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.
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Do charter schools pose an existential threat to public education and teacher unions? One need look no further than post-Katrina New Orleans, widely touted as a national model of education reform, to understand why many observers now answer this question in the affirmative. Today, charter schools enroll more than nine in every ten public school students, a share that continues to grow.
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David Cote is the CEO of Honeywell, a technology conglomerate and defense contractor that also dabbles in energy. In 2012, he clocked in at number five on the Forbes list of the highest paid CEOs, with an annual compensation in the ballpark of $55 million. Named CEO of the year last year by a publication called Chief Executive, he would seem to be doing quite well.
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Among the many promises of Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign was a thorough reform of U.S. healthcare. The radical inefficiency of the existing system was obvious: although per-capita healthcare costs were about twice as high as in other industrialized countries, at least forty-six million people still lacked health insurance.
Read MoreDespite my use of the singular in the title, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (2011) explores several problems with work. My focus is not so much on the difficulties of this or that job but on the failures of the system of waged work together with the values and ways of life that support and are produced by it. Some of these problems fit under three general headings: underwork, overwork, and non-work.
Read MoreThe problem with attempting to build a politics of debt resistance is that our crisis of personal indebtedness isn’t really about debt. It’s about neoliberalism, the inequality it reproduces, and the borrowing it necessitates. This isn’t to say that debt itself is irrelevant. A generation of college students and subprime mortgage holders can testify otherwise. It is, however, intended to suggest that mitigating the anxiety and material hardship that debt is inflicting on increasing numbers of us will require focusing less on the fact that we owe loads of money and more on why we owe it.
Read MoreAs unions gear up for the election of 2012, they should take a lesson from the electoral contests of 2008 and 2010.
Read MoreOccupy Wall Street (OWS) began as an encampment in New York City’s Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011. It has since evolved, with
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