Featured stories, news, opinions, reviews, poetry & arts, and other content from the latest issue of the New Labor Forum.
Recognizing the risks to the public, regulators have begun to step in to curtail abuses and hold accountable those who violate the law in lending practices that affect all borrowers, including those with subprime credit scores. While default rates remain relatively low thus far with these subprime loans, we should guard against complacency. Despite the fact that large banks may be pulling back…
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Born as a Twitter hashtag, Black Lives Matter has evolved into a potent alternative to the political paralysis and isolation that racial justice proponents have faced since the election of Obama. In just over two years, the young movement has reinvigorated confrontation politics, giving voice to a popular and righteous rage, establishing a new touchstone of grassroots resistance…
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Corbyn’s Class Act is a Climate Game Changer On September 12, 2015, Jeremy Corbyn was elected the leader of the
Read MoreSean Sweeney was in Paris during COP21 where Unions are fighting for a reference in the final agreement to “a just
Read MoreThe ghosts of Eugene Debs and Richard Nixon haunt the American political landscape. Whether the extraordinary presidential campaign of Brooklyn-born
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Promising to do something about student debt has become the means for politicians to pretend they are doing something for the 99 percent. That was true even before the 2016 election campaign really got underway. Obama, after all, promised two free years of community college in his 2015 State of the Union address. That idea, like so many others from Republicans and Democrats, did not go anywhere, even though the most recent re-authorization of the 1965 Higher Education Act (HEA) expired in 2013. However, inaction is not just a symptom of Washington gridlock. The reality is that paying for college is a confounding, sprawling sector of the economy involving loans, grants, scholarships, and tax credits.
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Our obsession with the question of what sort of consciousness attaches itself most readily to the culture of consumption has paradoxically blinded us to the ways in which the ideal type of the American consumer has achieved a new level of uncontested sovereignty in the political rhetoric of our market culture.
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The LGBT movement’s laser-focus on marriage equality propagates the myth of gay and lesbian affluence as political strategy, leaving aside any analysis of class or economic inequality or poverty—much less an analysis of capitalism. LGBT people are typically depicted as affluent consumers with high disposable incomes, yet this is hardly the norm. The majority of LGBT/Q people are poor or working class, female, and people of color, who struggle to get a job or hold onto one, to pay their rent and care for themselves and the people they love.
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Electing Bernie Sanders won’t be easy. But remapping ‘the left-wing of the possible’ (to use a Michael Harrington phrase) is within reach, changing the political landscape for our issues and associated social movements going forward.
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The weekend of September 21, 2014, people in 162 countries joined 2,646 events to demand global reductions in the greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions that are generating climate catastrophe. An estimated 40,000 marched in London; 30,000 in Melbourne; 25,000 in Paris. Some 400,000 joined the People’s Climate March through the center of New York City. The climate protection movement had come a long way since 2006, when a march of 1,000 through Burlington, Vermont proved to be the largest climate protest in American history.
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