Opal Lee is a writer.
The UK’s former prime minister Liz Truss came to power promising to restore growth to the British economy. During her 45 days at the helm, she crashed it. Calamity is pending, and the country’s political elite are out of ideas.
The BBC marked its centenary this week, but its long-term future is deeply uncertain. We should defend the idea of public-service broadcasting while sharply criticizing the BBC in its current form for its conservativism and deference to the British state.
Liz Truss has accelerated the UK’s decline faster than many thought possible. She’s been swiftly disposed of by her own party, but the long-run meltdown of British politics shows little sign of easing.
The Canadian right has committed to its own brand of angry identity politics, pitting “regular” folks against the depredations of elites. The Left has to fight back with a class politics opposing economic exploitation — not its own version of tribalism.
Compared to similarly educated peers in the workforce, teachers earn 76 cents on the dollar. Bubble baths and mindfulness apps can’t make up for the systematic denial of life-sustaining wages.
Long before Bretton Woods, powerful capitalist nations perfected the art of exploiting other countries without formally colonizing them. They’ve done this through a rigged international economy, governed by institutions like the World Bank and the IMF.
Thanks to Nike CEO Phil Knight’s cash, the ripple effects of the George Floyd protests and the COVID-19 pandemic, and a deepening housing crisis, Oregon is on the brink of electing its first Republican governor since the 1980s.
Effective altruist Peter Singer argues that individuals should do more to alleviate the world’s poverty. But his emphasis on giving to charity disregards the structural causes of inequality, suggesting that nothing fundamental can be changed.
Over the last week, record rains have again caused flooding in Australia, this time impacting Victoria. Although the disaster was easy to predict, the authorities took few preventative measures, and now residents are expected to bear the costs.
Doctors’ unions are rare in the US, and unions comprised of both physicians and other medical providers are even rarer. But in North Carolina, a group of medical providers has successfully organized an interprofessional union.
A new congressional report commissioned by Bernie Sanders finds that the 1 percent now own one-third of all wealth, while the bottom half of Americans hold only 2 percent. It’s another sign of the slide into oligarchy that Sanders has warned about for years.
There’s a disconnect between Western leaders’ increasingly hawkish public discourse and the quiet consensus among their military experts that any armed encounter with Russia would likely end in a nuclear catastrophe.
Tory British PM Liz Truss resigned this morning, and her downfall is well worth celebrating. But make no mistake: her government was brought down by a revolt of financial capital, of the same kind that would threaten a progressive economic agenda.
On Monday, ballots were sent to United Auto Workers members for the union’s first direct election of top officers. The vote gives rank-and-file members the chance to elect officers who will break with decades of corrupt, business-friendly union leadership.
Following Conservative British prime minister Liz Truss’s U-turn on tax cuts for the rich, the government is now set to attempt sharp spending cuts. More austerity would mean further punishing the poor and crippling already-starved public services.
Last week workers at four different Amazon warehouse across the US walked out to protest the company’s low pay and brutal working conditions. The actions were timed to coincide with Amazon’s Prime Day promotional sales rush.
As local newspapers shut down across the country, partisan mudslinging masquerading as news has filled in the vacuum. The Republicans are trailblazers in “pink slime journalism,” but the Democrats are following their lead.
The Salvadoran civil war didn’t just see US-trained-and-financed far-right forces commit endless war crimes — it also ripped children from families, an unknown number of whom never found their way back to their parents.
Republican Senate nominee Ted Budd helped clear the way for a controversial 2019 bank merger — then took big campaign cash and loans from the resulting financial behemoth.
Policymakers who have belatedly recognized the peril of climate change now promote incremental, market-based solutions to the crisis. But there’s no way we can prevent ecological disaster without tackling the vested interests at the heart of global capitalism.