Luke Savage is a staff writer at Jacobin. He is the author of The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History.
Yet again this week, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki dismissed legitimate questions about Biden’s governance, sarcastically referring to “bunny rabbits and ice cream.” It’s an admission that this administration and its party are incapable of delivering what they promise.
The vastly disparate NY Times coverage of two NYC transit strikes illustrates the dramatic transformation of mainstream coverage of working-class life in recent years. As media companies chase an upper-crust audience, workers have been erased.
The plight of the Afghan people was crucial for pundits and journalists — as long as they had a war to defend. Now that US troops are gone, Joe Biden’s sanctions are causing starvation and suffering — and the media has been astonishingly silent.
By the time they clocked out for lunch on January 4, Canada’s most lavishly paid CEOs had already made the average worker’s annual salary. It’s yet another reminder of the unequal burdens borne during the pandemic.
Farmworkers are among the most exploited workers in the country, and a bill in solid-blue Maine would have finally given them basic labor rights. But the state’s Democratic governor just vetoed the bill.
The bizarre tale of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’s years-long defrauding of many of the world’s most “sophisticated” investors and celebrities highlights the mendacity and self-deception that drive Silicon Valley tech culture.
The Biden administration has reneged on key promises that candidate Biden used to entice younger voters to turn out for him in 2020. Surprise: his approval ratings with the young are now in free fall.
The Biden administration’s U-turn on distributing millions of COVID tests free of charge — after White House spokesperson Jen Psaki ridiculed the idea two weeks ago — is a case study in how meaningless claims of “political impossibility” often are.
Mass culture is becoming a museum dedicated to itself, its artifacts curated by an ever-narrowing family of conglomerates. Nowhere is that clearer than in the decline of The Simpsons, whose groundbreaking satire was killed by monopoly capitalism.
Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are dead set on expanding commercial space flight — even though a single person taking one of their carbon-spewing joy rides will produce more pollution in a few minutes than people belonging to 1/8th of the world population will in their entire lives.
A recent gathering of right-wing politicians and intellectuals underscores conservatism’s increasing illiberalism — and suggests the GOP might move even further toward authoritarianism and phony economic populism.
It’s hard to think of anything more symbolic of America’s gilded and decadent ruling class than elected officials owning pieces of the very economy they’re officially charged with managing.
Thanks to COVID-related developments like expanded unemployment insurance, US workers have seen wages increase. But corporate profits have grown even more — meaning labor’s share of the economic pie is still small compared to its 20th-century peak.
The White House spokesperson was asked why the administration doesn’t just send out free COVID tests, as other countries do. Her mindless, condescending response was a reminder that the Democrats are still the party of Aetna.
Chris Cuomo abused his platform at CNN to help his politically besieged brother. It was flagrantly unethical, but in keeping with the culture of complete unaccountability for unethical abuse that American media elites have long enjoyed.
Centrist Democrats use phrases like “accessible and quality health care” to sound like they support reforming the broken US health care system while avoiding the only genuine reform: removing health care from the market altogether.
With the spread of the new Omicron variant and low levels of vaccination throughout much of the world, there’s still no real end to COVID in sight. It’s bad news for global public health — but great news for big pharmaceutical companies.
Capitalism imposes massive suffering on the poor and working class. But even the detestable superrich are being made miserable by the sadistic things market competition implores them to do to the rest of us.
All signs now point to a full-court press by the GOP to rig state election rules in a bid to stay in power permanently. So far, Democrats have barely put up a fight.