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‘This Is All A Big Game’
What a gathering it was two years ago when Terry McAuliffe got together with his buddies Bill Clinton and Haley Barbour in Horn Lake to celebrate the plant opening of …
Roll the Farmers Union On
A closing sentence in a 1937 Southern Tenant declaration of rights speaks to the hope that union still inspires: "To the disinherited belongs the future."
A Cold War Mentality
Back in the summer of 1992, just months after the failed coup that led to the fall of communism and Boris Yeltsin's rise to leadership in a new post-Soviet Russia, …
Smiling in Heaven
My old friend Ray Smithhart would have loved the irony of union-fighting manufacturer Nissan making a gift of $100,000 to the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute.
Attention Walmart Shoppers
Walmart's "chintzy" attitude toward the wages and benefits of its workers isn't news. What may be news to many, however, is just how bad it is for workers at Walmart …
Last of the Letter Writers
Sandy Margolis, the last of the letter writers, died at age 74 two years ago this September.
The Immorality of Incarceration
Mariachi guitarist Johnny Mora's bout with drugs was years in his past, but the legacy of jail time it led to is as much a companion as his guitar when …
Fighting an Old War
While Russia and Confederate statues deserve media coverage, they are also easy targets that don't challenge the corporate state.
Political War Stories
Many American voters are profoundly unhappy with the candidates from both major parties this election. Fifteen years of war are enough, you two! Americans are sick of war.
A Union Presence
Even the unofficial presence of a union and its supporters help workers long before an election is held and can force a company to act right.
Answering a Need Not Being Met
Dorothy Day House is the only refuge for homeless families in Memphis, Tenn., the nation's poorest large metropolitan area.
OPINION: Reform for a Broken System
The Salas family is one of many in Mississippi and the U.S. caught in the madness of the immigration debate and politicians' failure to pass real and meaningful reform to …
OPINION: Huddled Masses Yearning to Break Free
The world's largest gulag today is in the United States, where a quarter of the world's prison population is behind bars, and Mississippi is at the heart of that gulag …
OPINION: Immigration and the First Amendment
My late friend Marty Fishgold, a longtime labor writer in New York City, liked to say that "good journalism is a subversive activity" because it tells truth to power.
The Democratic Old Guard
In March, when Bernie Sanders stood on the podium at the "March on Mississippi" in Canton and told the crowd that "the eyes of the country and the eyes of …
City of the Dead
Memphis in 1878 became a city of the dead—people hiding behind shuttered windows and locked doors, the clickety-clack of wagons carrying the corpses to waiting gravediggers.
‘All About the Food’
‘To want to open a restaurant can be a strange and terrible affliction.’
By the Handful
Fannie Lou Hamer, a folk philosopher of the Civil Rights Movement, knew what she was up against in a state and region where an entrenched hard-right oligarchy ruled at the …
OPINION: The Business of Us All
I settled comfortably into my favorite chair one recent night and began watching the best Christmas movie ever: the 1951 version of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol."
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