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The Disruption This Time

L.A. Kauffman The Baffler
What has made these protests stand out is not their size, though some have been quite large. And this is not the first time protesters have used their bodies to block bridges, tunnels, intersections, and roadways around town. But I can’t come up with another time when protesters have engaged in as much spontaneous and simultaneous disruptive action as they have in the two weeks since Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson was not indicted for shooting Michael Brown.

Why the Founding Fathers Thought Banning Torture Foundational to the US Constitution

Juan Cole Informed Comment
We will likely hear these false appeals to an imaginary history a great deal with the release of the Senate report on CIA torture. It seems to me self-evident that most of the members of the Constitutional Convention would have voted to release the report and also would have been completely appalled at its contents.

Labor's New Reality -- it's Easier to Raise Wages for 100,000 than to Unionize 4,000

Harold Meyerson Los Angeles Times
Unions historically have supported minimum wage and occupational safety laws that benefited all workers, not just their members. But they also have recently begun investing major resources in organizing drives more likely to yield new laws than new members. Some of these campaigns seek to organize workers who, rightly or wrongly, aren't even designated as employees or lack a common employer, such as domestic workers and cab drivers.

The Lame-Duck Congress Plots to Undermine Retiree Pensions

Michael Hiltzik, "The Economy Hub" Los Angeles Times
In 2006, Congress passed the "Pension Protection Act", which had a devastating effect on single-employer defined benefit pension plans. Now Congress is looking to do the same to multi-employer pension plans.

Mamdani's "Holistic Challenge": Anti-Zionists Must Persuade Jews They Can Only be Safe by Dismantling the Jewish State

Philip Weiss Mondoweiss
The Zionist message to the Jewish population of Israel is this, Zionism is your only guarantee against another holocaust. The opposite is the case. Jews can have a homeland in the Middle East, but their safety can only be achieved by dismantling the Jewish state, Mamdani said. His speech was a political challenge to Jewish anti-Zionists, now just a splinter, to launch a political struggle inside the Jewish community to liberate it from Zionism.

Wall Street's Democrats

Robert Reich Robert Reich
Carried interest allows hedge-fund and private-equity managers, as well as many venture capitalists and partners in real estate investment trusts, to treat their take of the profits as capital gains — taxed at maximum rate of 23.8 percent instead of the 39.6 percent maximum applied to ordinary income. So why didn’t Democrats close it when they ran Congress?

Owning is the New Sharing

Nathan Schneider Sharable
The Silicon Valley-based network Shareable dispatched Nathan Schneider to write a report on the growing movement to experiment with new forms of economic democracy online. Schneider states that "A popular mantra among sharing-economy boosters has been "sharing is the new owning." What I found is the opposite." Given concerns about the sharing economy, Schneider examined cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and more.