Subjects Archives: Inequality

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Imagine being arrested and detained for months just for showing up to work. That’s what happened to construction workers Hugo Mejia and Rodrigo Nuñez on May 3, when their company sent them to work on a hospital inside Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California.

“I have spent most of my life studying Marxist ideas and have identified with groups that have not only embraced Marxist-inspired critiques of the dominant socioeconomic order, but have also struggled to understand the co-constitutive relationship of racism and capitalism.”

For those confused by the recent headlines on Venezuela, this is a point worth explaining. The so-called ‘peaceful’ ‘pro-democracy’ demonstrators of the opposition had made threats against those who planned to participate in the Constituent Assembly elections, leaving many people fearful to vote in their own communities, particularly those with a strong opposition presence. This fear was not unfounded.

Even most leftish white Americans like to think that their country is good and its institutions are fair and equitable. According to this wishful thinking human rights abuses only happen in faraway places and injustices here are resolved by reining in a few bad apples. The facts say otherwise and prove that the United States is consistently one of the worst human rights violators in the world.

The combination of the Nazi flag and the Confederate flag is a standard feature of the Right’s iconography—the linkage between a desire for White domination with a rehabilitation of the ‘lost cause’ of the Confederacy. This period of great economic instability has produced some truly morbid symptoms.

Nobody can say that liberal democracy has not liberated some people and that some kinds of servitude have not been obliterated. But the current system has run into a number of contradictions.

This is a dark moment in American history, perhaps one of the darkest, illuminated only by the broad swath of conservatives, moderates, and liberals who have rejected what Trump and Arpaio stand for. Let us pray that they—we—prevail.

However, white supremacy is not a tidal wave. And it isn’t a lurking storm that seeks to wreak havoc on the shores of the US either. That happened centuries ago, when English colonizers laid their claim to the North American mainland circa the mid to late 17th Century.

In the absence of an informed political opposition, it will be up to the American people to defend the independence of Social Security.

Official U.S. condemnation of Nazis, fascists and extremists is just American public relations rhetoric. Evidently, the condemnation has no credibility in terms of objective reality.

It is a devastating fact that James Baldwin is our contemporary; so much so, that the matter of his relevance seems either pressing or redundant depending on to whom one speaks. Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, a “cinematic séance” (The Guardian), is being taken as the completion of Baldwin’s unfinished Remember This House, […]

People in Eugene, Oregon have a history of coming together and fighting as a community: against logging, against the dominant system, and against development. Now we have to do the same against Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and white supremacists.

Germany has no exact equivalent of the White House cabal; its leaders are highly educated and circumspect in their speeches. But growing threats in both countries are far too similar.

When economic crisis grips a nation, when contradictions within the ruling class and the state create instability and social upheaval, fascists act as the foot soldiers of capitalism. Their function is to disrupt and destroy efforts on the part of the working-class and oppressed masses to organize against their miserable conditions.