Forfatter: roedtnyt

The first IRS child benefit payments went out today. Under the new scheme, parents are eligible for $300 per month for every child below the age of six, and $250 per month for every child aged six and above. The payments phase out for single parents with incomes above $112,500 per year and married parents [...]

J. R. R. Tolkien famously christened “cellar door” as the most aesthetically-pleasing phrase available in the English language. By way of contrast, I submit that it’s nearly impossible to conjure a less euphonious sequence of words than “James Carville interviewed by Chris Cuomo.” It’s similarly difficult, even by the lowly standards of cable news, to [...]

President Joe Biden’s pandemic relief bill included Democratic lawmakers’ language designed to prevent states from using the federal aid to subsidize tax cuts. But after Republicans protested, Biden’s Treasury Department said it will not aggressively enforce the provision — and now, some GOP legislatures may be using the stimulus cash to finance tax cuts for [...]

A 1975 semi-fictionalized film titled Our World: Woodcraft Folk shows a working-class British family of four — parents Pam and Jack and children Polly and Alan — out for a walk in the woods near their home. They catch a stray ball thrown their way and trace it to a nearby gaggle of children dressed [...]

Supermarkets have become an indispensable part of modern life. Most of us shop at them several times a week. Almost everyone buys their fruit, vegetables, meat, and dairy there, as well as cleaning products, toiletries, basic medicine, and whatever household supplies we need. Supermarkets are the center of our food system. The products they decide [...]

When Alfred Kazin arrived at the Manhattan office of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) to interview for a job as an editor, the writers were on strike. The room was “crowded with men and women lying face down on the floor, screaming that they were on strike,” he writes in his memoir of the 1930s. [...]

In February of this year, the Alberta New Democratic Party (ANDP) proposed the creation of a $200 million venture capital fund to support the province’s technology and innovation sectors. This is the latest move in an ongoing game of one-upmanship between the opposition ANDP and Alberta’s governing United Conservative Party (UCP). Both parties are keen [...]

In the past few years, anti-abortion activists have had great success in state legislatures passing so-called “heartbeat bills,” which outlaw abortion six weeks into a pregancy. The laws are supposedly designed to ban abortion upon detection of a “fetal heartbeat,” though that term is misleading at best. While ultrasounds can detect a flutter of activity [...]

South Africa is not a normal country. Almost half of the labor force is unemployed; the number rises to 76 percent for young people, who have no hope for their future. South Africa has the highest inequality rate in the world, with extreme wealth living next to extreme poverty. It is a country in which [...]

The devastating economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is now threatening to take away the very roofs over the heads of millions of Americans. More than half of US renter households lost employment income between March 2020 and March of this year, and one in five of those households is behind on their rent, according [...]

The pandemic has only hastened the transformation of the education sector, with students increasingly forced to rely on screens and platforms. But is it being transformed in ways that serve and promote children’s best interests — or the commercial interests of the private firms who increasingly dominate the educational landscape? As reliance on educational technologies [...]

“If we can do this, imagine what else we can do.” Such was the cheery message of hope and optimism delivered by mega-billionaire Richard Branson during his recent sojourn into not-quite space aboard the suborbital VSS Unity. For reasons other than those he intended, both the tagline of Branson’s stunt and the wider circumstances surrounding [...]

Beginning earlier this summer, Colombia was rocked by weeks of unprecedented anti-government protests that left behind wreckage in many of Colombia’s cities, from Cali to the capital Bogotá, reminiscent of the bitter days of its civil war. But despite heavy police brutality, many Colombians felt hopeful that real change was within reach. Today, Colombia’s cities [...]

In the days following the recent assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse, the country’s acting prime minister asked for military support from both the United States and the United Nations. While the requests were couched in terms of protecting Haiti’s infrastructure in the lead-up to new elections, critics warn that the vast majority of Haitians [...]

Abortion access has been uneven and inadequate for decades. But with the recent announcement that the Supreme Court will hear a major abortion case next term concerning a Mississippi state law that would ban almost all abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy, the threat has reached new levels. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization strikes [...]

Sunday’s snap elections in Bulgaria confirmed the demise of the kleptocratic GERB party’s rule, but also showed the difficulties that a scattered opposition will face in forming any stable alternative majority. A party of the center-right, GERB will be remembered for its leader Boyko Borissov’s thuggish behavior, its use of the state apparatus to help [...]

At 10:00 on the morning of November 11, 1880, Ned Kelly hanged from a rope until dead. His last words were “Such is life.” By some accounts, however, a journalist working to a tight word limit distilled this phrase from “Ah well, I suppose it has come to this.” Whatever the case, the laconic fatalism [...]

