The Immortality Hustle
Silicon Valley’s quest to achieve eternal life is pure quackery. But it reveals much about the antidemocratic pathologies of the global superrich.
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Celebrate Christmas With the Gilded Age’s Forgotten Christian Socialists
Christmas wasn’t always an apolitical holiday. During the Gilded Age, working-class Americans organized around a radical vision of Christ — until the Protestant establishment co-opted their energy.
Freedom Under Capitalism Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be
Libertarians argue that capitalism is superior to socialism because in capitalism anyone is free to do anything — including start a worker cooperative. In truth, capitalism constrains our options, while socialism can liberate us to live as we please.
Friedrich August von Hayek Was an Enemy of Freedom
Today marks 125 years since the birth of Austrian-British economist Friedrich August von Hayek. He theorized the need to keep the masses away from the levers of state power — and did it in the name of defending freedom.
J. D. Vance Is Summoning the John Birch Society
Far from a novel form of populism, J. D. Vance’s appeals are indistinguishable from the economic vision of the 1970s John Birch Society.
Burning Man’s Gentrification Was Inevitable
Burning Man wanted to escape capitalism’s ills. It ended up recreating them.
Efforts to Organize Amazon Are Advancing Across the US
Last week, Amazon warehouse workers in San Francisco organizing with the Teamsters marched on the boss to demand union recognition. It’s one of many organizing efforts targeting the logistics giant that are gaining ground across the country.
Transgender Politics Didn’t Have to End Up Here
Democratic Party leaders and their donors bear responsibility for the increasingly widespread view of trans rights as incompatible with a politics that benefits the many, not the few.
Gen Z Is Super Weird
From monarchism to eco-fascism, internet subcultures have given rise to a new generation of “e-deologies.” Amber Frost dives into the meaning of Zoomer politics.
“Buy Now, Pay Later” Companies Are an Unregulated Racket
“Buy now, pay later” companies like Klarna present themselves as friendly, interest-free alternatives to credit cards. Consumer advocates warn that the services don’t have proper guardrails, leading to potentially dangerous consequences for users.
The Real War on Christmas Is a Class War Waged by Bosses
The War on Christmas isn’t fully a figment of Fox News’s imagination. But the villains are today’s capitalist Scrooges, relentlessly exploiting their workers with long hours and low wages through the holidays.
Donald Trump’s Anti-Union Offensive and How We Stop It
Donald Trump is rolling out a blitz of attacks on workers in hopes of paralyzing organized labor’s energy to fight back. But unions can only survive this onslaught by fighting, not by burying their heads in the sand.
Big Tech Stands to Profit From a US Takeover of Greenland
Donald Trump is doubling down on his plan to buy Greenland. A US takeover could weaken the country’s mining laws and ban on private property, aiding Trump tech donors’ plans to profit from the island’s mineral deposits and build a libertarian techno-city.
Big Companies Are Already Asking Trump for Favors
Amazon helped fund Donald Trump’s inauguration. The retail giant and the insurer UnitedHealth waited less than a day to start begging the new administration to shut down their shareholders’ calls for transparency.
Democrats Appear Paralyzed. Bernie Sanders Is Not.
Since Donald Trump’s election, his opposition party hasn’t acted much like one. The same cannot be said of Bernie Sanders, who hit the road this weekend in red states in an effort to stoke pushback to Trump’s slash-and-burn plutocratic governance.
Corporate Media Doesn’t Want to Talk About Greedflation
Corporate media has routinely downplayed the role of corporate profiteering in driving inflation, often citing industry talking points or providing no explanation at all for crippling inflation over the past few years.
Amazon’s Shameless Union Busting Shouldn’t Be Forgotten
Thousands of workers at the JFK8 Amazon warehouse voted to unionize in 2022, sparking hope that we were witnessing a turning point for workers. The egregious union busting by Amazon that followed should have been a rallying cry for Democrats. It wasn’t.
What the Giving Pledge Really Gave Us
Most Giving Pledge dollars never reached the public, flowing instead to private foundations and donor-advised funds while billionaires grew richer, bought reputations for generosity, and handed back scraps to the people who made their fortunes.
The FTC Case Against Amazon Is Revealing the Extent of the Company’s Shady Market-Rigging
The Federal Trade Commission has taken Amazon to court over monopolistic practices. The trial is demonstrating just how much market power the corporate behemoth wields — and that we probably need more than meager antitrust law to rein it in.
Amazon Is Reshaping Contemporary Literature
From the hypercommercialization of Kindle Singles to the fraught question of classifying book genres, Amazon has put its stamp on the literary field in ways large and small — but always in the interests of profit, says Mark McGurl, author of Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon.