Almost 50% of union members in the United States today work in the public sector. By necessity, they will have to play a major role in the rebuilding of organized labor. But like private sector unions before them, government employee unions face circumstances threatening their very existence.

Nearly three decades after his untimely death, Harold Washington’s time as mayor of Chicago offers important political lessons for current progressive activists and organizers. While he ran for office as a Democrat, Washington was, in effect, drafted by a grassroots movement that emerged from the city’s neighborhoods.… What emerged from Washington’s run was a two-way process bringing together the “politics of the suites” and the “politics of the streets.”

Michael Hoover, “Whose Domain? Private Power, Public Policy, and Local Politics” (17 March 2006); “Zoned Out: The Politics of Community Exclusion” (8 April 2006) Until the 1930s, the U.S. government had little direct involvement with local governments. In altering that situation, the New Deal response to the Great Depression included direct grants of federal money […]

Michael Hoover, “Whose Domain? Private Power, Public Policy, and Local Politics” (17 March 2006) Local government initiatives to deal with housing and community development issues coincided with the expansion of industrial capitalism in the late 19th century.  New York City became the first to enact building codes following a cholera epidemic (the city’s third since […]

Susette Kelo (Photo by Isaac Reese, 2004 / © Institute for Justice) “Justices OK land grabs!”  “Property rights under attack!”  “No homeowner safe from government!”  “The sky is falling!”  So argued critics from across the political spectrum in response to a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding a municipality’s use of eminent domain power to […]

Part 3: Systematic Bias “…an ingenious strategy for recycling natural disaster as class struggle” Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear Michael Hoover, “Rowboat Federalism: The Politics of U.S. Disaster Relief; Part 1: History: The Problems Are Inherent” (28 November 2005) and “Rowboat Federalism: The Politics of U.S. Disaster Relief; Part 2: Politics: The Electoral Connection and […]

Michael Hoover, “Rowboat Federalism: The Politics of U.S. Disaster Relief; Part 1: History: The Problems Are Inherent,” 28 November 2005 Part 2: Politics: The Electoral Connection and Beyond The U.S. government’s role in disaster relief began expanding in the 1930s when President Franklin Roosevelt authorized Depression-era federal agencies to repair flood-damaged roads and bridges in […]

[All figures below are in current dollars.] Part 1: History: The Problems Are Inherent The U.S. constitution established a federal system of “dual authority” incorporating both national and state sovereignty. The product of a series of political accommodations made at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, federalism was designed as an opportunistic political battlefield with ambiguous boundaries, […]

Lost amidst the media clamor over George W. Bush’s U.S. Supreme Court appointment in early October was a New York federal court decision giving constitutional legitimacy to the president’s scheme of “faith-based” government. Ruling in the case of Lown v Salvation Army, District Judge Sidney Stein (a Bill Clinton appointee) held that religious institutions are […]

  Hong Kong’s film industry dominated South East Asian markets for the latter half of the twentieth century. Local productions began declining, however, in the “high anxiety” of the countdown to the “return” of the British colonial city-state to Mainland China in 1997. But when the “handover” had come and gone, expected draconian restrictions failed […]

“Hip capital” . . . “Rebel consumers” . . . “Conquest of cool” . . . “Bobos [bourgeois bohemians] in paradise!” Such are the terms used by social critics to ironically sum up the marketing of the counter-culture, a phenomenon that is commonly exemplified by the reduction of one-time “anti-establishment” anthems to a seemingly endless […]