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Strike Matters: Verizon's Union Employees Fight for the Future of the American Working Class

Jason Pramas Dig Boston
If well organized and militant union members at Verizon—who have gone on strike against the company and its predecessors in 1983, 1986, 1989, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2011 and now—can’t stop the outsourcing and destruction of decent jobs, unorganized workers spread across the planet in industries like telecommunications will find the task insurmountable.

The Science Behind the DEA's Long War on Marijuana

David Downs Scientific American
Experts say listing cannabis among the world’s deadliest drugs ignores decades of scientific and medical data. But attempts to delist it have met with decades of bureaucratic inertia and political distortion

The new Gilded Age: Close to half of all super-PAC money comes from 50 donors

Matea Gold and Anu Narayanswamy The Washington Post
Despite the mixed impact that big-money groups have had on the presidential contest so far the biggest surge of cash is likely to come this fall, when millionaires and billionaires aligned with both parties fully engage in the fights for control of the White House and Congress.

The Death Gap

Sam Pizzigati OtherWords.org
The richest Americans now live 10-15 years longer than the poorest.

Marx’s Theory of Working-Class Precariousness

R. Jamil Jonna and John Bellamy Foster Monthly Review
The renewed focus, particularly on the left, on precariousness constitutes a recognition of the harsh reality of capitalism, and particularly of today’s globalized monopoly-finance capital. More than a century of Marxian political-economic critique allows us to appreciate the extent to which the conditions that Marx described, focusing on a small corner of Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, are now global, and all the more perilous.

President Karen Lewis at City Club of Chicago

Karen Lewis Chicago Teachers Union
If you say you’re on the freedom side, then that means you will join us in asking the rich to pay their fair share; calling on the city and state to stop the attacks on public and higher education; in asking the banks to end their predatory deals that strip vital dollars from our schools; in fighting for stronger neighborhoods and job creation, and access to health care and not just health insurance.

Prince and Politics In Reagan's America

Jordy Cummings Red Wedge
The Reaper has been busy in 2016, Prince is dead at 57 years old and only recently on the road doing a well-received solo piano tour. Looking back at nearly four decades of hybridizing rock, funk and dance music, there can be no doubt that the man was a pioneer, sonically, aesthetically and as an artist who stood up and fought back against a music industry that alienated his labour.

Sanders Allies Plot Meeting to Discuss Future of the Movement

Alex Seitz-Wald MSNBC
The progressive movement that supported Sanders existed before his campaign and will continue after it. But Sanders has expanded it and unified it in a way that creates the potential for a powerful post-election force in politics if it can retain at least some cohesion.