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 Trump coalition unites anti-corporate populists and libertarian futurists — two factions with irreconcilable views. The struggle over AI copyright underscores just how unstable that alliance has become.
While the South Korean media has been focused on a snap presidential election, an important scandal has emerged involving the union that represents Samsung workers. It’s a cautionary tale about the difficulties facing organized labor in South Korea.
The Inflation Reduction Act has helped create good union jobs in the clean energy sector. Republicans want to derail this progress to pay for tax cuts for the rich. The building trades are starting to fight back, and environmentalists should join them.
The New Jersey Transit engineers’ strike caught many commuters by surprise. But since 2019, the engineers have been working without a new contract while making less than their counterparts at Metro-North, Amtrak, and the Long Island Rail Road.
For nearly two centuries, Karl Marx’s ideas have had a significant impact on US politics and intellectual life. In turn, Marx’s close study of the US informed the development of his ideas about capitalism and human freedom.
Germany has clamped down on pro-Palestine protest more harshly than most other European states. Despite the threat of violent repression, protesters, many of whom were Jewish and Palestinian, gathered in Berlin to commemorate the Nakba.
When United Food and Commercial Workers president Marc Perrone announced his retirement May 13, the union’s leadership immediately appointed his successor. This makes four presidents in a row first selected by UFCW leadership rather than by convention.
The hyperelitist world of prerevolutionary France fostered resentment among writers excluded from salons and high society. This bitterness proved a fertile breeding ground for revolution led by writers who targeted their anger at the old order.
Ultranationalist candidate George Simion has a big poll lead ahead of Sunday’s Romanian presidential election. He’s sought legitimacy from foreign leaders like Donald Trump and Giorgia Meloni, showing how the far right is increasingly the establishment.
The governments of India and Pakistan pulled back from the brink over Kashmir because neither can afford a full-scale war. Bellicose rhetoric and a climate of strident nationalism have helped both governments as they face problems on the domestic front.
Last week, Donald Trump’s UK ambassador, Warren Stephens, helped negotiate a trade deal between the UK and the US. Stephens holds shares worth hundreds of millions of dollars in key sectors that stand to benefit from the agreement.
Trump administration officials including RFK Jr want to add work requirements to Medicaid, arguing that there is a major scourge of able-bodied recipients refusing to get jobs. Their case dramatically overstates how many people in this group are not working.
The Trump administration has called off a bombing campaign that failed to achieve its stated goal of destroying the Ansar Allah movement. But steps taken by Trump to restrict aid are continuing to aggravate the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen.
On Sunday, Poland votes in the first round of presidential elections. The contest is dominated by various right-wingers, while small progressive forces speak mainly to the highly educated, professionals, and the downwardly mobile middle classes.
With a judge’s ruling this week that Georgetown postdoctoral researcher Badar Khan Suri should be released from detention, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio’s McCarthyite campaign to squash protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza suffered a defeat.
Decades of precedent, from RICO to asset forfeiture to “good faith” exceptions, have normalized warrantless search and gutted the Fourth Amendment. Hasan Piker’s detainment is the latest proof that constitutional rights are now largely a legal fiction.
When people fall behind on property taxes, this shouldn’t become an opportunity for private profiteering. But that’s precisely what happens in tax lien sales, where city governments collude with financial predators to extract wealth from struggling people.
A month after Israel began its brutal war on Gaza, Yemen’s Houthis launched a blockade of shipping routes in the Red Sea. The US-led attempt to restore safe navigation was a disaster that has exposed deep fragilities in the global maritime trading system.
The GOP is smuggling a $5 billion school voucher program into the budget reconciliation bill. It’s a major giveaway to wealthy school-privatization boosters — and a slap in the face for many of Donald Trump’s own voters.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s comments about autism are part of a long legacy of right-wing politicians deciding which people’s lives are and are not worth living.