“America may have lost its stomach for military intervention,” Charles Blow wrote recently in the New York Times. At least among Obama supporters, that has become the most common explanation, hardening into cliché, for why the president’s call to punish Assad’s regime for …
Marshall Berman, distinguished professor of political science at CUNY and a longtime editor of Dissent, passed away on September 11. In the coming days, we will be posting tributes here from some of the many friends and admirers he left.
In this week’s Belabored podcast, Josh and Sarah talk about a judge’s ruling against Indiana’s “Right to Work,” a living wage law vetoed in DC, Chicago schools without air conditioning, and steps towards UAW union recognition in the South. Plus a report back on the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles.
One Chinese subject that even those Dissent readers with no special interest in China know a good deal about is Beijing’s obsession with controlling information. Given the news coverage of the topic they’ve encountered over the years, few were likely to have been …
On September 11, 2013, longtime contributor and board member Marshall Berman passed away in New York.
The August jobs report was unremarkable, both for the middling numbers (169,000 new jobs in August and downward revisions to the June and July reports) and for the continuation of a couple of troubling trends. Unemployment ticked down a notch (to …
There is a general reluctance to judge the effects of U.S. war-making by the same humanitarian criteria we apply to our enemies. Reflection on the history of international law, and on an incident from 1920s Syria, might shed light on the deep roots of this intuition that the way we fight can’t be held to the same standards as the way they do.
Join Dissent in celebrating sixty years of critical thought and politics, in honoring Michael Walzer’s six decades as writer and editor, and in building the foundation for a renewed democratic left in the twenty-first century.
This week’s Belabored podcast opens with a round-up of recent news: strikes by fast food workers and port truckers, anti-retaliation rallies against Walmart, and progress on silica dust safety rules. Then Sarah and Josh are joined by Daily Kos Labor Editor Laura Clawson for a wide-ranging interview: What’s ahead at next week’s AFL-CIO convention? Can living wage laws triumph? How has the relationship between bloggers and unions changed?
The Mexican government’s decision to expropriate the country’s oil in 1938 was sparked by uprisings tied to the labor and environmental abuses of foreign companies. If the state-run energy company is privatized, reform will have to include stepped-up environmental monitoring and control.
Like most Americans, I’m wary about President Obama’s proposal to bomb Syria as punishment for Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons to massacre civilians in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. I’m glad, and relieved, that Obama decided to ask Congress …
When did Labor Day speeches start sounding like eulogies—tinged with regret, dwelling on losses, and offering mostly memories to those left behind? The answer can be found in the arc of postwar economic history, which breaks starkly and decisively in …
Yesterday, in an interview aired by PBS, President Obama said that the United States must now attack Syria. The reason was the imminent danger that, if we do not, the Assad government will use chemical weapons against Americans on the U.S. mainland. This fantastic and hollow pretext comes so close to a statement made by Tony Blair in the run-up to the Iraq war that the two assertions invite a comparison.
Few political mobilizations inspired Dissent editors and writers as much as the 1963 March on Washington. On the March’s fiftieth anniversary, check out archival gems by Tom Kahn, Bayard Rustin, Irving Howe, A. Philip Randolph, and others.
The trial of Bo Xilai, the highest Chinese official to fall to scandal in the last thirty years, opened last Thursday, one year and thirteen days after the trial of his wife, Gu Kailai. She was charged with murder, and …
