Safety Is Life-or-Death, Say Refinery Strikers

Samantha Winslow Labor Notes
So far 3,800 workers are off the job. Non-striking refinery locals are getting 24-hour contract extensions each day. But the unions says, if need be, it will bring more sites out. It's the first national refinery strike since 1980. Back then workers at all represented refineries went out together, and stayed out for three months before they got a deal.

Diane Nash -- Bio of a Civil Rights Activist

This short biography of Diane Nash features contemporary footage of Nash and her comrades in the Freedom Rides, in boycotts, sit-ins, marches and demonstrations, challenging segregation and facing down official and unofficial violence and hatred. Angela Bassett narrates.

The Fiery Cage and the Lynching Tree, Brutality’s Never Far Away

Bill Moyers Moyers & Company
I couldn't sleep the night we heard the news of the Jordanian pilot’s horrendous end, burned alive in an iron cage. ISIS be damned! I thought. But then I was haunted by the story of our own barbarians, of decades of lynchings. By insiders. Our neighbors, friends, and kin.

Confessions of an Erratic Marxist in the Midst of a Repugnant European Crisis

Yanis Varoufakis Yanis Varoufakis blog
Yanis Varoufakis is currently the Greek Minister of Finance. In this essay, posted to his website one year ago, he explains why he believes that radicals must work to stabilize the Eurozone on a more equitable basis so as to mimimize human suffering and to provide the time and space to develop a humanist alternative to Corporate Europe. He also describes the influence of Karl Marx on his views and asserts the necessity to embrace -- critically -- Marx's insights.

LBJ Doesn’t Deserve the Credit for Selma

Diane Nash The New Journal and Guide
My husband James Bevel and I conceptualized and wrote the plan that became the Selma Right to Vote movement. We believed that if Negroes in Alabama could vote, they could better protect their children from things like the Alabama church bombing.

Stiglitz: A Fair Solution to the Greek Debt

Joseph Stiglitz Project Syndicate
What is needed is not structural reform within Greece and Spain so much as structural reform of the Eurozone and a fundamental rethinking of the policy frameworks that have resulted in the monetary union’s spectacularly bad performance. Failure to restructure Greece's debt would be a failure of democracy and morality.