‘It is not social rights that produce mistrust and hostility among employees, it is on the contrary the fact that these rights are not for everyone and are increasingly restricted, giving the feeling that aid is “for others and never for me”.'
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IV573 - October 2022
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France,
Public services
Kategori: Engelske
Image by Kelly Sikkema.
As we turn towards the 2024 presidential election (much as many of us might like to forget its existence), calls for Joe Biden to step aside have grown in number and volume. I think these pleas are well-founded, and I hope Biden follows through on his campaign-trail indications that he would only serve one term. But liberals and centrists
The United States is notorious around the world for having a huge prison population. Many of the incarcerated have committed relatively minor offenses; many of which stem from substance abuse issues and institutional racism. Prison is a place most of us wish to avoid. But what if certain individuals purposefully get themselves arrested and risk […]
Enmeshed in a colonial relationship with the US and abandoned by their own establishment politicians, Puerto Ricans are being forced to forge their own recovery after Hurricane Fiona. But they’re also dreaming of a different, more just future.
A person cooks in the dark in a home in the Condado community of Santurce in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on September 19,
Black sharecroppers organizing a union were slaughtered en masse 103 years ago this week in the Elaine Massacre. It was one of the US’s worst episodes of racist violence — and a reminder that Jim Crow was about keeping the masses divided and labor brutalized.
Troops are seen marching sharecroppers toward temporary holding facilities where hundreds would be
Ian McEwan is one of Britain’s most prominent novelists. His latest offering, Lessons, is an attempt to track the life story of its fictional protagonist through the turbulence of postwar British and European history. The result is a labored exercise in boomer agitprop. Instead of delivering a literary manifesto in defense of liberal democracy, McEwan […]
The Hill has fired Katie Halper from its morning show, Rising, for describing Israel's policies as tantamount to apartheid. It's a blatant act of censorship to silence a pro-Palestinian journalist.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) on Capitol Hill on May 12, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
For all the strides the Palestinian cause has made
Despite fears that a military coup could follow Sunday’s elections in Brazil, the country’s military brass is unlikely to feel threatened enough to attempt one. Whoever wins, the military’s growing institutional hold on power looks likely to continue.
Current Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, during an audience with his former Minister of Defence and
Deliveroo’s UK director of corporate communications said that France – a country in which the gig-economy platform has been fined for abusing workers’ rights – is “the most progressive example” of gig economy regulation.
He made the comments during a Labour Party conference fringe event on Monday about how to “deliver a progressive gig economy”
The new Conservative prime minister Liz Truss has experienced a spectacular humiliation during her first weeks in office. Her self-defeating agenda reflects the mindset of a Thatcherite ideologue managing an economy already ravaged by decades of Thatcherism.
British prime minister Liz Truss visits the British Gas Academy in Dartford, UK, September 30,
“The junta started its reign in a brutal and bloody way, it was however recognised by Emmanuel Macron, present at the funeral of Idriss Déby Itno. Demonstrations organized by political groups, human rights associations, and trade union organizations were violently repressed (eight dead and more than five hundred arrested), their leaders were arrested.”
The new Conservative prime minister Liz Truss has experienced a spectacular humiliation during her first weeks in office. Her self-defeating agenda reflects the mindset of a Thatcherite ideologue managing an economy already ravaged by decades of Thatcherism.
British prime minister Liz Truss visits the British Gas Academy in Dartford, UK, September 30,
Liz Truss’s premiership has set the Tories into freefall, but how much damage can the Conservatives do before we get the chance to kick them out?
Plus: Vladimir Putin annexes whole swathes of Ukrainian territory; and the third episode of the Al Jazeera ‘Labour Files’ documentary.
With Michael Walker and Maurice Mcleod.
The Industrial Workers of the World pioneered a radical unionism that built a small but incredibly dedicated group of unionists and union supporters — which is why American capitalists and politicians quickly decided they needed to stop the union.
International Workers of the World labor organizer Frank Tannenbaum, speaking to a gathering at Union Square
What a week for the Institute of Economic Affairs, self described as “the UK’s original free-market think-tank”, known to everyone else as the brain geniuses who have been laying the ideological groundwork for our current economic maxi crisis.
