In France, right-wingers love to pose as defenders of free speech. Yet the takeover of media by a cast of billionaire pro-Trump tycoons means that just a handful of individuals have a veto over huge swaths of the press.
The Trump administration’s cartoonish graft presents a unique opportunity for a populist anti-corruption platform. But for the Democrats to pull it off, they’d have to repudiate corruption within their own party first.
We live in an age of populism, on the Right and on the Left. In an interview with Jacobin, Vivek Chibber explains both populism’s potential and limitations for putting class and economics back into politics.
Hu Anyan’s I Deliver Parcels in Beijing describes life working in China’s logistics and service trades. Anyan’s account reveals differences in context between Chinese and US workers that indicate the difficulty of international working-class solidarity.
Emergency rooms, dentist offices, and nursing homes managed by the private equity industry consistently deliver worse health outcomes than other such medical institutions. The difference can mean life or death for patients.
For the last three decades, Rwanda’s leader Paul Kagame has fueled conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo and ransacked its natural resources. The US and the EU have been Kagame’s partners in crime so they can get a share of the loot.
Workers must organize for power, while capitalists wield it individually through property rights. This fundamental asymmetry, as German sociologist Claus Offe explained, creates a chain of obstacles that make working-class collective action uniquely difficult.
The Professional Staff Congress, the faculty and staff union at the City University of New York, is organizing against GOP attacks on higher ed — and fighting what it says are the CUNY administration’s own McCarthyist attacks on pro-Palestine professors.
Donald Trump thinks the US was constrained by “political correctness” in Vietnam and Afghanistan. But those wars were characterized by thorough dehumanization and staggering destruction. What type of war would be politically incorrect enough for Trump?
Mainstream economics argues that the tax system is the best tool for reducing economic inequality. In fact, “predistributive” measures like minimum wages and collective bargaining can be equally or more effective.
Populist economic policies grounded in the value of work and commonsense notions of fairness may be able to win over constituencies that have abandoned Democrats in recent decades. There’s a problem though: the Democratic brand is trash.
Why aren’t more elected officials turning Donald Trump’s assault on the basic rights of both noncitizens and citizens into a major national scandal?