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For a long time, labor and progressives have had essentially one electoral strategy: elect Democrats, and hope for the best. Every cycle, prominent progressives issue statements that somehow, this time, things will be different. Somehow, they never are. A prominent labor movement strategist recently put the matter bluntly: “in election after election the labor movement and other progressives have been arguing that . . . the Democrats must run on an aggressive, populist, economic message.

White and African American males hold signs that read: "The Dress Shipping Clerks' Won't Cross the Picket Line. We Stand United with the Dressmakers Union!" 1958.

2015-06-08 Sean Sweeney

Green Capitalism Won’t Work

For the last 20 years, unions in the U.S. and internationally have generally accepted the dominant discourse on climate policy, one that is grounded in assumptions that private markets will lead the “green transition,” reduce emissions, and stabilize the climate over the longer term. Indeed, unions began attending the climate negotiations convened by the UN in the early 1990s, a time when the “triumph of the market” went unchallenged and the climate debate was awash with neoliberal ideas. Unions therefore focused on articulating the need for “Just Transition” policies.

Featured Race

2015-06-01 Adolph Reed

The Strange Career of the Voting Rights Act: Selma in Fact and Fiction

Ava DuVernay’s film Selma has generated yet another wave of mass mediated debate over cinematic representation of black Americans’ historical experience of racial injustice. The controversy’s logic is at this point familiar, nearly clichéd. DuVernay and others have responded to complaints about the film’s historical accuracy, particularly in its portrayal of Lyndon Johnson, with invocations of artistic license and assertions that the film is not intended as historical scholarship.

Featured The Domestic Economy

2015-03-30 Jennifer Wolff

Puerto Rico’s Debt Crisis: Economic Collapse in America’s Biggest Colony And What Can be Done About It

… What do the twin catastrophes of economic collapse and debt crisis mean for the 3.5 million U.S. citizens who

Featured The Environment

2015-03-25 Sean Sweeney

Standing Rock Solid with the Frackers: Are the Trades Putting Labor’s Head in the Gas Oven?

If anyone were looking for further evidence that the AFL-CIO remains unprepared to accept the science of climate change, and

Featured U.S. Politics & Society

2015-02-03 Michael Hirsch

After the Fall: An Autopsy of the Midterms

Surveying the wreckage of his party’s 2014 election campaign, Howard Dean, on the November 9th Meet the Press, was candid, with such sound bytes as, ““Where the hell is the Democratic party …You got to stand for something if you want to win.” The Republicans’ message was, “We’re not Obama.” What was the Democrats’ message? “Oh well, we really aren’t either.”
Translation: “Get my message; we need a message.”
No matter how hard the Democrats tried to demonize their Republican rivals — they couldn’t.

Featured Immigration

2015-01-20 David Stoll

Comprehensive Immigration Reform and U.S. Labor Markets: Dilemmas for Progressive Labor

Ordinarily, legislation supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Restaurant Association, Silicon Valley moguls, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is not supported by people who identify with the American left. But such is the case with Comprehensive Immigration Reform. In a complex deal between interest groups that ordinarily oppose each other, CIR was first pushed by the Bush administration.

Photo credit: Wikimedia http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Dreamers_AZ_Sit-in_5-17-10.jpg

Featured Immigration

2015-01-19 Walter Nicholls and Tara Fiorito

Dreamers Unbound: Immigrant Youth Mobilizing

One of the most important social movements in the United States is the undocumented youth movement (Dreamers). The movement has not been successful in passing the federal DREAM Act. It has, however, worked closely with its allies to rack up an impressive string of local and state-level victories and pressured the Obama administration to pass Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2012. This latter measure provided approximately 553,000 undocumented youths with temporary relief (two years) from deportation.

Featured Race

2015-01-19 Will Jones

“The Sanctity of Private Property”: The Civil Rights Act and the Limitations of American Liberalism

In marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, commenters frequently lamented the contrast between progress toward legal equality and the persistence of economic inequality today. “The decision to pursue purely legal change, and to leave economic relation- ships alone, says much about the intellectual and moral limitations of midcentury liberalism,” wrote journalist Clay Risen.

Featured U.S. Politics & Society

2015-01-17 Hannah Appel and Astra Taylor

Education with a Debt Sentence: For-Profit Colleges as American Dream Crushers and Factories of Debt

Imagine corporations that intentionally target low-income single mothers as ideal customers. Imagine that these same companies claim to sell tickets to the American dream—gainful employment and the chance for a middle-class life. Imagine that it’s all a lie.

Featured

Does the Working Families Party Work? An Appraisal of 25 Years of Semi-Independent Politics