The weird neoliberal lobby group beloved of Liz Truss were some of the only people who were happy with Kwasi
The Fed has dropped all pretense of aiming for a “soft landing” as it ratchets up interest rates to fight inflation. It now openly admits it’s trying to create a recession in which millions of people will lose their jobs.
Unemployed men sitting on the sunny side of the San Francisco Public Library in San Francisco, California. (Dorothea Lange / Heritage Art / Heritage
New studies suggest that private equity–owned hospitals and nursing homes deliver worse outcomes and higher costs for patients — weeks after Congress gave private equity firms a new tax break.
Private equity activity in the health and eldercare spaces has ballooned over the last decade, at the expense of patients’ financial and physical well-being. (Bromberger
“The regional resistance is perhaps the most important. It has the greatest potential right now to sabotage the mobilization and challenge Putin.”
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IV572 - September 2022
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Russia
Published in 1985, Don DeLillo’s White Noise depicted an America blinded by consumerism. Ahead of Netflix’s adaptation of the novel, it’s worth revisiting DeLillo’s masterpiece, which remains one of our most perceptive visions of contemporary America.
Don DeLillo’s White Noise remains one of our most perceptive visions of contemporary America and the
Six Republican states are suing to stop Joe Biden's student debt forgiveness plan — even though a new study shows that borrowers in most of those states would be among the biggest beneficiaries of the program.
A new Federal Reserve analysis finds that nearly three-quarters of Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness will go to those living in areas where the median
Nine days before this weekend’s election, Brazilian leftist firebrand Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva posted a picture of himself on social media. Smiling from ear to ear, both his hands stretched out to the camera, the former president reminded voters that the final countdown is on. It’s a meme-worthy image, with the joke lying in the fact that Lula, a former metalworker,
A union general secretary has been accused of pitting trade unionists against each other as his staff take strike action.
Office staff at trade union Usdaw are taking two days of strike action against the trade union. Across the country, Usdaw staff represented by GMB have unanimously rejected a pay offer of 3.5% and are seeking a commitment to potential home
Based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, Andrew Dominik’s film Blonde ignores the assertive and hardworking real-life Marilyn Monroe and instead gives us a lurid tale of perpetual victimization.
Ana de Armas plays Marilyn Monroe in Blonde. (Netflix)
By now the Netflix film Blonde is notorious for its length, it’s NC-17 rating, and its cruelly narrow view of film
Despite Democrats controlling the White House and Congress since 2020, it has largely been the Right that has taken the political initiative and set the terms of the political conversation. Expect that to get worse after November.
President Joe Biden delivers remarks about lowering health care costs in the Rose Garden at the White House on September 27, 2022,
The apocalyptic dangers now confronting the world with greatest risk of nuclear war since at least the Cuban Missile Crisis are also telling us why the problem in Vietnam was primarily with promiscuous militarism rather than with avoiding defeat in the future, which was the preoccupation of the Weinberger Doctrine. More
The post Why I Love the “Vietnam
“If this happened in Israel, they would have gained so much international support, everything would be turned upside down, because we are talking about children in a graveyard”, says Fayez Abu Karsh, a Palestinian father who lost his son to an Israeli airstrike. The families of the victims now call for Israel to be brought More
The post “Take Israel to the ICC:”
This article addresses the most current research on sea level rise, as well as adaptation measures being taken around the world. Of special interest, brilliant adaptation measures are taking place in the face of higher seas. “Sea level has been fairly stable for 6,000 years, which is most of human civilization… but its risen eight More
The post Sea Level Acceleration
War and Spy Masters for Democracy It’s instructive to look behind the veil of people that liberal media bring forward as champions of democracy on cable news. Look at some of the imperial war and spy masters that MSNBC has long featured in denouncing the crimes of Donald Trump and his Republic-fascist allies as well More
The post Compromised Talking Heads appeared
Oceans soak up heat. Nearly all of the excess heat being generated by climate change is captured by oceans, where it is held in water a few hundred feet from the surface. Hurricanes need 80F° water for fuel. But as Hurricane Ian blew across western Cuba, it entered waters with some of the warmest sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic, allowing Ian to rapidly
