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The economic realities we face at the end of 2022
Economies around the world were shocked and damaged over the course of 2022. Global capitalism had been brewing conflicts among the major powers (the United States, China, and the EU) for some time as their relative strengths and vulnerabilities shifted. U.S. capitalism and its empire are widely perceived as waning. Europe’s role as a U.S. ally and indeed its economic future became correspondingly riskier as a result. China’s economic growth encountered problems but continued to be remarkably positive and often crucially supportive of world economic conditions in ways that were once more closely associated with the role of the United States. China’s deepening alliance with Russia as well as its burgeoning global economic reach frightened many in the United States. Years of increasingly aggressive competition, tariff and trade wars, and bans and subsidies, mostly initiated by the United States, culminated this past year in global economic warfare. Continue reading
Once upon a time the US taxed the rich
A little history might just inspire us to try that taxing again.
Once upon a time, the United States seriously taxed the nation’s rich. You remember that time? Probably not. To have a personal memory of that tax-the-rich era, you now have to be well into your seventies. Continue reading
Democrats didn’t win the midterms—they simply held the line
Americans invested in the idea of living in a democracy heaved a collective sigh of relief the day after the 2022 midterm elections when it became clear that the dire predictions of a Republican sweep were overblown. Democrats made greater gains than expected, winning races in both the Senate and the House that they didn’t expect to. Continue reading
Lula must save Brazil from savage capitalism, says Federal Deputy Juliana Cardoso
Juliana Cardoso is sitting in her office in front of a lavender, orange, and yellow mandala that was made for her. She has been a member of São Paulo’s city council since 2008. On October 2, 2022, as a candidate for the Workers Party (PT), Cardoso won a seat in Brazil’s lower house, the Federal Chamber of Deputies. Continue reading
‘Nothing works’: Europe must stop blaming others for its own crises
The European Union’s Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell is not particularly perceived by the EU’s political elite or mainstream media as a rightwing ideologue or warmonger. But seen through a different, non-western prism, it is hard not to mistake him for one. Continue reading
The ‘principal threat’: Time to talk about the Palestinian class struggle
On Monday, October 31, Palestinians in the town of Al-Eizariya, east of Occupied East Jerusalem, observed a general strike. The strike was declared to be part of the community’s mourning of 49-year-old Barakat Moussa Odeh, who was killed by Israeli forces in Jericho a day earlier. Continue reading
Corporate CEOs gone wild: Raking in inflation profits and busting unions
Democratic politicians who don’t call out powerful corporations and their CEO’s as the driving force behind inflation risk allowing the GOP, the party with no plan to combat the skyrocketing costs to consumers of almost everything, to take power in the elections next week. Continue reading
Anarchy in America: We’re being gunned down like dogs in the street
Things are falling apart. Continue reading
Tech billionaires are actually dumber than you think
It turns out that many of today’s billionaires are selfish, lonely men fantasizing about how they will survive the end times they have played a part in creating.
In mid-September, for just a few days, Indian industrialist Gautam Adani entered the ranks of the top three richest people on earth as per Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. It was the first time an Indian, or, for that matter, an Asian, had enjoyed such a distinction. South Asians in my circle of family and friends felt excited at the prospect that a man who looked like us had entered such rarefied ranks. Continue reading
Decolonizing the mind
The word decolonization should not be treated as trendy slang. It describes an important political and psychological process. Media and state attempts at indoctrination show just how important it is.
It is vital to free ourselves from belief in the systems of white supremacy and imperialism that are inculcated in the educational system and are affirmed and amplified by the media and establishment opinion. The recent death of Queen Elizabeth II puts the need for political and psychological liberation in high relief. We are encouraged to admire an anachronistic monarchy, and are exhorted to join in mourning an individual and a system that have caused great harm to Black and other oppressed people around the world. Continue reading
Barbara Ehrenreich helped make inequality visible—her legacy lives on in a reinvigorated labor movement
Have you heard of Jaz Brisack, Liz Fong-Jones and Chris Smalls? Continue reading
The most important election in the Americas is in Brazil
Former Brazilian President Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) runs about on stage at the Latin America Memorial in São Paulo. He was there on August 22, 2022, speaking at a book launch featuring photographs by Ricardo Stuckert about Lula’s trips around the world when he was the president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010. Lula is a man with a great deal of energy. He recounts the story of when he was in Iran with his Foreign Minister Celso Amorim in 2010, trying to mediate and end the conflict imposed by the United States over Iran’s nuclear energy policy. Lula managed to secure a nuclear deal in 2010 that would have prevented the ongoing pressure campaign that Washington is conducting against Tehran. There was relief in the air. Then, Lula said, “Obama pissed outside the pot.” According to Lula, then-U.S. President Barack Obama did not accept the deal and crushed the hard work of the Brazilian leadership in bringing all sides to an agreement. Continue reading
Is the U.S. legal system at war with its people?
