SEPTEMBER 4, 2026

Dolly Parton Was a Proud Union Sister: Organized labor is celebrating the life and legacy of an artist who championed working women and carried a union card for almost 60 years.

It came as no surprise that the news of Parton’s death on Tuesday elicited heartfelt expressions of mourning — and respect — from unions that counted her as one of their own. “Dolly Parton knew what it was like to struggle as she fought for working families her whole career,” recalled the AFL-CIO. “From providing free books to kids to giving working women our ‘9 to 5’ anthem, she was an icon and an inspiration. Rest in power to our union sister. We will always love you.” Parton was, indeed, a union sister for the better part of 60 years — carrying the card of multiple labor organizations that on Tuesday celebrated the talent and humanity that earned the country singer, actress, and philanthropist universal admiration. The Nation via Portside

Trump Can’t Stop the Populist Uprising Against Data Centers: The grassroots revolt against AI oligarchs is reviving a more than a century-old fight against robber barons and their attempts to seize land, water, and political power.
A year ago, data centers won 43 percent net support and clocked 42 percent opposition. Now, in that same poll, 75 percent of respondents oppose the construction of data centers near them, and just 15 percent support them — a swing of 61 percent. Sorting through this seismic turnaround, Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect surmises that it’s part of a broader repudiation of the arrogant impunity of the tech-industry power elite: “The AI rollout has been the ne plus ultra of Silicon Valley arrogance. A handful of billionaires declaimed that AI was going to revolutionize all human society, take everyone’s job, and/or maybe wipe out the human race. Therefore they needed to spend trillions and trillions of dollars building AI data centers everywhere, as fast as possible. When the tech barons blearily realized that this wasn’t the best sales pitch, and pivoted to ads about how AI had dull business applications, the damage was already done.” All true enough — yet the other, more immediate cause of the data-center revolt has to do with basic principles of communal self-protection. The Nation

The Only Kill Switch We’ve Got — Inside Labor’s AI Data Center Split 

Technology — almost by definition — has always replaced jobs. And for centuries, the professional class largely filed it under progress. Inevitable, even. But now that the automation is coming for people who went to college, pausing it has become a mainstream idea. If lawyers were asked to give up a decade of work to protect electricians’ jobs, would they? History suggests probably not. But while opposition to data centers grows, the labor movement remains divided, for obvious reasons. The data centers are creating jobs (at least, right now), while AI threatens to eliminate jobs in the future. And those jobs largely belong to different sets of people.So far, the building trades have been supportive. [Building trades leaders] argue that data centers have delivered tens of thousands of well-paid blue-collar careers, and that communities should be welcoming them. It’s not hard to see why. Data centers now account for 2.3% of all US construction spending, and spending has more than quadrupled since 2020. Labor Politics via Portside

Identity Politics Wasn’t Supposed to Be Like This

As leftist candidates have scored shocking victories over mainstream politicians, party leaders have leveraged identity in new and surprising ways. Identity has become both a cudgel and a crutch, alternately wielded to police the identities of those who seek to overturn the status quo and leaned on to defend it. The first move is to cast progressive challengers as illegitimate. It goes like this: Driven by the views of the highly educated but often downwardly mobile white people who make up a majority of the membership of the Democratic Socialists of America, these leftist candidates, with their fixation on Gaza and demands for radical change, are far out of touch with the everyday concerns of working-class Black and brown voters. The second move is perhaps more surprising. It is to claim for centrist incumbents the authentic identity that is missing in insurgent progressives. NYT Opinion

Privatization by the Book: The fight to keep public libraries public continues.

How and why would a community privatize its library? Surely the library is one of the very few places that would never see privatization, right? The privatization of libraries follows a similar pattern as a lot of privatization schemes — a financial shortfall creates a crisis (or the appearance of a crisis) and a magic solution appears: turn the public good over to a private company who will “run it like a business” and make it more efficient. In the Public Interest via Portside