Wouter van de Klippe is a freelance journalist and writer based in Europe. He is particularly interested in organized labor, social and environmental justice, and social welfare states.
The cataclysmic floods in Libya are a direct result of NATO’s disastrous 2011 intervention, which was cheerled by the Obama administration. Just don’t expect the mainstream media to tell you that.
Big Three executives are claiming that UAW demands, including a just green transition, are too expensive. This is an obvious misdirection: the real sap on company finances is the billions of dollars in stock buybacks and executive compensation.
The Economist marked 50 years since the Chilean coup by calling for the country to move on from the past. What the magazine didn’t do was confront its own key role in demonizing Salvador Allende and building Augusto Pinochet’s international legitimacy.
For days, the mainstream media has said Donald Trump is going to Michigan to speak to union autoworkers. That’s completely false: he is traveling there today to speak at a nonunion auto-parts shop, at the invitation of its boss.
Bob Menendez’s cartoonish bribery case — complete with gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz — isn’t just exhibit A in Washington corruption. It’s a reminder that US allies like Egypt’s dictatorship, not Russia or China, are often the ones meddling in US politics.
From autoworkers in the US to railworkers in the UK, organized labor is enjoying a new lease on life. In an interview, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn explains why he thinks militant organizing represents the trade unions’ future.
Joe Biden’s historic visit to the picket line yesterday would never have happened if the UAW simply cozied up to Biden. As the union showed, you don’t win by showing deference to Democratic elites — you use the leverage you have to extract concessions.
Today Joe Biden became the first sitting US president to walk a picket line when he joined striking autoworkers. It says less about him than it does the electrifying effects of the strike — forcing politicians, and everyone else, to side with either workers or CEOs.
On Friday, California governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have banned self-driving trucks from being on the road without a safety operator aboard. This move followed a six-figure lobbying effort from the autonomous vehicle industry.
On September 4, Russian anti-fascist Azat Miftakhov was released from jail, only to be instantly rearrested. Vladimir Putin claims to be fighting Ukrainian Nazis — but he persecutes anti-fascists in Russia itself.
With the UAW strike spreading, GM is dispatching nonunion workers and managers to try to keep their parts distribution centers running. “I wish them luck,” one striking worker said. “They’re gonna be so goddamn lost.”
“Lean In” feminism doesn’t seem to have the purchase it did a few years ago. Maybe that’s because it is so obviously irrelevant to the lives of the vast majority of women, who need a union and decent pay, not a female boss.
El Conde is a fantastic satirical movie in which the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet stars in black and white as a ravenous vampire. Yes, you read that right.
Members of my chapter, Detroit’s Democratic Socialists of America, are mobilizing to support the United Auto Workers’ historic strike. Here’s some of what we’re doing — and what other socialists can do when the strike comes to their town.
A Clinton-era telecommunications law granted social media companies immunity from the libel laws that newspapers and TV stations have to follow. Now we’re living with the consequences: billionaires controlling what does and doesn’t count as a lie.
David Brooks, elite pundit par excellence, has been giving a master lesson for years in how to talk about class without actually talking about class. But class is about material realities, not empty cultural signifiers like one’s TV habits or food preferences.
The UAW’s ongoing “stand-up strike” represents an earth-shattering departure from the union’s recent history. It’s the fruit of decades of efforts to transform the union and return it to its militant roots.
Democratic senator Bob Menendez has been indicted for performing favors in exchange for lavish gifts. The Supreme Court justices who will hear his case are guilty of much of the same.
Former Italian president Giorgio Napolitano has died at the age of 98. A longtime member of the Communist Party, he devolved into a staunch establishment figure that made nice with the neoliberalism of the EU and Washington.
Late last night, the Writers Guild of America announced they have reached a tentative agreement with the Hollywood studios. The union’s negotiating committee is calling the deal “exceptional,” but it’s now up to rank-and-file writers to vote on it.