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 rapid collapse of Afghanistan to Taliban rule has created a chaotic, complicated situation. But here’s the fundamental point: the US has nothing to show for two decades of bloodshed and occupation.
The US military has lost enormous legitimacy because of its humiliation in Afghanistan. We will need to remind people of that humiliating defeat every single time the Pentagon tries to sell us another war.
Wildfires are devastating Greek forests in the worst heat wave in 30 years. Thanks to years of austerity and a right-wing government pushing through further privatizations under cover of the pandemic, even the basic services required to fight the fires are desperately lacking.
In the twentieth century, the post-revolutionary Mexican government drew up ambitious plans to transform the world economic system for the benefit of the Global South. Their failure helped turn Mexico itself into a laboratory for neoliberalism.
The Canadian military has been caught using PSYOP tactics it honed in Afghanistan on domestic soil. The dirty tricks, which included a scheme to spread panic about imaginary wolf attacks in Nova Scotia, should worry anyone concerned about civil liberties.
Visiting Hungary, Tucker Carlson presented its authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán, as the defender of the normality America has lost. In fact, Orbán’s kleptocracy offers a grim indication of what far-right ideologues would do in the US if they had the chance.
After the Taliban seized Kabul, Emmanuel Macron led EU governments in declaring the need to “protect ourselves” from a fresh wave of refugees. The West’s intervention fueled chaos in Afghanistan. Now, it is punishing the victims.
Despite its claims to be building democracy in Afghanistan, the US’s War on Terror pushed the country deeper into chaos. The United States should be held fully responsible for this failure by the rest of the world.
With 445,000 UK tenants in arrears, it’s clear the landlord class is out of control. Rent controls can rein in its exploitation.
On Fox News, Laura Ingraham asked, “What if we just cut off the unemployment? Hunger is a pretty powerful thing.” With benefits set to expire, Joe Biden has three weeks to decide whether he agrees with her.
The Trump presidency briefly made liberals critics of US actions around the world — but now he’s gone, they’re back to believing America is the solution to the destruction it creates.
The gig companies, fresh from their Prop 22 victory in California, are seeking to repeat their success in Massachusetts, pushing a ballot measure that would strip app-based drivers of existing labor protections like the minimum wage.
In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam and Iraq, US elites sold us a vision of the world in which the United States alone has not just the power but the duty to forcibly reshape the world how it sees fit. They have again proven utterly incapable of doing so.
The Purge franchise and its offshoot, The Hunt, try to feed the appetite for dark social satire about the barbaric inequalities of the modern United States. But they end up delivering little more than weak fantasies of resistance.
Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has called for a union of Latin American countries. Drawing on the revolutionary vision of Simón Bolívar, it aims for regional integration as a bulwark against foreign interference. Could it work?
Oil and gas donors have spent $100 million on elections in Texas. Now storms made worse by climate change have flooded the state capitol building in Austin.
In 1917, impoverished Oklahoma tenant farmers were the backbone of the US’s flourishing socialist movement. That year, hundreds mobilized — armed — to march on Washington and force an end to the World War I draft.
Too many anti-racist efforts today obsess over individual actions like microaggressions. We need to fight racism in a collective project rooted in shared material interests — as the United Packinghouse Workers of America did in its heyday.
HBO’s brilliant The White Lotus reminds us that class society permeates everywhere, even on a tropical island — something that US television traditionally does its best to hide.
Rent control means more money and control for renters and less for landlords. It’s why they hate it — and why we should fight for it.