Monetary and fiscal policy, according to conventional political wisdom, amounts to a choice between encouraging growth and restraining it, between policies that lower the unemployment rate (but risk a higher rate of inflation) and those that control prices (but risk …
Last Thursday, in a major policy speech at the National Defense University, President Obama unveiled the legal scaffold his Department of Justice has been erecting, one piece at a time, around the “targeted killing” program that has become the signature …
Josh and Sarah interview Gabriel Thompson, biographer of Fred Ross, the little-known organizer who trained Cesar Chavez. They also discuss the latest strikes by low-wage workers, a strike in Dubai of immigrant workers, & more.
Last Friday, thousands of Philadelphia high school students walked out of their schools and marched on City Hall to protest a proposed austerity budget that would categorically eliminate extracurricular activities, libraries, and guidance counselors. As a former high school teacher …
In Dissent’s Spring 2012 Food issue, Marion Nestle pointed out that changing the food system is as radical an objective as those pursued by the civil rights, women’s rights, and environmentalist movements. “But food has one particular advantage for advocacy,” …
In his interview with David Moberg in Dissent, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins explains that he resigned from the National Academy of Sciences to protest its “involvement in research for the military.” This strikes me as late and incongruous. The discipline Sahlins …
On March 15, a group of over 200 student activists from across the country gathered outside the Department of Education for one of the most effective uses of direct action tactics I have ever been a part of. The group …
Within half an hour, thousands of women had spread from one block throughout the entire Lower East Side. They broke glass and climbed into butcher shops; seized kosher chicken and beef and flung it into the streets. They forced anyone …
Obama’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board rejected, new strike authorizations, and Sarah and Josh discuss the state of fast food workers’ organizing efforts. They interview journalist Jake Blumgart about recent developments around anti-sweatshop activism, at-will employment, the future of Atlantic City, and high-stakes testing at a sushi restaurant.
On May 2, as President Obama arrived in Mexico City, hundreds gathered outside the heavily fortified United States Embassy to protest his visit, U.S. immigration policies, and U.S. economic and political influence in the region.
This is not a famous picture, but it should be. Forty years ago, the March 22, 1973 issue of Jet magazine featured Dr. T.R.M. Howard and a staffer attending a prostrate female patient on its cover, all under a yellow …
Earlier this week, the Congressional Budget Office released its budget projections for the next decade. Its finding, that both the budget deficit and the debt-to-GDP ratio are recovering nicely from their recessionary spikes, is unsurprising. But its timing is impeccable. …
In a striking new piece of intellectual history in the Nation, political scientist Corey Robin argues that neoliberalism is haunted by Friedrich Nietzsche’s late nineteenth-century elitism. Like all ambitious histories, Robin’s genealogy of neoliberalism raises more questions than it can answer, but one …
No group in America, aside from Latino activists, is a more steadfast champion of generous immigration reform than organized labor. That stance, declares the AFL-CIO, is “based on the simple idea that working people are strongest when we work together …
Many people have been criticizing President Obama for dithering over what to do in Syria. Not me; dithering seems an entirely rational response to what’s going on there. The difficulty is that we don’t really know what we want to …