‘We have given the power of the world and its leadership over to women! O you women of the world, be you responsible with it, if you be just and fair!’ – First Gate of the Fifteenth Unity of the Bayān As several historical narratives have detailed,[1] during the summer of 1848 as revolutions were More
The post A Feminist Revolution in Iran? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
The post How Mikhail Gorbachev Became the Most Reviled Man in Russia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
At the end of apartheid in 1994, only 36 percent of households in South Africa were electrified, with almost all white households having electric power and most Black households having no access to electricity. Ten years later, more than 80 percent of households were electrified. This was an important achievement, albeit one that mostly left More
The post
Mahsa Amini, 22, did not deserve to die. Women across Iran are burning their headscarves and baring their heads in protest after Amini died in police custody over an alleged violation of the country’s strict religious dress code. There were reports that police beat Amini’s head with a baton and banged her head against one of their More
The post
The arrest of a prominent Palestinian activist, Musab Shtayyeh, and another Palestinian activist, by Palestinian Authority police on September 20 was not the first time that the notorious PA’s Preventive Security Service (PSS) has arrested a Palestinian who is wanted by Israel. PSS is largely linked to the routine arrests and torture of anti-Israeli occupation
During the 11-year-long, estimated $57.4 billion (partial) decontamination efforts at the destroyed Fukushima-Daiichi reactor site in Japan, almost every novel program invented to deal with the complex, unprecedented triple catastrophe has initially failed and then needed to be re-invented. Unworkable schemes instigated to repair, decontaminate,
Our worldhome is critically ill and on fire, but the politicians and economically powerful are fluffing about with rockets, gleefully banning abortion, spending US$932 billion on new oil and gas fields, and goofing around with carbon trading, as though our living conditions and survival were a leisurely card game. On our side, we are marching More
The post
The Spanish civil war of 1936 becomes more relevant every day. That’s because it was a war against fascism in its pure form. In case you wonder what form that is, amid the poisonous, weedy varieties sprouting up globally these days, it’s fascism, exercised through corporate control of government, against and thus persecution of leftists, More
The post The Global
[Warning: I’m really not sure if this review is one big spoiler. Any movie with a central reveal risks its own spoilation, especially when the secret will be divined during the screening by some, maybe even by many. I do want to protect this surprise as ardently as the men try to protect their women More
The post Don’t Worry Darling: Black Comedy Under the Desert
When doing fieldwork for my book on Brazilian social movements in 2010, I heard many people express a kind of qualified support for the outgoing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration. Lofty goals, from eradicating hunger, to challenging US-backed free market reforms, propelled the former steelworker and labor leader into power when first elected in More
The City Council of La Quinta CA last week unanimously cancelled the Coral Mountain project, “a wellness resort community” featuring a 16-acre surf-wave pool. The locals, who prefer “quiet, tranquility, and dark skies” as one opponent said, had more persuasive experts, better publicity, and the worst drought in 1,200 years on their side. The idea More
The
As if right on cue, just as Mussolini’s acolytes win the Italian elections and the January 6 Committee is hot on the heels of Trump’s would-be presidential putsch plotters, Hollywood releases an important new antifascist film that follows in the hobnailed footsteps of Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 anti-Hitler masterpiece The Great Dictator. Writer/director
By every conceivable measure, South Sudan is a nation in acute crisis. According to the World Bank, eighty percent of the South Sudanese population lives below the international poverty line, only one percent of people have access to electricity, and this month a UN Security Council delegation warned that another full-fledged civil war could break More
The
An unfortunate part of modern life is living with the knowledge that the planet we live on is quite obviously suffering from the ventures of humankind. The destruction wrought in the pursuit of profit and the name of progress continues every moment of every day. The benefits are now mostly outweighed by the damage of More
The post Unnatural Consequences appeared
Ten of thousands of Russian men are fleeing the country to avoid President Putin’s mobilization. Miles after miles of cars are jamming the roads to Finland. Flights to Georgia and other countries are fully booked. For someone who was faced with the draft during the Vietnam War and pondered various possibilities, including leaving the United More
