The Unstoppable Dreamers (tags)
"Courage begets more courage. One sacrifice inspires another... instead of deciding it was advantageous to cave to anti-immigrant racists, Obama looked for a way to please a mobilized and dissatisfied Latino base. We have the DREAMers to thank.."
Building a Progressive Counterforce to ALEC (tags)
Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor of The Nation. Mark Enlger is an author and contributing writer to Dissent magazine.
Obama's Broken Resolutions and Occupy White House (tags)
Generalized security requires a social net, not lies and trillions to the banks. There has been a 30-year war in which the voice of business became louder. The financial sector must be shriveled. Private losses cannot become public losses. 14 million jobs can be created.
Thomas Friedman Wants to Take Away the Weekend (tags)
The labor movement brought you the weekend. Thomas Friedman wants to take it away.
Why America's 99% have rebelled (tags)
They sign their messages, ‘I am the 99%’. Tthe message of the site is immediately clear: while our society’s richest one per cent enjoys a hugely disproportionate share of wealth and income, the economy has left the vast majority of us behind.
Obama's `Free Trade' Follies (tags)
The three pending "free trade" agreements portend more unemployment and corporate enrichment. Countries like Argentina have broken with the Washington Consensus (deregulation, privatization and liberalized markets). Argentina is free from the bondage of structural adjustment.
War: The Wrong Jobs Program (tags)
Presidential Candidate Alexander Wants Unemployment Benefits Extended Indefinitely (tags)
If elected president in 2012, Alexander says his administration will support the provisions of a livable guaranteed annual income. A Guaranteed Livable Income would be an unconditional and universal income administered by the federal government and granted to individuals to ensure that no person’s income falls below what is necessary for health, life and dignity.
The Future of the #Occupy Movement: Solidarity and Escalation (tags)
A month after it began with a few hundred people marching on Wall Street, the #Occupy movement has grown to include tens of thousands of participants throughout the country and has captured headlines around the world.
Presidential Candidate Stewart Alexander says Occupy Wall Street is a workers revolution (tags)
As a 2012 presidential candidate, Stewart Alexander says it is time for revolutionary change; ?the Occupy Wall Street protesters are demanding nothing less.? Alexander, along with the Socialist Party USA, the Peace and Freedom Party and millions of socialists nationwide, are calling for a radical transformation of society from capitalism to socialism; their demands are a challenge to the basic assumption of a capitalist market economy.
How #OccupyWallStreet is Evolving and Gaining Power (tags)
What do the protestors want? A solution to the jobs crisis, corporate money out of politics, fairer tax rates, and policies that work for 99% of Americans instead of the 1% at the top.
Five Things That #Occupy Wall Street Did Right (tags)
"Few institutions in our society are more in need of condemnation than the big banks and stockbrokers based where the critics are now camped. ?Why are people protesting Wall Street??
Ten Years After 9/11, Time to End Perpetual War (tags)
Peace and resistance are part of our nature as antibodies are part of our bodies. Education is the great transformer (JK Galbraith). Diversity, tolerance and nonviolence are imperatives threatened by a warrior cult.
Is "Free Trade" Obama's Jobs Plan? (tags)
Mark Engler writes about President Obama's increasing detachment from the Democratic base (and from the American public at large) on the issue of "free trade."
Kudos to Egypt for Ditching the IMF (tags)
From the beginning of the Arab Spring revolts, many progressive commentators have expressed concern that people in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia might win greater political freedoms but would have their nations? economic policies hijacked...
In my column for the June issue of the New Internationalist, I write about "Palm Trees in the Snow" as a metaphor for the big lie conservatives are telling about the budget crises in our states. There are no palm trees in Wisconsin. And public fiscal problems were not caused by union greed.
Ending Man-Made Disasters (tags)
I feel that this is an opportune time to write in praise of fire codes and building inspectors. Natural disasters are not natural. In large part, they are products of poverty, neglect, and exploitation.
Stimulus Should Be Looking Pretty Good Right About Now (tags)
With states cutting budgets to the bond, we are seeing how painful the economic crisis is without federal funding to help soften the blow.
US military spending marches on (tags)
Sec. Gates astounded many this week in declaring that anyone desiring a long-term land war in the Middle East "should have his head examined." Empires like Narcissus fall in love with their reflection and drown. The US empire could become a republic (Chalmers Johnson).
The sweeping anti-union legislation being pushed by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is not about balancing budgets. It is a power grab, part of a calculated effort to undermine what's left of the most significant institutional counter-balance to the ever-weightier political influence of corporations.
The Misuse of Martin Luther King Jr. (tags)
Beacon Press has just published a collection of King’s speeches on labor and economic justice, entitled All Labor Has Dignity.
Fight Inequality, Don't Scapegoat Immigrants (tags)
"The emergence of vast inequalities between the wealthy and the rest of us may be the biggest change in American society over the last fifty years. And it’s hardly a change that we should welcome."
Labor Day: Immigrants build the U.S. Economy (tags)
Undocumented immigrants streaming into this country from south of the border drive down wages and steal jobs that could otherwise go to out-of-work Americans. Right? Wrong. As it turns out, immigrant workers play an important role in building our economy.
How Dr. King might have responded to current crises of recession, unemployment and foreclosure.
American Empire Foreclosed? (tags)
Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via the Web site http://www.DemocracyUprising.com.
Spreading the Wealth: A Review of Unjust Deserts (tags)
The foremost ethical question is, given that we owe most of our productivity to a common social inheritance, to what extent can we say that we have "earned" our personal wealth? There is a growing consensus in favor of a new robust public compact to regulate our shared conditions.
Social Contract and the Emergency Hour (tags)
The financial crisis is also an opportunity to reflect on our priorities and perspectives. Elite consciousness is a frozen consciousness where there are not alternatives and bankruptcy are only normal business practices.
Greed is the Nature of the System (tags)
Politics was corrupted byt he economy and lost control to the economy. In the private enterprise system, there are too many incentives that oppose the public interest. When company pensions end, workers speculate. When high profits are the norm, companies speculate.
Mark Engler on the Financial Crisis (tags)
"This crisis is a crisis of deregulation. Deregulated market fundamentalism causes crises. This is a crisis of financialization. An ever-larger part of the economy switched to financial speculation or gambling. Greed is systemic."
Meltdown and Bailout: Why Our Economic System Is on the Verge of Collapse (tags)
Today's highly speculative economy pushes capital into developing countries and into bubble after speculative bubble in search of a better profit margin.
In The Kingdom Of Forgetting (tags)
Memory can be an embarrassing thing. In politics, it's often more convenient to forget. The classic illustration of this idea was Orwell's dystopian Ministry of Truth, where functionaries fed any inconvenient bit of information down the memory hole -- "whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air."