
Fintech and Microfinance Are Preying on the Global Poor
Microfinance and fintech have been sold as innovative solutions to poverty in the Global South. But for the most part, they’ve just enriched wealthy investors at the poor’s expense.
Microfinance and fintech have been sold as innovative solutions to poverty in the Global South. But for the most part, they’ve just enriched wealthy investors at the poor’s expense.
If Democrats subject the next round of survival checks to more means testing, Americans battered by the economic crisis will find it even more difficult to make ends meet.
Rather than creating an individualized “culture of giving,” we should be challenging capitalism’s institutionalized taking.
Capital's share is more than enough money to finance a universal basic income.
It is a gross injustice that 30 million Americans lack health insurance — but the insured also face serious problems, paying through the nose for substandard care. We need a universal, automatic, free health care plan.
Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows that not everything in mainstream economics is worthless.
Li Andersson, the leader of Finland’s Left Alliance, on the country’s diminishing welfare state, rising populist right, and possible socialist future.
Anticapitalism isn't simply a moral stance against injustice — it's about building an alternative.
Lawmakers and wonks who insist on means-testing every government program like to posture as champions of the poor and downtrodden. But the fake Robin Hood act is just a cover for their deep-seated suspicion of the welfare state.
Who was poor in 2016 — and why our system keeps failing them.
The choices in tomorrow's UK elections aren't particularly exciting. But are there signs of a leftward shift on the horizon?
All around the world, the Left has been hemorrhaging working-class support for decades. To think it could achieve long-run success as the champion of affluent cosmopolitanism is whistling past the graveyard.
Runaway inequality, regressive taxes, rampant labor exploitation. It’s often said the US economy “isn’t working,” but the truth is that capitalism is a class system that’s working exactly as intended.
Since Occupy Wall Street, “inequality” has emerged as a central theme of progressive politics. Is that a good thing?
Economic inequality undermines democracy, hastens environmental destruction, fosters anxiety, and erodes social trust. We can start to solve these problems by taxing the rich, as progressives and socialists in New York State are now proposing.
Utter the words “monetary policy” and many of us fall asleep. But that policy is crucial to how capitalists exert power. Instead of leaving it to the “experts,” socialists and the labor movement should demand a democratic say in what monetary policy looks like.
To confront climate change, we need to democratize, decarbonize, and decommodify our energy resources.
For decades, Democrats have positioned themselves as guardians of fiscal responsibility while Republicans happily hand tax cuts to the rich.