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ips-dc.org — Sadly, those who "occupied" Wall Street and city squares across the country in 2011, were right: All of the income gains have concentrated at the top, while the rest of us saw a deterioration or stagnation in our wages and income. We can’t seem to stop having record numbers of people living in poverty in the United States. The richest continue to get richer and the rest of us continue to see our incomes get lower and lower.

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washingtonpost.com — So much for Democratic Party harmony. Just a few days after a convention that displayed the party as one big happy family, a civil war has erupted in Chicago between the Democrats’ disparate wings. Rahm Emanuel, the volatile, far-from-union-friendly mayor who is a mainstay of the national Democratic Party, and the almost-as-volatile Chicago local of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), itself a mainstay of the national Democratic Party, are at loggerheads over the future of Chicago’s schools and teachers. The school strike that began Monday should be an alarm bell in the night for Democrats everywhere. At stake in the conflict is not only the future of education reform but also the role of unions within the party and, by extension, the nation.

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boldprogressives.org — Chicago’s 29,000 public school teachers and support staff aren’t just on strike to defend their own wages and benefits. They’re also fighting for better schools for the communities they live in. Click here to learn about why Chicago’s teachers are on strike. Here’s five facts — from a well-researched early 2012 CTU report — that you need to know about the abominable state of the Chicago Public Schools system — facts that Mayor Rahm Emanuel would rather you didn’t know.

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salon.com — Chicago’s public schoolteachers are on strike against the city government and Mayor Rahm Emanuel. And while no one likes the budget crisis that forms the strike’s fiscal context, nor the fact that 350,000 students aren’t at school, much of Chicago is finding joy in the municipal impasse — which is why, anywhere within earshot of the schools where the Chicago Teachers Union’s 25,500 members are picketing in front of their workplaces, solidarity car horns are blasting away. Since Rahm Emanuel’s election in the spring of 2011, Chicago’s teachers have been asked to eat shit by a mayor obsessed with displaying to the universe his “toughness” — toughness with the working-class people that make the city tick; toughness with the protesters standing up to say “no”; but never, ever toughness with the vested interests, including anti-union charter school advocates, who poured $12 million into his coffers to elect him mayor.

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