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.
There’s a lot of talk these days about labor shortages and workers unwilling to work because unemployment benefits are too high. Ignore the hand-wringing: it’s a very good thing if workers have the freedom to say no to low-paying, dehumanizing jobs.
Coming almost exactly ten years since Spain’s Indignados protests, Pablo Iglesias’s retirement as Podemos leader marks the end of a political era. In its early years, Podemos appealed to Spaniards outside traditional left-wing circles — yet it failed to build a party working people could consider their own.
We’re often told that creating a single secular democratic state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians would violate Israel’s “right to exist.” But no nation-state has an inviolable right to exist — especially not an ethnostate based on exclusion and ethnic cleansing.
This day in 2011, the Indignados protesters occupied Madrid’s Puerta del Sol to denounce Spain’s dominant parties and their austerity agenda. Ten years later, the Spanish left no longer has that insurgent dynamism — but it’s had an enduring success in breaking a previously monolithic neoliberal consensus.
Everywhere in the media and in the halls of power, we hear that Israel has a right to self-defense. But when it comes to the question of whether Palestinians suffering under brutal occupation have the right to defend themselves, those same voices are conspicuously silent.
In May 2009, Sri Lankan forces massacred 150,000 Eelam Tamils trapped in the island’s north. The slaughter was part of an ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing. But the Australian government has whitewashed those atrocities and helped equip Sri Lanka’s state security forces.
For a century, reformers have tried to change Washington’s regressive tax system. Last week, a landmark capital gains tax became law. The story of how they got there shows how the Left can win against Democrats defending the status quo.
Since the start of his political career, Joe Biden has rigidly adhered to a deeply unprincipled commitment to back Israel no matter what for the sake of his own political advancement. The Left now has a chance to make that approach a major political liability for the president.
The French interior minister has issued a blanket ban on protests in solidarity with Palestine. For months, Emmanuel Macron’s government has joined the far right in denouncing “Islamo-leftism” — a war on anti-racist movements that is now undermining basic civil liberties.
To supply bosses with exploitable low-wage workers during a deadly pandemic, Republicans are reviving a grotesque lie: the myth of the “welfare queen.”
Jay Carney went from being Barack Obama’s press secretary to being Amazon’s top flack. But PR is only part of his job — his larger mission is to help Amazon ruthlessly exploit its workforce so it can expand endlessly.
Scott Morrison, Australia’s conservative premier, is selling his 2021 budget as a job-creation package. But in reality, it’s a miserly budget — except when it comes to handouts for business and the wealthy.
The hysterical talk about a “crisis at the border” isn’t being used to make the lives of those fleeing violence and poverty any easier. It’s being used to justify shoveling even more money into an enforcement apparatus whose budget has tripled in less than two decades.
Since the pandemic began, the biggest corporations have been rewriting their compensation rules to ensure their CEOs continue raking in multimillion dollar payouts. The result: a 29 percent pay hike for the average CEO, even as the average frontline worker has been hit with a 2 percent wage cut.
Israel claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East. Yet its wanton, murderous bombing campaign in Gaza is slaughtering not just civilians, but scores of children.
The $13 billion debt collection industry is funneling huge amounts of cash to lawmakers in a bid to kill legislation that would finally put some limits on their predatory business model.
The gig economy is notorious for using bogus self-employment to skirt around labor laws and evade collective bargaining. But in Italy, strikes by couriers have forced major food delivery firms to recognize their employee status — a success that also shows how we can revitalize the wider labor movement.
After last week’s calamitous election for the Labour Party, party leader Keir Starmer was asked to explain his “vision” for Britain. His humiliating inability to answer the question was a window into the hollowness of Britain’s center.
The current round of partisan shadowboxing around unemployment benefits misses the point: the purpose of a real welfare state is to free people from the drudgery, precarity, and misery of low-wage work.
Once again, the media are trying to depict the fighting between Israelis and Palestinians as a round of meaningless violence from “both sides” of an equally matched contest — the reality on the ground be damned.