While we debate the travails of some of the world’s most privileged women, most women are up against the wall. And yet for much of mainstream feminist discourse, it’s as if the economy hasn’t shifted, or as if there’s nothing about it worth examining from the standpoint of gender.
The “end of men,” “having it all,” the “richer sex” — women, it would seem, have finally arrived. But this celebration is one part toast to the wealthy exceptions, and one part nonsense.
One of Robert Bork’s last acts was to bless Google’s near-monopoly over search advertising as “pro-competitive” in an October 2012 white paper commissioned by Google. On Thursday the Federal Trade Commission showed, once again, Bork’s enduring influence.
Next time you hear a pundit say that to preserve America’s competitiveness or dynamism, we must replace the liberal arts with something more “practical,” take a second to check what they studied.
In a meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, when the friends were both in high office, the president asked Mulroney, “Brian, did you read that article in the Reader’s Digest that trees cause pollution?”
Dissent contributors on Michigan’s right-to-work law: Colin Gordon looks at the faulty economics, Richard D. Kahlenberg and Moshe Z. Marvit tell the ugly racial history of the idea, and Michael Kazin reminds us why people would miss unions if they vanished.
Dissent contributors reflect on the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. Read posts by Saul Cornell, Bryce Covert, and Elliott J. Gorn.
Nearly everyone on the battlefield is just fighting “to not get licked.” That’s more a testament to the poverty of our social relations than to the poverty of individual souls, and it’s just as pertinent to the impoverishment of our social imagination as it is to the amorality of war.
The Central Park Five is a powerful reminder of what can happen when innocents are caught up in racial divisions and tensions they didn’t create and railroaded for a crime they didn’t commit, and when all of the city’s institutions collaborate in the horrific act.
Conservatives and neoliberals envision a government that provides a comparable range of benefits to the one advocated by earlier American liberals. But rather than designing and delivering services directly, the neoliberal government provides coupons for citizens.
In 1937 autoworkers boldly grasped the means of production, gained recognition from General Motors, and proceeded to build the kind of institutional power that transformed history. It’s an incredibly seductive story. Perhaps too seductive.
Perhaps the ultimate irony is that in its critique of modernity and global capitalism, the Chinese New Left’s greatest tool has been neither market socialism nor anything native to China, but deconstructionism.
By working outside structures of power one may circumvent coercive systems but not necessarily subvert them. Localizing politics—stripping it of its larger institutional ambitions—has its advantages, but without a larger structural vision, it does not go far enough.
Given the level of alarmed debate and self-criticism in at least some major sectors of the Israeli press, the tsunami of vitriol that has descended on Peter Beinart and his book is fascinating, puzzling, and profoundly depressing.
The rescue of public education must come from the grassroots, from a coalition led by parents and teachers. Such a movement has been taking shape gradually and gained visibility during the 2012 election cycle.