The post Are
September 21 is the day that dictator Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines. For 49 years, it had been a day of mourning for Filipinos. This year, the fiftieth anniversary of martial law took place under the regime of his son, Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., who was elected president by a landslide last May. More
The post Extreme Events are the New Normal…and
Our cities have finally shut up after two hundred years of noisy chatter. Appearances are less deceptive: isolated people shuffle off to work, the tollway precedes the road, and our old city centers have become new museums of debt. Does anyone really expect recovery? What is there to recover? We are all gothic protagonists now, More
The post Forsaken Identities:
In this era of hyper-partisan politics, it’s difficult to find an issue that appeals to voters across party lines. But Democratic leaders successfully identified one in the run up to the 2020 election when they pledged to reform America’s archaic and unpopular marijuana prohibition laws. “No one should be in jail because of marijuana,” then-candidate
The U.S. Census Bureau recently reported that poverty dropped notably in 2021. Amid a pandemic and widespread economic pain, this is a significant accomplishment. There are three lessons here — about government programs, about how we measure poverty, and about how far we have left to go. First, these numbers show that government programs work. After
This is the twentieth installment in a series about a journey, by train and bicycle, across Russia to Crimea shortly before the war began. It would be nice to think that a peace conference of the world’s powers, perhaps meeting in Geneva or Vienna, could end the current fighting in Ukraine. But the unintended consequences More
The post Letter From Crimea: Yalta’s
Ambassador Alex Saab, a victim of the US economic war to achieve regime change in Venezuela, has been under arrest for over two years. This article recounts the developments in the diplomat’s court case. Saab is fighting against his illegal detention and extradition before the 8th District Court in Miami. As Venezuela’s special envoy and More
The post US Hybrid
The strike of 2000 Kaiser Permanente mental health care providers is now in its seventh week. On Saturday, votes were counted; the tally was overwhelming, 1349 to 222 to continue the strike. Why? Here’s Jane Kostka, a steward with the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW): We’re out here on the picket line today because More
The post Voices from the Picket
We have spent much of the past week reading and listening to speeches by world leaders at the UN General Assembly in New York. Most of them condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a violation of the UN Charter and a serious setback for the peaceful world order that is the UN’s founding and defining More
The post “End War in Ukraine” Say 66 Nations at UN General Assembly
To the ancient Greeks, the owl symbolized wisdom, but the Romans saw it as an evil omen. Their myths tell of an owl-like strix that stalked the night and preyed on human flesh. Ovid’s poem Fasti describes how such a demon slipped into the nursery of the sleeping prince Proca and was found hunched over More
The post The Aerodynamics of Velvet: What Owls Can Teach Humans
Republicans and Democrats both claim democracy will die if they don’t win the midterms on 8 November. Each party says the other is not just defending unworkable or reprehensible ideas but is in fact an enemy, a foreign body, immoral and subversive (1). This paranoid reflex, formerly reserved for Native Americans, African Americans and communists, now More
With the flame burning eternally on the grave of their hero-Führer Mussolini, the Brothers of Italy not only won a big election victory but also claims to be post-fascists designed to camouflage their fascistic politics. Their propagandistic “post-fascist” and “we are not fascist” mantra is happily propagated by the right wing press. Yet, Giorgia Meloni’sright-wing
Crises often bring long-standing submerged conflicts into the open. For a long time, numerous academic commentators on the public art museum have noted that these institutions depend upon economic inequities. (I am one of these commentators.) Luxury and poverty are brought into proximity when precious artworks, which are protected by poorly paid guards,
The United States may regard itself as a “leader of the free world,” but an index of development released in July 2022 places the country much farther down the list. In its global rankings, the United Nations Office of Sustainable Development dropped the U.S. to 41st worldwide, down from its previous ranking of 32nd. Under More
The post US is Becoming a ‘Developing
When Queen Elizabeth passed away, much of the Western establishment’s reaction was one of uncritical mourning. Likewise, her successor King Charles’ ascent to the throne was greeted with celebration. It’s one thing for world leaders to send formal condolences for a loss or congratulations for an ascendance. But in the United States, President Biden and
