Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Jon Stone reports on Jeremy Corbyn's message to progressive parties that voters have had enough of being told there is no alternative to austerity and corporatism:

On a visit to the Netherlands on Thursday the Labour leader said socialists and social democrats risked looking like another part of the establishment by “supporting a failed economic system rigged for the wealthy”.

He warned that “fake populists and migrant-baiters of the far-right” would benefit from the demise of the centre-left, which had in the past “delivered enormous advances for working people” but was now losing ground.
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“In election after election, voters have shown they simply don’t believe many of these parties offer real change. After a decade of austerity following the bankers’ crisis, years of stagnating living standards and rising insecurity, working class communities in particular are simply not prepared to accept more of the same,” Mr Corbyn said at an event organised by the Dutch Labour Party in the Hague.

“My message for our European sister parties is simple: reject austerity or face rejection by voters. If our parties look like just another part of the establishment, supporting a failed economic system rigged for the wealthy and the corporate elite, they will be rejected – and the fake populists and migrant-baiters of the far right will fill the gap.”

- Noah Smith offers a reminder of the crucial role unions have played in giving workers a voice in the community at large as well as in the workplace. And Leo Gerard discusses how billionaires are pushing to undermine the U.S.' public-sector unions by recruiting or hiring stand-ins to encourage people to contribute nothing to their collective bargaining mechanisms. 

- Travis Lupick writes about new research showing that mental health care for homeless people produces few lasting outcomes unless it's paired with housing. And Seth Klein and Iglika Ivanova offer their recommendations to make housing more available and affordable in general - including both better protections against landlord abuses, and more direct public investment in providing homes for the people who need them.

- Finally, Brent Patterson compares the severe punishments being threatened against activists with the laughable excuses for any consequences to Kinder Morgan for deliberately preventing fish from spawning and otherwise harming the environment in the name of pipelines.