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How Can Workers Organize Against Capital Today?

Benjamin Y. Fong Catalyst
John Womack’s labor strategy is about workers finding the capacity to "wound capital to make it yield anything.” But the massive challenge in today’s deindustrialized economy is locating where that leverage actually lies.

Organized Plunder

Elias Rodriques and Clint Williamson The New Inquiry
In the absence of the tax dollars city governments rely on, American are now funding themselves by fining the poor instead of taxing the rich.

Why 2020 Was the ‘Precarity Election’

Albena Azmanova and Marshall Auerback Economy For All
workers with dangerous machine gears Neither political party has truly addressed the issue of economic security, which is why the country remains a house divided against itself.

labor

Should We Mourn the Loss of Industrial Jobs?

James Partick Ferns Working Class Perspectives
We should, of course, avoid simplistic nostalgia for industrial work, nor should we forget its dangers and adverse health effects. Yet workers are right to remember and value many aspects of industrial employment.

books

Beware the Blue State Model: How the Democrats Created a "Liberalism of the Rich"

Thomas Frank Tom Dispatch
Reading Thomas Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, I was reminded of the snapshot that Oxfam offered us early this year: 62 billionaires now have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the global population, while the richest 1% own more than the other 99% combined...In 2010, it took 388 of the super-rich to equal the holdings of that bottom 50%. At this rate...by 2030, just the top 10 billionaires might do the trick. [*]

Deindustrialization, Depopulation, and the Refugee Crisis

John Russo New Geography
The New York Times reported in 2014 new immigrants are more often to be found in midsize cities, like Dayton, Ohio than in New York, Chicago, and other large cities. Like Youngstown, Dayton had lost over 40% of its population. But city officials embraced immigration by establishing a Welcoming Dayton plan in 2011. New immigrants and refugees were encouraged to relocate in this community and developed support groups to help newcomers adjust to their new community.

labor

A Practical Solution to an Urgent Need

Gregg Shotwell Monthly Review
Gregg Shotwell is a retired UAW member who frequently contributes poems to the Blue Collar Review, and is the author of Autoworkers Under the Gun (Haymarket Press, 2012).

Detroit Bankruptcy Bankrupts Democracy

John Nichols thenation.com
The city is being steered into a wrenching process of restructuring that—by all appearances—will be based on flawed math, flawed priorities and an exceptionally flawed understanding of how democracy is supposed to work.

Book Review: Capitalism Gone Wild

Michael Hirsch The Indypendent, October 2013 - Issue #191
Review of George Packer's "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America." This American life is a mess. As responsible as they were for instigating the Great Recession, Wall Street and the securities industry were not the business centers solely at fault for the lead-up to the collapse. An outsized military budget, imperial wars, the decline of unions as counterweights to corporate excesses and the flight of manufacturing overseas played their parts, too.
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