Yesterday, in an interview aired by PBS, President Obama said that the United States must now attack Syria. The reason was the imminent danger that, if we do not, the Assad government will use chemical weapons against Americans on the U.S. mainland. This fantastic and hollow pretext comes so close to a statement made by Tony Blair in the run-up to the Iraq war that the two assertions invite a comparison.
Few political mobilizations inspired Dissent editors and writers as much as the 1963 March on Washington. On the March’s fiftieth anniversary, check out archival gems by Tom Kahn, Bayard Rustin, Irving Howe, A. Philip Randolph, and others.
The trial of Bo Xilai, the highest Chinese official to fall to scandal in the last thirty years, opened last Thursday, one year and thirteen days after the trial of his wife, Gu Kailai. She was charged with murder, and …
This week, Sarah and Josh discuss recent labor developments, including a big raise for Walmart warehouse workers, and a judge’s reversal in the fight over New York hospital closures. Then they’re joined by City Paper reporter Daniel Denvir, who breaks down the latest in the under-covered crisis in Philadelphia’s public schools.
The 1963 March on Washington featured just one prominent white speaker. “We will not solve education or housing or public accommodations, as long as millions of Negroes are treated as second-class economic citizens and denied jobs,” declared Walter Reuther, the …
Dissent editor Michael Kazin recently participated in a symposium on the future of the left for the Polish website Kultura Liberalna. The following is his contribution; for the others, including Zygmunt Bauman and Marcel Gauchet, visit Kultura Liberalna. We are …
The violence following the removal of Mohamed Morsi continues to spiral out of control, and is in many respects too senseless to be analyzed. Difficult as it is to understand current Egyptian politics and predict where the country might go next, the following observations are intended to shed some light on that very complex and confused landscape.
How do sex, race, and class shape what counts as “work” and as “life”? Why do these conversations neglect a life for women outside productive or reproductive labor? Is it time for labor to demand the right to free time? The nineteenth episode of Belabored takes on these questions plus the latest developments in labor news.
The International Olympic Committee is mired in a political morass, thanks to the regressive anti-gay legislation signed into law this summer by Russian President Vladimir Putin that outlaws “propaganda of non-traditional relationships to minors.” Violators of the law are subject …
Fifty years after the March on Washington, we confront a system that idealizes diversity even as it continues to produce injustice in the aggregate. To rescue the dream, we need a politics that combines race and class, just as reality does.
Things are tough for American workers. Wage growth has flatlined. Unemployment and underemployment remain stubbornly high. Job growth is skewing towards low-wage, no-benefit services. And economic mobility—across generations, or as a reward for educational attainment—has slowed dramatically. There is a …
In the Summer 2013 issue of Dissent, Max Holleran described the role of world-famous architects in Spain’s housing bubble. These “starchitects”—among them Santiago Calatrava, Herzog & de Meuron, and Frank Gehry—were not deterred by the failure of the Spanish real …
Political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain died on August 11. Elshtain was the author of many books and articles, including several contributions to Dissent. In 2005, Dissent editorial board member Alan Johnson interviewed Elshtain for the first issue of his journal …
Last December, at the prayer vigil in Newtown, Connecticut, Barack Obama delivered one of the best speeches of his presidency. He grieved and consoled, speaking both as a father and as the head of state. Then, pivoting to the need …
This week on Belabored, an interview with historian William Jones about the forgotten history of civil rights and the relation between racial and economic justice. Plus the latest on prevailing wage law in New York, living wage law in DC, domestic workers’ rights, and labor issues at the ACLU.
