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.
In the ’80s and ’90s, the Democrats took a jackhammer to education, housing, and social welfare. This isn’t the story of a weak party unable to defend its earlier gains, but a transformed party demolishing them in service of a new neoliberal ideology.
States at war generally adopt interventionist economic policies to mobilize resources and manpower. Ukraine hasn’t followed suit, instead pursuing dogmatic free-marketeer measures that suit Western creditors more than its own population.
John Bolton bragged this week that he’s “someone who has helped plan coups.” It was a brazen display of antidemocratic imperial arrogance, making clear that antidemocratic meddling is par for the course in US foreign policy.
Salah Hamouri is a French-Palestinian lawyer imprisoned without charges by Israel. In an open letter to France’s president Emmanuel Macron, he denounces how Israel uses its “Bastilles” to crush Palestinians’ basic freedoms.
Trigger-happy behavior and racist practices have long been endemic in US policing — but as the new Uvalde video and other revelations of recent weeks have shown in gruesome detail, so are gross incompetence and violent extremism.
Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has pushed Sweden and Finland to crack down on Kurdish groups in exchange for NATO membership. He cites his country’s “legitimate security concerns” — but it’s the long-oppressed Kurds who have most to fear.
Moscow’s invasion has pushed Ukraine closer to defaulting on its foreign debt, imperiling its economy and any future reconstruction. It’s time Western governments canceled that debt.
Good union jobs built America’s blue-collar black middle class. But the percentage of black workers in manufacturing has been halved since the 1970s, yielding poverty and precarity. We can’t achieve racial justice without a movement to win those jobs back.
Over the weekend in Brazil, a leftist official backing Lula’s presidential bid was killed by a supporter of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. It’s a chilling reminder of the far right’s willingness to use violence to fight the Left.
The “Uber Files” leak reveals the power of the company’s multimillion-dollar lobbying effort — and how it worked with governments around the world to undercut workers’ rights.
In the labor movement, we are only as strong as the weakest among us. Revoking the right to abortion undercuts much of the workforce’s bargaining power — which means reproductive freedom is a cause the entire labor movement must champion.
Atlanta is constructing a massive police militarization complex on the site of a former prison farm. Residents are overwhelmingly opposed — but business interests, police, and city government are pushing ahead with the proposed “Cop City.”
Ron DeSantis, the right-wing Florida governor and potential presidential hopeful, has taken to branding himself as the leading defender of precious American freedoms. But throughout his administration, he’s been at war with the First Amendment.
Despite his pledge to fix the US’s “broken” immigration system, Barack Obama’s punitive policies made life more difficult for migrants — and unleashed untold horrors throughout the hemisphere.
Air travel is a Kafkaesque nightmare right now. To solve this crisis and avoid future issues, airlines and the government should listen to workers and finally give them what they deserve: better pay and working conditions.
A new book profiles five extraordinary women of the Communist world — dedicated socialists and champions of women’s equality whose lives exemplified the contradictions of a system defined by pervasive oppression as well as genuine social achievements.
Neoliberalism may not be dead, but it is no longer the unquestioned ideology of our time. That leaves a huge opening for those on the Left who want to see a political and economic order based on democracy and solidarity rather than unbridled profit-seeking.
A few years ago, commentators were announcing the demise of the Latin American left. But if Lula wins this autumn’s presidential election in Brazil, the Left will be governing the region’s six largest economies for the first time.
The “labor question” was once the principal question confronting American society, the axis upon which other maladies turned. We don’t think about social problems according to the labor question today — but perhaps we should.
Across Australia, power prices are rising exponentially while corporations rake in billions. It’s not the product of shortages or instability but of a market designed to let for-profit companies hold the public ransom.