As a pure logistical feat, the rollout of vaccines in some Western nations has been nothing short of remarkable. By most other conceivable metrics, however, the global pandemic response — a response largely formulated and led by those very nations — has been a catastrophic moral failure. As Canada’s vaccine distribution skyrockets, pre-pandemic rhythms resume [...]

As the streets of Cuba are filled with some of the largest anti-government protests in the country’s history, we’re seeing a predictable, reckless response from US policymakers. That would be the exact same one we see anytime one of the Washington foreign policy Blob’s many official enemies face unrest: calls for the US government to [...]

On June 7, Jeff Bezos announced his plan to go to space on July 20 — just fifteen days after finishing up as CEO of Amazon. It was positioned as a bold next step in the billionaire space race that has been escalating for several years, though it didn’t take long for its true face [...]

Federal ethics regulators have ordered Joe Biden’s top domestic policy adviser, Susan Rice, to divest her multimillion-dollar holdings in a fossil fuel giant weeks after the Biden administration boosted the company’s controversial pipeline, according to government documents we obtained. The pipeline decision — backing a Trump administration policy over the objections of environmental groups — [...]

On Sunday, the largest anti-government protests in at least twenty-seven years broke out in Cuba. Thousands of people marched in the streets chanting slogans. Others overturned police cars or looted stores. It’s far too early to make definitive pronouncements about the political character of these protests. Quite likely, the people in the streets represent a [...]

There’s a crisis on the imaginary line that separates the United States from Mexico, but it’s not the one politicians and media outlets have been talking about. Earlier this year, the US political class was focused on a supposed “surge” in migration and on serious — but not unprecedented — failures in the treatment of [...]

One can often learn as much about the world by who we are instructed to hate as who we are invited to love. Few writers were subjected to as much Cold War public derision as Mike Gold, once the darling of 1930s red left. Even in the introductions to books and in public retrospectives, ostensibly [...]

Reading the Economic Freedom Fighters’ (EFF) manifesto for South Africa’s last general election in 2019 and watching their online lecture series, one sees a party that offers Pan-African socialism. The thought of Frantz Fanon has converged with Marxist-Leninism to supposedly deliver a revolution deferred twenty-seven years ago. But postapartheid politicians are infamous for talking left and walking [...]

In late June, Sweden’s Social Democratic Party (SAP) prime minister lost a no-confidence vote in parliament, with the decisive backing of the Left Party. Throughout history, the Social Democrats could traditionally count on this small left-wing party’s support whenever a right-wing government risked coming to power. This time, however, a red line had been drawn, [...]

Last April, Christian Smalls, a supervisor at an Amazon facility in Staten Island, New York City known as JFK8, was fired for organizing fellow workers. Chris was a leader, someone who trained other workers; he’d been at Amazon for years when the pandemic hit. When he felt the company wasn’t taking the necessary precautions to [...]

At least three socialists have declared victory in New York’s city council races: Alexa Avilés of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Tiffany Cabán of Astoria, Queens, and Kristin Richardson Jordan of Harlem, New York. Cabán and Avilés were both endorsed by New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA), while Jordan is a DSA member (though not [...]

In the year 1913, when the Teachers’ League formed, the word feminism broke through in American culture. These developments were more directly related than is generally appreciated. Early in 1913, at its inception, the Teachers’ League established a committee on the status of married women chaired by executive committee member Henrietta Rodman. Teaching was often [...]

Several months after the UK government announced a package of support for small businesses to help them through the disruption of the pandemic and subsequent lockdown, the banks administering the government’s Coronavirus Small Business Interruption Loan Scheme issued a warning. UK banks told the government that between 40 and 50 percent of the businesses in receipt of [...]

What does Karl Marx’s masterwork, Capital, have in common with Dante’s Inferno? And more importantly, what can the book — which was written partly in debate with the socialist movements of its time — teach us today? In his book Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital, political theorist William Clare Roberts argues that Marx’s [...]

In 1992, an unexpected memo arrived on the desk of Philip Gould, a senior Labour Party strategist. “Dear Phillip . . . ” it read, “Stan is anxious to meet you here in Little Rock.” “Stan” was Stanley Greenberg, a pollster for Bill Clinton. He was asking Gould to fly to Arkansas where James Carville, [...]

Recent trials of a four-day week in Iceland have shown the merits of a shorter working week. Working less — without loss of pay — makes us less stressed and with more time to do what we really want. The effects on our behavior could make this a key measure in stopping climate change — [...]