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The South: Labor's Elephant in the Room

streetheat It's About Power Stupid!
Shifting resources to win in the South necessarily means taking funds from other projects and revenue sources. In many cases this could create an internal struggle over the allocation of funds.There is no doubt feathers will be ruffled and fiefdoms will be threatened, but making a choice between labor's survival and comforting the sense of official entitlement will require political will that hopefully can be summoned.

Big Oil's (Taxpayer Subsidized) Big Profits

Mijin Cha Policy Shop Blog / Demos
Gas prices are down nearly 35 cents from last year, yet this has had virtually no impact on this year’s first quarter profits of the big oil companies.

Assata Shakur Is Not a Terrorist

Mychal Denzel Smith The Nation
“Assata is not a threat,” scholar and activist Angela Davis, who herself once occupied a spot on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list, told Democracy Now! “If anything, this is a vendetta.”

Media Bits & Bytes – On the Move Edition – May 7, 2013

Portside
Racializing the Boston Bombers; LA Times Drops the "I-Word"; NY Times, Not So Much; ESPN Becomes New Conduit to Obama; Newspapers Remain Immobile; Online Ads Follow You Around; New Fight Over Internet `Wiretapping'; Feds Becoming Big Customer of Consumer Data Collected by Corporations; Decade of iTunes Killed the CD Industry; Journalism or Churnalism?; Wikipedia Has Women Problems

The Unhappy Marriage of Economics and Health Care

Gerald Friedman Unions for Single Payer Health Care
For 40 years, many economists' have promoted increasing cost sharing through higher copayments and deductibles, the replacement of fee-for-service payment systems with capitation as in Health Maintenance Organizations, and competition where multiple insurers offer a variety of plans catered to individual consumer's interests and in competition with each other. These practices have produced the worst of all worlds, rising costs along with restrictions on access.

Inspired by Freedom Riders, Workers Plan Caravans to Walmart Convention

Josh Eidelson The Nation
Following a five-day organizing training and strategy summit in Birmingham, members of the labor group OUR Walmart, a non-union organization backed by the United Food & Commercial Workers union, will announce a plan to send civil rights movement–style caravans of workers from around country to converge at the retail giant’s June 7 annual shareholder meeting.