far deeper pain?

Republicans believe that the President's inflammatory comments will come back to haunt the Democrats in November.