“Black Monday,” September 19, 1977, was the day 34 years ago when the shuttering of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube steel mill threw 5,000 steelworkers onto the streets of their decaying Midwestern hometown. No local, state or federal programs offered significant help. Steelworkers called training programs “funeral insurance”: they led nowhere since there were [...]
For the first time since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958, the French political left have won an absolute majority in the Senate. In elections held on September 25, a broad front, ranging from the Communist Party through the Socialist Party (PS) to the Europe Ecologie-The Greens (EELV) and left radicals, gained 175 of [...]
On 9/13 morning, the Census Bureau released its annual report on income—including median income, inequality, and income poverty—and health insurance coverage in the previous year. As expected given continued high unemployment, the report shows a substantial deterioration in Americans’ economic security between 2009 and 2010, including substantial income losses for middle- and working-class Americans, [...]
When governments fall deaf to social reality, it’s up to working people to get loud. Obama’s jobs speech proved that the Democrats – like the Republicans – suffer from massive hearing loss, unable to listen to the millions of people suffering from the intractable jobs depression. After mounting pressure from labor and community groups, [...]
Eisenstein concludes her book with a passionate but reasoned call for feminists to come back to class analysis and to build a movement that puts the needs and interests of working-class women, women of color, and women of the global South at the center. Hester Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s [...]
This August 26 celebrates women winning the vote in the U.S. 91 years ago. Today Radical Women honors the suffrage movement and its militant, multiracial fighters. These women–Sojourner Truth, Clara Lemlich, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, Sarah Grimke, and so many more–rebelled against enforced second-class status to organize courageously for equal rights. We will be [...]
Upon the US capturing Saddam Hussein out of a “spider hole” and parading his abject person on TV, Tariq Ali wrote: “My first reaction to the capture of Saddam Hussein was both anger and disgust. Anger with the old dictator who could not even die honourably. He preferred to be captured by his old [...]
In April 2010 I found myself in Montreal for an academic conference. It was my first time there, and as I am wont to do in such a new place, I looked up used bookstores and otherwise roamed around the city. In one such English-language bookstore in the city center I asked the owner if [...]
Hundreds of state legislators from all 50 states have gathered in New Orleans for the annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC. Critics say the Washington-based organization plays a key role in helping corporations secretly draft model pro-business legislation that has been used by state lawmakers across the country. Unlike [...]
The United States assumed the mantle of Western civilization immediately after blasting Japan with atomic weapons on August 6 and 9, 1945. Scientists created those weapons. By that act, scientists made science dangerous and changed themselves, America, and the world forever. In 1963, David Lilienthal, chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, the [...]