Incarcerations, brutality, and torture are common in the U.S. Activists claim that this amounts to a war waged against racially marginalized, poor, and working-class people.
The very laws and government agencies created to protect the people in the United States are increasingly being weaponized against those who are often marginalized in society: people of color, the poor, and the working class. In just the last few months, there have been many incidents of this kind of violent abuse of power. Continue reading
Biden defends democracy as Republicans push dystopia and fascism
Biden heads to Independence Hall in a mission to save democracy as Republican leaders join an extremist call for a future too horrible to contemplate.
WASHINGTON—As Democratic President Joe Biden prepared to defend democracy in a prime-time speech on Thursday night, Republican predecessor Donald Trump was leading the Republicans, dominated by his MAGA followers, off the deep end into unconstitutional insanity and threats of fascist violence. Continue reading
Can a deeply unequal nation totally reverse course?
The alarm bells are—sort of—ringing, Bloomberg reports, in Colombia’s most “fashionable neighborhoods of Bogotá and Medellin.” Continue reading
Behind the ‘economic policy’ façade, it’s class war
At the end of July, an economic adviser working for Bank of America wrote a memo that got leaked. It made bluntly explicit the long-standing common knowledge among savvy investment advisers: those “economic policies” debated among politicians, economists, and dutiful mass media operate at two different levels. On the public level, debaters discuss what “we” need to do to fix “our economy’s problems.” It reeks of that “we are all in this together” language that reminds us of commercial greeting card poetry. On the other, private level, insiders discuss how the government should respond to economic problems in ways that boost employers’ profits even if at employees’ or the public’s expense. Insiders express their preferred solutions in that nicely neutered term: “policies.” Continue reading
Today’s Republicans: “Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt are dead, long live Hitler and Mussolini”
The United States is in the same vulnerable position today as Weimar Germany was in the early 1930s. German democracy died amid acts of violence by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. The United States now finds itself in a similar perilous position. The Republican Party under the Hitler-admiring Donald Trump eschews democracy and embraces fascism. Republican candidates for office this year are as violent, anti-Semitic, and racist as Hitler’s Nazi Brownshirts. Continue reading
Are community schools the last, best shot at addressing education inequity?
A district in the Washington, D.C., suburbs may foretell whether a transformative approach to school improvement can address longstanding opportunity gaps in education.
When Tiffany Allen and her husband first moved to a house in Montgomery County, Maryland, their plan was not to stay in the neighborhood for very long because the school their two young children would eventually be assigned to attend was Wheaton Woods Elementary. The school had a mixed reputation among parents in the neighborhood, she told Our Schools. It was designated a Title I status by the federal government, meaning its enrollment was mostly for students who struggle the most in schools—namely, children from low-income households. The school’s students were mostly Hispanic, and many of the children come from homes where the parents don’t speak English, according to Allen. The school had a middling summary rating of 6 out of 10 stars on Great Schools, the school rating site many parents rely on for choosing schools, and the test scores of Wheaton Woods were no better than the state average, according to the site. Even her husband, a school teacher in neighboring Howard County, was skeptical about the quality of education that would be provided by the school. Continue reading
Sleeping at the wheel: The Uber Files, the media, and the coup against labor rights
The recent reporting on the Uber Files—a series of 124,000 communications, dated from 2013 until 2017, that Mark McGann, one of Uber’s top lobbyists, leaked to The Guardian—has shed light on the company’s strategies to gain global prominence during its nascent years. McGann and the many reporters working on the project through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists are commendable for their efforts to bring this history to public attention. Still, the reporting elides a much larger story about the rise of a new model of labor relations being implemented throughout the globe, and workers’ efforts to stop it. Continue reading
Washington is the problem, not the solution: Why Mahmoud Abbas is seeking new ‘powerful’ sponsors
To judge US President Joe Biden’s recent visit to Israel and Palestine as a ‘failure’ in terms of activating the dormant ‘peace process’ is simply a misnomer. For this statement to be accurate, Washington would have had to indicate even a nominal desire to push for negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian leadership. Continue reading
Glen Ford’s irreplaceable journalism
I was very proud to write the preface to Glen Ford's book, The Black Agenda, which published posthumously by OR Books. I endeavored to explain why Glen was truly irreplaceable.
In the best sense of the word a journalist is someone who brings to the public sphere accurate, well sourced information, and rigorous analysis. Those individuals speak for the marginalized, who can’t speak for themselves, and they expose the privileged, who are always given opportunities for expression. They point out the faults of those deemed too authoritative to be questioned. If an outlet claims to write all the news that is fit to print or declares that democracy dies in darkness, their work should be given more scrutiny than credibility. The journalist should be truly independent and skeptical of official narratives. Glen Ford was such a person. His decades of work provide a blueprint for anyone who wants that word to have real meaning and integrity. Continue reading
Digital authoritarianism: AI surveillance signals the death of privacy
Nothing is private. Continue reading
Celebrating revolution in Nicaragua
Genuine people’s holidays are hard to come by in the U.S. But in Nicaragua the ongoing revolutionary process is widely celebrated.