This past May, the Wall Street Journal released a bombshell report on trends in American CEO pay. According to the Journal’s analysis, median CEO pay at American S&P 500 companies rose to a record-setting $14.7 million in 2021, with the 25 highest-grossing CEOs earning at least $35 million and the top nine each at least More
The post Corporate America Suddenly
The Jewish New Year was a big deal for both my family and the Jewish community in which I grew up. The synagogue in our community had mostly fallen into disuse by the beginning of the decade of the 1970s, though the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur still brought people back More
The post Old Beliefs Die Hard appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
With groveling apologies to Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson … and also to Joe Hill. And while I’m at it, to Paul Robeson, too. Deeply, deeply sorry. I dreamed I saw Limbaugh last night, Right here, above the ground. Said I, “But Rush, you croaked last year.” Said he: “I’m still around.” Said he: “I’m More
The post I Dreamed I Saw Limbaugh Last Night appeared first on
On 2nd October, Brazil will be faced with a stark choice. The incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro, has overseen economic calamity and nearly 700,000 Covid deaths in his first term. His challenger, Lula Da Silva, is hoping to regain the presidency – just three years since being freed from prison. To discuss the state of Brazilian democracy ahead of the election,
Unlike most world leaders, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has boldly called for peace commission in Ukraine, foregrounding the need for open negotiations to end the war. At home, however, he has increased the power of the military.
Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (C), Mexico's secretary of defense, Cresencio Sandoval (L),
A court has decided that the value of property should be taken into account when considering the human rights of protesters.
The ruling was made after the attorney general referred the acquittal of the ‘Colston four’ to the court of appeal. It means that in future, protesters accused of property damage will only be able to rely on human rights defences in “minor,
The new Oprah Winfrey–produced Sidney Poitier documentary, Sidney, is a gushing tribute film, not a fully rounded portrait of a human being who had weaknesses to go along with his many strengths.
Sidney Poitier in the film To Sir, With Love, 1967. (Columbia Pictures / Getty Images)
Sidney is an entirely conventional but handsome Apple TV+ documentary about
Trussonomics is based on a simple logic: financial markets are the mechanism best able to allocate the economic resources of the UK in a way that meets the needs of the people of this country. That has always been the mantra of the free market thinktanks, like the Institute of Economic Affairs, which Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have associated themselves with
Our resource-starved public education system is not equipped to handle the increasingly extreme heat, condemning students and teachers to sweltering classrooms. New school infrastructure is an urgent priority if we want to have a functional education system.
Overheated classrooms make it virtually impossible for students to engage in meaningful scholarship.
You’ve heard about tax havens like the Cayman Islands. But billionaires aren’t just dodging their taxes with international loopholes — US states have turned their tax codes into plutocratic rackets where billionaires can stash their cash tax-free.
"Trust haven" states are one of the major weak links in the global system of financial transparency. (Ivan
The Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña’s work binds together Marxism and indigenous Latin American culture. Her paintings and sculptures present an alternative to the dreariness of contemporary capitalism: a socialism founded on anti-imperialism and human pleasure.
Karl Marx (1972) by Cecilia Vicuña. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York,
In June, three months before Hurricane Ian battered Florida, Republican state legislators tried to halt a climate risk disclosure mandate for businesses. They also voted against investing in climate-related weatherization and flood mitigation.
Boats are pushed up on a causeway after Hurricane Ian passed through the area on September 29, 2022 in Fort Myers,
The rise of trillion-dollar investment firms like BlackRock has resulted in a massive, unprecedented concentration of economic power. BlackRock’s Larry Fink may use green rhetoric, but his company won’t take real action to address the climate crisis.
A pedestrian passes in front of a statue of a bull in the Wall Street area in New York City where rains from
“No doubt the Republican governors will win the support from Trump's political base. But photos of the families with their children standing on American streets looking lost and afraid will also cost them the votes of many independents.”
