JULY 24, 2026

Game Changer Policies: Solidarity Insurance and ‘Just Cause’ Job Protections
The Game Changers project offers bold, new ideas to build a stronger, fairer, greener, and more inclusive economy for all Americans. Two new proposals presented this week are Solidarity Insurance and Just Cause Job Protections. Outside of the United States, most industrialized countries around the world adopted explicit worker protections (“just cause”) against unjust dismissals throughout the 20th century. In the US, however, “at-will” employment became the norm, tracing its roots to post-Civil War white employer backlash after the abolition of slavery, forced labor, and debt bondage. And the patchwork of unemployment insurance, state by state, keeps workers from gaining agency and collectively demanding “solidarity insurance” instead. Political Economy Research Institute via Portside

Manufacturing Revolt
In April, a wave of strikes swept through the National Capital Region around Delhi. The NCR is one of the most densely industrialized areas in the world, a constellation of planned manufacturing hubs, expanding rapidly after the economic liberalization of the 1990s. The region now stretches from Delhi, at its core, across several adjoining states — Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, all BJP-ruled — employing several million workers in producing automobiles, electronics, garments and consumer goods. Discontent has been accumulating for years. Inflation has severely eroded purchasing power. Yet unionizing is nearly impossible, thanks to the contract labour system and the fragmentation of supply chains. Resistance to such conditions has until recently therefore been mostly individual and informal: work slowdowns; calling in sick; refusing overtime. At the extreme, workers get on a bus back to their village and don’t come back; the turnover rate in NCR factories is so high that management treat it as a cost of doing business. New Left Review

As Centrist Dems Go After the Left, Beware the P-Words
Democrats are trying to defeat socialism by deploying concepts that, while sounding reasonable, ultimately play to the Right. Words like “practical” and “pragmatic” may sound objective, but they’re used to undermine a left that’s winning elections. Jacobin

The Left Needs Seniors and Seniors Need the Left
Early on, I learned a hard lesson about primary electorates: the most reliable voting bloc is older voters. Our target universe was composed mainly of seniors, with some middle-aged voters mixed in. Even before the campaign officially launched, we began voter registration efforts to expand the electorate. But we never lost sight of a fundamental truth: you cannot win without persuading the voters who actually show up. Today, I look at the progressive electoral ecosystem and see a movement that has abandoned this wisdom. Progressive Maryland blog

How America’s newspapers lost their voice
The long history of newspaper editorials may be about to end, a casualty of both changing news values and economic pressure. Some news companies have concluded that local editorials aren’t in their interests. Editorials and endorsements have largely been jettisoned, along with the men and women who used their institutional knowledge to look out for their communities. Gannett, now USA Today Co. Inc. and the largest newspaper company in the U.S., and Lee Enterprises, the third largest, led the scaling back of local editorials beginning in 2022. “In their place, [Lee] distributed to its papers standardized editorial pages consisting of commentary from national columnists and its editorial board,” Paul Farhi wrote for Nieman Report when the change was made. “The change might have been a boon for those seeking yet another opinion about presidential politics, Congress, and international affairs, but it did little for commentary about events occurring down the street from Lee’s 77 daily newspapers.” Nieman Report

ICE melting under Trump’s expectations, officers say
While the Department of Homeland Security and White House have focused on whether to continue traffic stops, the debate inside ICE’s ranks is instead focusing at times on whether the job is even worth doing. In a bizarre turn of events, officers who spoke with the Washington Examiner this week said morale is lower under President Donald Trump than it was during the Biden administration. Current ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations officers, as well as retired senior ICE officials still dialed into daily operations, said the White House’s approach to immigration enforcement may prove detrimental to its mass deportation operation because it puts new recruits on the street who, sources claimed, were not adequately trained. Sources additionally say that officers have burnt out while working overtime month after month — all on top of functioning in an already tense and dangerous environment, likening the situation to a powder keg ready to blow. Washington Examiner