Holidays in the United States celebrate awful events such as the settler colonists declaring independence from Britain so that they might take indigenous lands and protect slavery. There is also Thanksgiving, the commemoration of genocide turned into a day when Americans should think grateful thoughts before spending more than they can afford in order to celebrate Christmas. Christmas is ostensibly a religious holiday but is rarely treated as such. Labor Day was created to prevent acknowledgement of May 1, May Day, which commemorates just one example of U.S. state repression which took place in Chicago in 1886. Continue reading
The selfish politics of anti-abortionists
Those claiming to be against abortion often rely on being able to access the procedure when they need it—a common conservative approach to social needs.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was predictable even as it was shocking. Right-wing forces have spent years working painstakingly on multiple fronts in plain sight to ensure that the right to an abortion would no longer be guaranteed, and they have won. Two of the three Supreme Court Justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, who were appointed by former President Donald Trump, stand accused of lying about their positions on abortion. A third, Justice Clarence Thomas, invited challenges to same-sex marriage and the right to contraception as part of his undoing of Roe, hinting at the right-wing’s future targets. Continue reading
Can community schools rescue a ‘troubled’ district?
A contentious contract negotiation between teachers and a district in the Washington D.C. suburbs could foretell whether a transformative strategy for school improvement can dislodge entrenched leadership practices.
“Why are we still fighting for basic needs?” asked Karen Guzman, a parent and community organizer for the local teachers’ union in Prince George’s County, Maryland, a suburban sprawl of communities that lie just to the east of Washington D.C., Guzman’s union, the Prince George’s County Educators Association (PGCEA), is currently embroiled in contract negotiations with the district administration, and the negotiations are not going particularly well, according to her assessment. “Almost everything we’re asking for is being rejected,” she said. Continue reading
Protesting for Jayland Walker
The number of bullets used to kill Jayland Walker have sparked an outcry, but police kill one Black person every day in this country. If systemic change is not the demand all protest is for naught.
Jayland Walker was killed by police in Akron, Ohio when he was shot more than 60 times. The nature of his death, and the brutality of his killing, made headlines. But lest anyone forget, the police kill an average of three people every day in this country and one of those victims will be Black. Continue reading
Palestinians ‘are not animals in a zoo’: On Kanafani and the need to redefine the role of the ‘victim intellectual’
(Dedicated to the memory of Ghassan Kanafani, an iconic Palestinian leader and engaged intellectual who was assassinated by the Israeli Mossad on July 8, 1972)
Years before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, US media introduced many new characters, promoting them as ‘experts’ who helped ratchet up US propaganda, ultimately allowing the US government to secure enough popular support for the war. Continue reading
PRIDE 2022: A season of celebration, a season of struggle
After a pandemic-enforced two-year hiatus in many parts of the world, Pride is back this summer. Pageants, parties, and parades are in full swing once more, putting the vibrancy and diversity of the LGBTQ community front and center. From longtime gay sanctuaries like San Francisco to small towns like Seward, Alaska—population 3,000 and hosting its first-ever Pride parade this year—the community and its supporters are out on the streets embracing one another again. Continue reading
Right of Return, Nakba are back on Palestinian agenda
The Nakba is back on the Palestinian agenda. Continue reading
Community schools were working in Oakland, but the district is shutting them down anyway
The school district was at the forefront of a public education model that is gaining national popularity—but its decision undercuts what the community appreciates about each school’s custom offerings that put students first.
The Oakland, California, school district touts itself as the nation’s first full-service community schools district, committing to a model of school improvement that, according to the model’s most prominent proponents, provides students with “well-rounded educational opportunities” and the “supports” they need to be successful. Community schools attend to the basic needs of the communities they serve, which often entails, according to news reports, such things as access to health and dental care, nutritious food, arts programs, sports and recreation, or after-school activities. But in February 2022, Oakland, despite its commitment to its districtwide reform plan, announced it is shutting down several of its community schools. Continue reading
Anti-abortionists played the long game, and they are winning
The U.S. is sliding toward a grim future where abortion is criminalized with little support for families. This “new normal” is disproportionately impacting low-income people of color.
Republican state legislatures are creating abortion refugees across America. Continue reading
The road to fascism: How the war in Ukraine is changing Europe
Posted on September 8, 2022 by Ramzy Baroud
As soon as I landed in Rome, I discovered that I was no longer able to access any Russian media whatsoever. Unfortunately, threats by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, that Europe should sever all links with “Russia’s propaganda machine” were taken seriously by the Italian government. Continue reading →