I can think of few books about a slice of American history that have more relevance to the vital debates of today than Sam Pizzigati’s “The Rich Don’t Always Win.” Sam’s book tells the story of how the United States, one of the world’s most unequal societies in the early 1900s, became by the middle of the 20th century one of the most equal nations on earth. He shows how average Americans, organized in the labor and other movements, mobilized and vanquished a plutocracy even more powerful than ours today.

Why is this relevant to today? Well, starting with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the U.S. government — fueled by a far right ideology — passed “free market” taxes and other policies that left the nation once again as one of the most unequal on earth by the beginning of this century.

Labor unions believe they have found a way to challenge these bills at the ballot box, even if they would be allowed to remain in place for a while in the interim. As first reported by NBC News, an analysis by the Citizens Research Council of Michigan shows that labor would have recourse to put the right to work laws up for a citizen initiative.

Despite large protests and thousands of demonstrators, lawmakers in Michigan, as expected, granted final approval to right to work legislation, which will ban closed shop unions and allow workers to opt out of union dues despite having their employment covered by a collective bargaining agreement.

A direct action group called Tar Sands Blockade has been harassing TransCanada and their efforts to build the lower half of the Keystone XL pipeline. That portion, from Cushing, Oklahoma to the port at the Gulf of Mexico in Texas, was approved by President Obama as a way to speed through to international markets what has become a glut of oil being processed in the interior of the United States. It’s seen as a prelude to the potential approval of the northern half of the pipeline, which would connect Cushing to the tar sands region of Alberta, allowing “the biggest carbon bomb on the planet” of energy-intensive tar sands oil to move to the Gulf.

Protests and attacks continued at Western embassies across the Middle East and North Africa today, and at this point they have little relationship to the anti-Muslim film “The Innocence of Muslims.” A reporter for the Times of London asked protesters outside the US Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, yesterday if they watched the clip of the film online, and to a man all of them said they hadn’t. The film is a pretext to stir up sentiments among a small but determined band of agitators. I’m not sure we can say too much about the sentiments of the populations of these Arab countries as a whole, but we can say that they contain at least an element of anti-Westernism.

Given the mysteries of the Benghazi attacks on the US consulate (not an embassy, and not an entity that was guarded by Marines, apparently), I’m going to step lively before attributing any Middle East incident to anything else in a direct through-line. But we do now that riots/protests/attacks are proliferating. Today they have spread to the US Embassy in Yemen and possibly Iran.

Right now, members of Occupy Wall Street are preparing to mark the one year anniversary of the occupation of Zuccotti Park on September 17 with an event halfway between a celebration and a protest. Meanwhile, Occupy’s energy and influence can be seen in a range of activism and dissent that stretches from coast to coast in America and beyond, from anarchist grand jury resisters in the Pacific Northwest to the solidarity networks supporting the forthcoming teachers’ strike in Chicago.

I’m sure we’ll have a lot of reports about the dissent outside the DNC convention in Charlotte. There should be a bigger Occupy presence in Charlotte than there was in Tampa for the RNC convention, and the Undocubus, filled with undocumented immigrants who plan to challenge the Democrats on comprehensive immigration reform could make some waves. But the protest of about 800 in the streets of Charlotte last night, which was smaller than anticipated, did not give me much hope for a real breakthrough.

Protests have begun at the RNC, even if the convention hasn’t. And the groups engaged in the protests started by targeting an unlikely but also a universal target, one you’ll hear a lot about next week in Charlotte as well – Bank of America.

A security bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security and FBI garnered wide media attention over the past twenty-four to forty-eight hours, raising the specter of possible “anarchist” violence or “terrorism.” The bulletin was largely state propaganda designed to whip up fear ahead of the convention. Given that there has been no preemptive raid against activists there to protest, the publicizing of this bulletin could be aimed at giving agencies cover if something happens.

I appeared on RT America on Friday night to discuss the bulletin, the possibility that drones will be used to police the RNC and what I predict could happen with protesters and security forces during the convention.