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The Accident-prone Oil Industry Is a Chronic Threat to the Gulf Coast's Environmental Health

Sue Sturgis Facing South
When we talk about the problem of oil industry accidents, we tend to focus on dramatic events like the deadly 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon explosion off the coast of Louisiana, or the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil tanker crash in Alaska's Prince William Sound. But the industry is far more accident-prone than such relatively rare high-profile disasters suggest.

Young Adolescents as Likely to Die From Suicide as From Traffic Accidents

Sabrina Tavernise The New York Times
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that in 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, the suicide rate for children ages 10 to 14 had caught up to their death rate for traffic accidents. The number is an extreme data point in an accumulating body of evidence that young adolescents are suffering from a range of health problems associated with the country’s rapidly changing culture.

Measuring Global Inequality

Michael D. Yates Monthly Review
The response to growing economic inequality must start with mass resistance within every country and maximum solidarity among all workers and peasants, in rich and poor countries alike. The details of such struggles have to be worked out in each place. The key is solidarity among all workers and peasants, within and between the states of the world.

Early Voting Ends in North Carolina

Joe Gamm / Tierney Sneed Greensboro News and Record / Talking Points Memo
Guilford County, like North Carolina as a whole, set an all-time record for the number of ballots cast during early voting despite GOP efforts for suppress voter turnout.

The Best Show on TV Right Now is About Living Carless in the Suburbs

Ben Adler Grist
The best show on TV right now is about working-class African-Americans in the Southern suburbs, and it highlights one of the country’s biggest, least-appreciated problems: living without a car in the midst of sprawl. The show demonstrates the suburbanization of poverty, including how hard it is for people in low-income neighborhoods to get to their jobs.

Standing Rock Solid with the Frackers: Are the Trades Putting Labour’s Head in the Gas Oven?

Sean Sweeney Socialist Project
If anyone were looking for further evidence that the AFL-CIO remains unprepared to accept the science of climate change, and unwilling to join with the effort being made by all of the major labour federations of the world to address the crisis, the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) provides only the most recent case in point. Progressive labour must, however, develop its own vision of an energy future.

The Truth About Venezuela's Opposition

Lucas Koerner Jacobin
Yet strangely missing from the narrative of the Venezuelan opposition’s peaceful march to victory over a cruel dictatorship was the small detail of the murder of a Venezuelan police officer by demonstrators Wednesday evening.