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IV572 - September 2022
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United States (USA),
Migration
The left will continue to lose because all left parties in Sweden are stuck in fossilized social movement formations tied to national growth, globalization without sufficient attention to declining regions, identity, complaints about welfare state reductions without attention to wealth creation, and deconstructions of the negative consequences of
A cycle of protests began in Haiti in July 2018, and—despite the pandemic—has carried on since then. The core reason for the protest in 2018 was that in March of that year the government of Venezuela—due to the illegal sanctions imposed by the United States—could no longer ship discounted oil to Haiti through the PetroCaribe scheme. Fuel prices soared by up
No one listened better than Studs. For those of you old enough to remember, that’s Studs Terkel, of course. The most notable thing about him in person, though, was this: the greatest interviewer of his moment, perhaps of any moment, never stopped talking, except, of course, when he was listening to produce one of his memorable bestselling oral histories — he
Be careful who you praise and the degree of zeal you do it with. The slain Shinzo Abe, shot dead in Nara on July 8, towered over Japanese politics. In doing so, he cast a lengthy shadow. In death, this shadow continues to grow ever more darkly. The reaction from certain figures outside Japan left More
The post Whitewashing at Shinzo Abe’s State Funeral appeared
In its original sense, the term “political commissar” or a “supervisory officer responsible for political education” (ideology) referred to a special officer in the armed services. Their job was to “ensure political control of the military.” The post was first created by the French revolutionaries at the end of the 18th century and eventually adopted
Last May a remarkable column by Stephen Kinzer appeared in the Boston Globe. It was headlined: “Republicans Return To Their Roots As The Antiwar Party.” More significantly, the subheading ran: “Since the Vietnam era, Americans have come to expect antiwar rhetoric from liberal Democrats. Cancel that.” It began: “With Americans now engulfed in passion for
Congress has had hearing after hearing on Jan. 6, with another due to start on Wednesday. For certain elements of the Democratic Party, this has become something of a Passion Play. In contrast, as I note in the latest Capitol Hill Citizen, the Democrats, especially in the House, have blocked any meaningful Congressional inquiry into the origins More
The post
“Arrests at the southern border will set new records this year,” Joe Walsh reports at Forbes. “Border Patrol apprehended 1.998 million people at the U.S.-Mexico border from October to August, already blowing past the 1.659 million arrested in all of fiscal year 2021, which was the agency’s busiest year on record.” Republicans
Democratic campaign fundraisers are complaining about cable news. The reporting they rely on, to attract attention and stir giving, dried up, they say, when US news networks switched their attention from politics and the midterms to Queen Elizabeth II’s death. How do you spark alarm, inform the public, prod people to act, if the media More
The post Queen Quashes
More than $2 billion dollars. That’s how much dark money eclipsed the 2020 elections, OpenSecrets estimates– an increase of over $1.8 billion from just ten years prior. The 2010 Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision devastatingly altered U.S. campaigns and elections. By likening political spending groups to individual Americans entitled to First
There were headlines all over the place this week telling us how the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan would cost $400 billion. I suspect that sounded very scary to lots of people who heard it. After all, those not named Elon Musk will never see anything like $400 billion More
The post Student Loan Forgiveness
It’s been quite a while since I last wrote about the pandemic—which, contrary to the President’s latest gaffe, is most definitely not over. Largely because the Democrats have decamped to a “what, us worry?” position on COVID since at least the spring in a transparent attempt to swing enough votes their way in November to keep control of Congress. More
The
September 21st was designated by the United Nations as International Day of Peace. You could not be blamed for missing it as the news focused on war. We desperately need to move beyond a symbolic day for peace to a just and sustainable peace. The high costs of militarism have always been terrible; now they More
The post A Just and Sustainable Peace…or Else! appeared
There was an increase in firearm homicides across the United States from 2019 to 2020. Every region experienced increases. While firearm homicide is a complex phenomenon driven by multiple factors, researchers consistently find that it is associated with measures of economic hardship. This was again observed in the recent increase in firearm homicides.
