The brunt of the impact of climate change will be borne by some of the poorest populations in the world. Is there a way to make rich nations pay climate debts to developing countries that have already felt the effects of climate change?
Berkeley politics flesh out uncertainties if not downright disagreements on the left over “growth,” environmentalism, U.S. manufacturing, homelessness, and public employee compensation. To grasp the political realities of today’s Berkeley is not only to dispel an antiquated myth about an iconic place; it’s also to begin to grapple with major incoherence in progressivism at large.
“Is there such a thing as the left and right? What distinguishes them, not just in our time but across time?” Bruce Robbins and James Livingston argue with Corey Robin and Michael Kazin about their recent attempts to theorize the political spectrum.
At the American Civil Liberties Union’s national headquarters in New York City, four months of negotiations have failed to bring unionized office staff to an agreement with management over the terms of their employment. Last Wednesday these employees held their …
This week on Belabored: Detroit blogger Marcy Wheeler discusses the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. Plus fast food strikes, immigration reform, port truck drivers, and layoffs at Chicago public schools.
Obamacare will help all Americans in significant ways, yet it remains controversial. What will it take for the program to join Medicare and Social Security as a permanent part of America’s system of social insurance?
In the past week, two new stories of brutality have called China’s attention to the lawlessness of controversial “urban management” teams known as chengguan.
Environmental advocates face a question that has widespread implications for how we think about legislation, lobbying, mass movements, and social change: what do you do when an issue emerges as one of the most urgent matters of our time and, at the same instant, becomes firmly regarded as a political loser?
A new set of reality shows thrive on foreclosed property and unpaid bills; they promote a bargain-basement ethos where everything has a price, and where discovering and comparing those prices is a source of pleasure.
This week in Belabored: Special guest Lee Fang shares his insights into the resurgent right wing. Plus Chicago school closings, NLRB appointments, and strikes by low wage workers.
Because of its magnitude, the climate crisis can appear as the sum total of all environmental problems. But halting greenhouse gas emissions is a specific problem, the most pressing subset of the larger apocalyptic panorama. A radical approach to the crisis of climate change begins not with a long-term vision of an alternate society but with an honest engagement with the very compressed timeframe that current climate science implies. In the age of climate change, these are the real parameters of politics.
Russian and American nuclear scientists perceived the remarkable similarity of the workings of the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy and the American Department of Energy. Now, as the opening of secret archives and closed cities has since set loose a flood of historical writing about atomic weapons programs, Kate Brown’s Plutopia offers a comparative study.
Can an energy system move off carbon-based fuels and nuclear energy at the same time? Will Boisvert argues that the German Energiewende shows why not—with a response from Osha Gray Davidson and a reply by Boisvert.
The German new Left was too close to the history it so desperately wanted to negate; it could not develop a sane or truthful relationship to the crimes and the cruelty of the Nazi era. Haunted by visions of the gas chambers, it believed that the only alternatives were the creation of a utopia or the recreation of Auschwitz.
Violence has ebbed and flowed in Darfur for more than ten years now. Now, though the situation is almost totally absent from news coverage, the region teeters on the edge of a complete humanitarian collapse and uncontrollable violence.
