Liberal pundits have found a new icon in New Zealand’s center-left leader, Jacinda Ardern. Ardern may be personable and engaging, but just like Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau, her government isn’t meeting the urgent needs of working people.
Nobody likes corruption. But the modern politics of “anti-corruption” is built on both domestic and international double standards. Corruption is not some alien virus that enters and disrupts a system, it is a symptom of all that is wrong with the world that liberals are vainly striving to restore.
International organizations like the IMF are pressing Global South countries to cut their fuel subsidies in the name of fighting climate change. But don't be fooled: these are neoliberal measures that do little to reduce emissions while hammering the livelihoods of poor and working-class people.
In her new novel Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler paints a bleak portrait of a social media–addled world saturated with loneliness and alienation. It’s incredibly accurate. But there must be a way out of the nightmarish social landscape she depicts.
John Sweeney, who won the AFL-CIO presidency in 1995 as part of a progressive reform leadership slate called New Voice, died earlier this month at the age of eighty-six. He failed in his quest to revive the US labor movement — but he succeeded in pushing the main body of trade unionism firmly to the left.
In the recent GameStop saga, Chamath Palihapitiya portrayed himself as a defender of the little guy and floated running for office. But beyond the shrewd PR, he’s just another corporate-friendly Third Way centrist with an intense devotion to free-market triumphalism.
The fall of the Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, ten years ago today, was a triumph for popular mobilization. But the revolutionary forces lacked the political organization and vision needed to head off a counterrevolutionary backlash that restored the authoritarian state’s power.
For decades, presidents have used their power to declare emergencies to sideline badly needed regulations and entrench the national security state. Now a group of Congress members led by AOC is proposing that those powers be used for good: to force action to avoid a climate catastrophe.
Former Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis’s bombastic way of painting the union’s class enemies as out-of-touch corporate hacks was genius political theater, and her commitment to democratic, militant unionism was unflagging. Lewis played an integral role in transforming teachers' unionism — first in Chicago, then around the country.
Plastic pollution is choking up the oceans and killing wildlife. It’s the fossil fuel giants who are driving the growth of plastics, not demand from consumers. We need a new approach to environmental regulation that reins in corporate polluters instead of enabling them.
Progressives are swooning and right-wingers are hyperventilating. But a closer look at Joe Biden's first month in office shows a presidency that — for better and for worse — looks a lot like Barack Obama's so far.
New Deal job programs didn't just absorb unemployment but allowed thousands of artists and writers to work on ambitious creative projects. Works Progress Administration funding allowed a golden age in US culture — but drew vicious anti-communist attacks, offering a foretaste of McCarthyism.