Apple's iEconomy is a Labor Dystopia
Do yourself a favor: listen to Mike Daisey’s amazing story from This American Life about visiting the factory in China that makes our iPhones, iPads, and a huge percentage of all the other electronic crap we use on a daily basis. It will change the way you look at the world.
I know that I’m late in plugging this; Daisey’s piece originally aired on the radio on January 6 and (as we will see below) has since attracted a ton of attention. But the story deser... More
Marty Peretz’s Smear on “Liberal Islam”
I tend to ignore Marty Peretz for a couple of reasons. First, I don’t think he is as virulently racist as many find him to be. Second, I think that when he says virulently racist things, it is childish attention seeking that is best ignored. He has criticized Palestinian violence and advocated for Israel’s right of self-defense; these are legitimate views. In the heat of a polemical argument he can let slip a statement that sounds like a justification of whatever collective punishment Israel imposes upon Palestinians; that is an illegitimate view. He has also been critical of the barbarism ... More
At the Super Bowl, Two Teams with One Union
When the National Football League’s players and owners found themselves in a labor stalemate in the spring and summer of 2011, fans grew frustrated. The possibility of a season lost over a dispute between “millionaires and billionaires,” as some referred to the two sides, seemed unbearable. But while some would dismiss the players as well-paid pituitary cases, the player-owner relationship remains hugely unbalanced. Football players work under unimaginable conditions and are afforded inadequate physical and economic protection. The average NFL player makes nearly $2 million a year, but this... More
Trials of Shame
A decade after Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón ordered a landmark international arrest warrant against Augusto Pinochet in 1998, he set off an even bigger political maelstrom by investigating human rights crimes in Spain. The judge’s audacity to look into his country’s troubled past has landed him in the Spanish Supreme Court’s docket, under the scrutiny of an international audience.
Acting on a private petition received while sitting on the Audiencia Nacional (or National Court), Judge Garzón pushed the limits of historical memory in 2008. He began ordering that bodies be exhu... More
Occupying Student Debt
Editors’ note: Jeffrey Williams will participate in a panel discussion on student debt, co-hosted by Dissent and Jacobin, at Left Forum on the weekend of March 16-18. More info to come.
College student loan debt is a defining political issue of the rising generation. There is good news and there is bad news: it’s good that it’s finally become a mainstream issue, one that politicians feel the need to address (as President Obama did in last week’s State of the Union) and that major media sometimes report on. It’s bad, of course, because a rising majority liv... More
VIDEO: Winter 2012 Launch Event - “American Workers in an Age of Austerity”
On Wednesday, Dissent held a launch event for its Winter 2012 issue, on “American Workers in an Age of Austerity,” at the AFL-CIO building in Washington, D.C. The launch event, cosponsored by the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, featured Michael Kazin, Harold Meyerson, Kimberly Freeman Brown, and Joseph McCartin. Watch video from the event below.
Thomas Friedman Wants to Take Away the Weekend
The labor movement brought you the weekend. Thomas Friedman wants to take it away.
Even as he serves as a leading champion of corporate globalization, the New York Times columnist and flat-world author has a way of highlighting how ordinary people hardly have reason to be thrilled by what transnational capitalism has on offer. Case in point: in his most recent column, Friedman argues that “Average is Over.” Those with merely par-for-the-course skills and education, he tells u... More
In Chicago, Throwing Down the Gauntlet
Crossposted from the Occupied Wall Street Journal:
Eyewitless News prattles on that this is the Occupy movement’s winter of discontent. Weather, evictions, dissension, perplexity—yadda yadda. Those are facts, but they are not facts that speak for themselves. Facts need interpreting. This is also the run-up to spring. Spring means flowerings, cleaning, revitalization.
This past fall, Occupy transformed the political landscape by seizing a ripe moment—by putting righteous anger t... More
Newt the Historian, Mitt the Capitalist
After many months of debating and politicking, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have moved to the head of the Republican presidential pack. Here, we call the reader’s attention to two Dissent articles from the archives that might help us better understand Newt’s big ideas and Mitt’s big bucks.
First, Paul Ocobock offers a reading of Gingrich’s dissertation from Tulane University, on Belgian education policy in the Congo.
The War on Food Stamps
With the 2012 elections ten months away, nobody can say for sure what the winning issues will be. But it’s clear that Republicans are betting that they can tie President Obama to the federal food stamp program that now helps feed 46 million Americans, and thereby put him on the defensive.
South Carolina primary winner Newt Gingrich has labeled Obama “the food stamp president.” Iowa primary winner Rick Santorum has followed a similar course, criticizing welfare spending that “makes black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money” and comparing food stamps to welfare ... More