For Immediate Release September 28, 2022 Court Rules that California Department of Pesticide Regulation Must Comply with Environmental Regulations When Renewing Rodenticide BERKELEY, CA (September 28, 2022)— Yesterday, California’s First District Court of Appeal recognized the danger posed by the deadly rodenticide diphacinone in ruling
The Bank of England have been forced to intervene as Kwarteng’s mini-budget continues to cause economic meltdown. We ask economist and former market trader Gary Stevenson what it all means.
Plus: Keir Starmer’s conference speech analysed; and Labour MP Rupa Huq loses the Labour whip for comments about the chancellor.
With Michael Walker and
Three Kurdish attendees were turned away from this year’s Labour party conference, among them a former local mayor. All had travelled to Liverpool and were refused entry at the door, the party claiming they had failed security clearance.
The decision has raised questions about undue influence within the party of groups affiliated with the Turkish state.
In 2018, Dylan Wegela was on the picket line in Arizona, fighting against austerity in public schools. Now he’s preparing to take up the same fight in Michigan’s State House after winning his primary this summer.
Dylan Wegela is running for state representative in Michigan. (Dylan Wegela campaign website)
Four years ago, Dylan Wegela was organizing his coworkers
Historians have underestimated the role of pandemics in changing the course of history. Long before the Black Death hit Europe, an outbreak of bubonic plague triggered a profound social crisis in sixth-century Byzantium, shaking the foundations of the empire.
A mosaic of Byzantine emperor Justinian and his suite in Basilica San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy.
“The initial slogans, generally directed against the morality police, were very quickly enriched by mass chants such as: “Death to the dictator”, “Down with the Islamic Republic”, “No Shah, no Supreme Guide”, “Woman, Life, Freedom”, or “Bread, Work, Freedom”. The movement was highly politicized from the start, and it was no longer a purely protest movement.”
Jon Melrod was part of a wave of student radicals who took jobs in factories in the 1970s. He spoke to Jacobin about life in working-class Wisconsin, becoming a workplace leader, and how to merge shop-floor fights with a broader left politics.
General Motors workers wave picket signs outside a Detroit plant on September 14, 1970, after the United Auto Workers
While there are many memorable passages to be found in the recently published Christopher Hitchens collection A Hitch in Time, one of the most striking appears early in a piece originally published in the leadup to the first Gulf War. Lamenting the sorry state of the debate underway in Congress, Hitchens takes aim at partisans […]
In parts of Queens, socialists hold office at the local, state, and federal levels. Those victories are no accident: they’re the fruit of years of local organizing in a borough known for being anything but flashy.
Public defender Tiffany Cabán celebrates her victory with supporters after the Democratic primary for Queens district attorney on June 25, 2019.
A referendum to end discrimination against gay couples in marriage and adoption just won big in Cuba. That’s a victory for the core values underlying the socialist project.
Cuba has just approved a new Family Code that ends discrimination against gay couples in marriage and adoption. (Yamil Lage / AFP via Getty Images)
Two-thirds of Cuban voters approved the
The National Labor Relations Board has repeatedly ruled that Starbucks and Amazon’s union busting is against the law. Yet both companies seem intent on continuing to flagrantly break labor law in the hopes of breaking their fledgling unions.
Pro-union protesters gather for a rally near the home of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Fifth Avenue on September 5, 2022,
Liz Truss leads the most right-wing government in modern times while timid Labour dithers and prevaricates, terrified of its own shadow and bent on witch-hunting the party’s social democrats— in battles to select parliamentary candidates at the next election some more social-democratic candidates have been suspended for dubious reasons. More
The post
Book bans across the nation. Christian fundamentalism ascending. White supremacy running rampant. These are symptoms of a rising fascist politics in America. Reactionary political actors seek to reinforce white supremacy by erasing from public discussions any recognition of people of color, LGBTQ identities, and their struggles. One way this happens
The Cuban people, voting in a national plebiscite on September 25, approved a new Family Code. According to the National Electoral Council, preliminary results showed that of almost six million Cubans casting a valid ballot, 66.9% voted Yes; 33.1% voted No. The new Code was left-over business from a new Cuban Constitution approved on April More
The post Victory