The US government wrote off almost all the money it lent businesses during the pandemic. Now it’s wrecking credit scores and threatening to garnish paychecks to collect student loans. Debt can be forgiven easily enough — just not for the working class.
The Oil Crisis That Became a Weapon Against Welfare
War, dollar chaos, and soaring oil prices fueled the inflation of the 1970s. Workers and the welfare state took the blame. As war sends oil prices soaring again, that story still limits what we think society can afford.
Indonesia Still Hasn’t Come to Terms With Suharto’s Crimes
A recently unveiled statue in Jakarta is the city’s first public memorial to one of the many crimes of Suharto’s dictatorship. Its rarity exposes the culture of historical amnesia that’s making it easier to roll back democratic rights today.
AI Isn’t Coming for Our Jobs. It’s Coming for Our Wages.
Over the short term, AI may create more jobs than it destroys. But bosses will use it to de-skill work and suppress wages unless workers make it a terrain of class struggle and fight to put it under public control.
Starbucks Workers Are Calling for a Nationwide Boycott
Hoping to pressure Starbucks to finally sign a contract with its 12,000 unionized baristas, Starbucks Workers United has called for a boycott of the company. It is asking individuals as well as organizations and unions to stop patronizing the coffee giant.
American Freedom Was Built on Endless Conquest
The Founders made expansion the precondition of American freedom. We must find an alternative.
Jonathan Chait’s Atlantic essay claims the Democratic Socialists of America has betrayed the legacy of its founder, Michael Harrington. It gets DSA’s history, and what the organization is today, wrong.
Centrist Dems Are at War With Their Own Voters on Israel
Putting Jared Moskowitz in charge of Middle East policy isn’t just a slap in the face to Democratic voters — it’s an empowerment of a leading Democratic supporter of Trump’s disastrous Iran war and free speech crackdown.
Tony Is a Terrific Coming-of-Age Story
Matt Johnson’s Tony takes a few pages from Anthony Bourdain’s best-selling memoir and turns them into a warm, character-driven film about a spoiled kid learning how to work. It’s fantastic.
Faced With Record Fires, France Skimps on Fire Crews
This summer, France again saw hellish heat waves and record-high wildfires. But the job of dealing with fires is increasingly pushed onto volunteers, as an austerity government refuses to invest in its professional firefighting force.
The Customer Is Always Watching
Employers have long put customers to work watching and judging workers. With the development of technology like Ray-Ban Meta glasses, now customers have new surveillance tools of their own.
Mainstream economics cannot accept the concept of contradiction that is foundational for Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism. David Harvey explains why we need the Marxist perspective if we want to make sense of capital’s latest mutations in the age of AI.
James Lawson Was the Civil Rights Movement’s Drill Sergeant
The civil rights movement’s commitment to nonviolence wasn’t just moral but also strategic, based on a calculation of how the movement could best exert power. No practitioner of that nonviolence was more effective and disciplined than Rev. James Lawson.
Colombia’s Far Right Sees an Earthquake as an Opportunity
The response of Colombia’s new leader, Abelardo de la Espriella, to a deadly earthquake has been tawdry beyond belief. The reactionary president has used the disaster for publicity stunts and will only accept overseas aid from his far-right allies.
Trump’s Art of the Bad Deal Comes to Canada
Donald Trump’s trade demands, which would have killed off whole sectors of the productive economy, like auto, were impossible to accept. The negotiations’ collapse could open space for democratic industrial strategy that rejects free trade.
France Needs a President Who Isn’t for the Bosses
France’s first presidential debate on Thursday was hosted by employers’ group Medef. Entrepreneurs laughed when left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon called for wage raises, but he was deadly serious.