Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State By Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein Oxford, 2012, 320 pp. Caring for America—part feminist critique of the welfare state, part labor history, part organizing case study—is the …
Upon being elected mayor of New York City with nearly 75 percent of the vote, Bill de Blasio began his victory speech with words to gladden the heart of just about anyone who has ever written for Dissent: “Tackling inequality …
Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s by Michael Stewart Foley Hill and Wang, 2013, 432 pp. Are the 1970s and 1980s really history? Over the past ten years, the era has undergone …
Marshall was a good friend over many years—almost half a century; he was a political comrade for all those years; and he was a lovely human being. My wife, Judy, and I knew him first as a very vulnerable young …
If the twentieth century was the age of fear, the twenty-first is the age of shame. This is the most succinct way to describe how the dominant form of repression has changed. The twentieth cen-tury was full of terrible events …
Do you remember the proverbial “herd of independent minds”? That was critic Harold Rosenberg’s description, decades ago, of the New York intellectuals. These days some packs are still (alas!) on the left, some on the right, and some run somewhere …
If tomorrow the GOP agreed to everything in the agenda that Barack Obama laid out in his February State of the Union address, the progress in dealing with the dramatic changes in the economic prospects of most Americans would be close to zero.
Ravel Gonçalves Mendonça is a 17-year-old beach volleyball phenom from Rio. He is currently training with Brazil’s national team at its state-of-the-art facility. But his country’s preparation for the Olympics has eliminated what used to be Ravel’s home.
As our television screens toggle between pundits squabbling over Obamacare’s insurance rules and ads for erectile dysfunction remedies, another health care battle rages in village clinics and corporate boardrooms. Multinational brands and technocrats are concocting supranational policies to hold poor patients hostage to pharmaceutical markets across the Global South through elaborate intellectual property schemes in international trade.
In the Fall 2013 issue, Hans Kundnani wrote about the German Social Democrats’ struggle to challenge Angela Merkel’s approach to the Eurozone crisis. Read his update on the new grand coalition here, and read the original article here.
Once there was a golden age of democratic capitalism. Chastened by the Great Depression and cowed by vigorous labor movements, a generation of leaders forged a new type of political economy in the aftermath of the Second World War that united economic growth with robust welfare regimes. Then in the 1970s something went wrong. At least, that is how the story goes.
European Muslims were once embraced by the left as a natural ally, but the relationship has become increasingly fraught. If the parties of the left don’t want to lose voters to new religious formations, they must create the conditions for people of faith to feel more comfortable in national institutions. There is room for more complex answers than those offered so far.
Since the Clinton administration, we have seen growing concern about income inequality, the clear failure of TANF to work as a safety net program, and that effectively ending welfare has not stopped Republicans from mounting new attacks on the poor. All of this indicates the urgency of reopening the welfare debate and initiating a public discussion that challenges archaic conservative ideas about poverty.
A Small World is a self-consciously exclusive social network aimed at a certain class of internationals—referred to interchangeably as “global nomads,” “citizens of the world,” or, more frequently, the “global elite.” The site reveals that modern cosmopolitanism has been a largely market-driven phenomenon, designed for capital, not citizens, to become “of the world.”
Early twentieth-century skeptics were rightly suspicious of plutocrats deciding how to improve the human condition and then paying to translate their notions into public policy. Now it’s time for a new progressive era—complete with muckrakers and trust-busters to cast a critical eye on big philanthropy.
