Flora Johnson takes care of her adult son Kenneth, who suffers from cerebral palsy. She used to work as a cashier at a unionized grocery store and made enough to buy a home in the Washington Square neighborhood on the …
The financial crisis and the ruin of recession are only a few years old, but we’ve been marching for forty years toward income inequality, a service-based economy (finance and fast food), and political rule by and for the rich. Where …
At a time when unions are floundering and popular sentiment toward organized labor is at an all-time low of 45 percent, one workers’ organization is thriving. The Freelancers’ Union, a nonprofit organization based in a trendy Brooklyn neighborhood, has more …
Whatever the effects of police repression and freezing weather, I believe that the men and women of the Occupations will still be making themselves heard when you read this. Something new and important has begun in American politics, and we …
Age of Greed by Jeff Madrick
“When I graduated from Muncie Central High School, you could go just about anyplace and get a job—a decent job,” says Dennis Tyler. Tyler has represented Muncie’s Delaware County in the Indiana State House since 2007, and this past November …
I don’t think my political analysis can be understood apart from my class experiences. And those experiences probably explain a lot about why I’m writing this essay on how workers have been betrayed, devalued, stigmatized, and misunderstood. I’m the kid …
Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition by Dan McKanan
Editors: Joan Ockman’s lively review of several famous buildings and architects (“What Is Democratic Architecture?” Dissent, Fall 2011) asks what determines democratic architecture and answers that she is “suspicious of democracy talk in architecture.” I would go one step further …
What benefits has Hugo Chávez’s populist administration brought to the Venezuelan people? In a controversial 2008 Foreign Affairs article, “An Empty Revolution,” Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez argues that the regime has not improved the quality of life in the country …
For at least two decades, conservatives have argued that school choice was the last unachieved civil right. In 2010, some powerful moderate voices echoed their view and invoked the name of Rosa Parks to support it. At one screening of …
It’s hard to forget Donovon. He sat in the far right corner of his sixth-grade math classroom facing the wall. He was quiet and listened to the teacher’s class discussions and lectures, even though he could not actually see her …
The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing
Alan Greenspan described the 1981 destruction of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization as “perhaps most important” of all of Reagan’s domestic undertakings. The defeat of PATCO during the first summer of the Reagan administration “gave weight to the legal …
I’m in the receiving line with my mother at my aunt’s wake. The stifling funeral parlor is crowded with mourners, and I recognize former neighbors from my aunt’s all-Italian neighborhood. My mother tenses as an elderly man approaches, murmurs his …
