Subjects Archives: Inequality

  • Footage from Smithfield Meats Circle Four Farms

    Animal liberation, human liberation

    The Left must endeavor to make visible the political valence of meat, let alone other industrial uses of animals. This act of acute empathy reveals the extent of one’s political imagination.

  • [Photo: Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis, 1968]

    The effect of the whip: The Frankfurt school and the oppression of women

    Stuart Jeffries on the Frankfurt School’s absence of women and the points of contact between the thinkers associated with the Institute für Sozialforschung and theorists of feminism.

  • Photo: Lilian Campelo

    There can be no revolution if we do not overcome racism

    Cosmas Musumali participated in a seminar on Pan-African Thought at the Florestan Fernandes National School, which is famous in Brazil for its social and political commitment.

  • Che’s professional ID card in Mexico. Photo: Marta Rojas

    Dr. Ernesto in Mexico

    Ernesto Guevara’s medical colleagues, both in Peru and Mexico, agree that he was profoundly interested in the social function of medicine, and that he had the makings of a researcher, although politics dominated his extraordinarily analytical mind.

  • Making Black Lives Matter in our schools (Damon Davis)

    Making ‘Black Lives Matter’ in our schools

    How do you kill Mr. Phil and nothing happens?” According to parent Zuki Ellis, this is the question students at J. J. Hill Montessori Magnet School in St. Paul were asking just a few days into summer. On June 16, the Minnesota police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile, or Mr. Phil as students knew him, was acquitted on all charges.

  • Saudi Woman (Photo: Zuhair A. Al-Traifi / Flickr)

    The biggest impediment to Saudi women was never the driving ban

    No matter their age, Saudi women are treated like minors — to the point that many require permission from their sons to work, study, or travel.

  • AdD supports marching in Germany

    Germany and the rise of a ‘fascist international’

    Germany funds foundations for its political parties. If the far right gets one, we’re one step closer to globalizing the alt-right.

  • Oakland Raiders teammates kneel during the national anthem, Sep. 24, 2017

    Take a knee: The revenge of Colin Kaepernick

    After Trump’s deranged demand that ownership purge NFL athletes who fail a loyalty test, it felt a little miraculous when, by a quirk of a game being played in London, Sunday morning dawned on the vision of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Baltimore Ravens arm in arm during the National Anthem. Standing with them was Shahid Khan, the league’s first non-white owner. I’d prefer no owners at all, but for now, it was a vision worth kneeling for.

  • Berlin Bulletin by Victor Grossman

    Merkel clobbered while rightists threaten

    A key result of the German elections is not that Angela Merkel and her double party, Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Bavarian CSU (Christian Social Union), managed to stay in the lead with the most votes, but that they got clobbered, with the biggest loss since their founding.

  • Counter demonstrators clash with white supremacist's at the entrance to Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, US [Steve Helber/AP]

    No, Antifa is not the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis

    Comparisons between citizens fighting against fascism and tiki-torch wielding anti-Semites are absurd – and dangerous.

  • U.S. President Donald Trump participates in a joint news conference with Amir Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah of Kuwait, September 7, 2017. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

    The dangerous case of Donald Trump: Robert Jay Lifton and Bill Moyers on ‘A Duty to Warn’

    Renowned psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton on the Goldwater Rule: We have a duty to warn if someone may be dangerous to others.

  • Screen shot of strawberries

    What we sow is what we eat

    Our treatment of the earth, of the dirt beneath our feet, is directly connected to our system of food production. The pollutants we put in the soil show up in our groceries. And the entire wretched business of agriculture derives from the nature of our economic system, which compels every giant corporation, every “entrepreneur,” to grow, to compete, to consider everything and everyone a commodity. Buy cheap, sell dear. These are the words that drive all of life.

  • Two men sentenced to perform unpaid community work wearing tabards emblazoned with 'Community Payback' to make their punishment visible

    Work, capital and the ‘administration of punishment’

    Criminal justice and welfare policies routinely produce a distinct labour force in Britain, disposable by design. This article examines recent policy developments driving these labour forms, and explores their implications for the meaning of work.

  • A member of the Occupy Wall Street movement shows his sign as he protests on 5th Avenue while marching through the upper east side of New York October 11, 2011. The Occupy Wall Street movement took protests to the New York homes of super-wealthy executives on Tuesday as rallies against economic inequality were planned this week for over 50 U.S. college campuses and in several cities around the world. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton (UNITED STATES - Tags: CIVIL UNREST BUSINESS POLITICS TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY) - RTR2SJC7

    Racial inequality is hollowing out America’s middle class

    America’s middle class is under assault.

  • This artwork by Michael Osbun relates to the travails of the American middle class.

    The fall offensive: the U.S., France and Brazil

    The fall of 2017 will witness the most brutal assault on working and middle class living standards since the end of World War II. Three presidents and their congressional allies will ‘revise’ labor legislation, progressive income tax laws and regulations and effectively end the mixed economy in France, the US and Brazil.

  • American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) meeting

    State conservatives block city progressives

    Conservative forces, organized by infamous groups like ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), are using their influence in state legislatures to pass preemption laws. The purpose is to stop, and even roll back, the gains of progressive local coalitions by usurping the authority of city governments, thereby rendering popular strategies, like ballot and elected official vote measures, useless.

  • Latino field workers in Yuma, AZ

    Why do we still have employer sanctions?

    The AFL-CIO was one of the main supporters of employer sanctions back in 1986. It only took 13 years for the labor federation to learn its lesson: in February 2000 it officially called for the elimination of the policy. Another 17 years have now passed, and the case against the sanctions has only grown more solid.

  • MLK on Capitalism

    We must have a new Poor People’s Campaign and Moral Revival

    Channeling the incisive analysis of our best historians, TaNehisi Coates cut through the talking points of political pundits last week to name Donald Trump America’s “First White president.” Writing for The Atlantic, the National Book Award recipient made clear how there could be no Donald Trump without President Obama. The chaos from which the whole world now suffers is a direct result of the backlash against racial progress in America.

  • Activist being handcuffed in Berkley antifa protests

    Thugs and journalists

    The repetition of words like “thug” and “gang” in media coverage of anti-fascist demonstrators suggests the degree to which mainstream journalists, and centrists more widely, understand challenges to the state in the same euphemisms with which they express their own deep anti-blackness.

  • Why Should Schools Have Salad Bars?

    Another privatization fail: 5 things you don’t know about school lunches (but probably should)

    One thing is clear: school lunches have a long way to go, and there’s no simple solution in sight. As school districts struggle to balance costs with meeting federal nutritional standards and other requirements, students are left to weather the storm with lackluster food choices that may not be having the positive effect on their mental and physical health that educators and parents want—and are certainly not having the tastebud-pleasing effects students hope for.