As Josh Eidelson reported last week in Salon, retail workers at Walmart walked off the job in a strike for the first time in the company’s fifty-year existence. And he reports today that the strikes have spread: workers in Dallas, Texas, and Laurel, Maryland, have joined the original strikers in Southern California stores, and workers in other cities are expected to join in. Walmart is famous (or infamous) for successfully warding off unionization at its stores during its entire history, and these strikes were, as Eidelson reports, “in protest of alleged retaliation against their attempts to organize,” as well as a call for improved benefits and staffing.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re on the road in Washington, D.C. We begin today’s show on Afghanistan, where the U.S. has waged the longest war in its history. This week, the official U.S. military death toll in Afghanistan passed the 2,000 mark. On Monday, a suicide bomber killed 14 people, including three U.S. soldiers, in an eastern province of Khost. Witnesses say the bomber was wearing an Afghan police uniform.

The deeper reason for the heated response from the Muslim world is not so much Western rhetoric but Western policy.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is a convicted conman. He knows almost nothing about Islam and even less about filmmaking. And yet, thanks to the power of the Internet and the tense relationship between the West and Islam, Nakoula has generated a major international scandal with Innocence of Muslims, his lowbrow, low-budget movie.

The YouTube clip, which produced protests in Libya that led to the deaths of the American ambassador and three embassy staff members, accomplished exactly what Naboula wanted. He shouted "fire" inside a crowded movie theater and watched the turmoil that resulted.

Occupy is now a year old. A year is an almost ridiculous measure of time for much of what matters: at one year old, Georgia O'Keeffe was not a great painter, and Bessie Smith wasn't much of a singer. One year into the Civil Rights Movement, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was still in progress, catalyzed by the unknown secretary of the local NAACP chapter and a preacher from Atlanta—by, that is, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. Occupy, our bouncing baby, was born with such struggle and joy a year ago, and here we are, 12 long months later.