Articles

BY RICHARD D. WOLFF Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair At the end of July, an economic adviser working for Bank of America wrote a memo that got leaked. It made bluntly explicit the long-standing common knowledge among savvy investment advisers: those “economic policies” debated among politicians, economists, and dutiful mass media operate at two different levels. On the public level, debaters discuss what “we” need to do to fix “our economy’s problems.” It reeks of that “we are all in this together” language that reminds us of commercial greeting card poetry. On the other, private level, insiders discuss how the government should respond to economic problems in ways that boost employers’ profits even if at employees’ or the public’s expense. Insiders express their pref...

BY ISHMAEL REED Photograph Source: Mike Shaheen – CC BY 2.0 During the summer of 1967, I wrote my second novel in an apartment in the Echo Park Lake section of Los Angeles. Riots had broken out in cities throughout the nation. In my early 20s, I’d written my share of “Revolutionary” poetry, but this bulletin shocked me. Black snipers were holding down members of the armed forces and, at one point, forced their retreat. The radio announcer sounded as shook as I was. There was speculation that the snipers were army veterans who knew how to handle weapons. Though a popular television series portrayed Blacks as passive victims during the Tulsa race riots of 1921, army veterans from World War I resisted the invasion of Black neighborhoods. They took on the full power of the s...

BY HENRY GIROUX Photograph Source: U.S. Department of State – Public Domain The Orbánization of Fascist Politics The malicious passions of fascism are with us once again, evident in the emergence of diverse regimes of predatory repression and exclusion that increasingly legitimate their hatred of democracy through appeals to a notion of illiberal democracy—a project that calls for the elimination of freedom, dissent, and justice as essential elements of political life, if not democracy itself. Of particular importance is the growing attraction of nationalist Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, to conservatives in the United States. Orbán’s popularity is due to his disdain of democracy and his use of political power to implement a range of reactionary policies, especi...

BY MIKE GARRITY Image by Sarah Worth. Just like clockwork, Montana’s junior senator, Steve Daines and representative Matt Rosendale, have repeated the timber industry propaganda on forest management at their recent Western Caucus roundtable in Bozeman, Montana. Americans, however, not only deserve better, they deserve the truth. Rep. Rosendale, like Sen, Daines and Montana Governor Gianforte, has once again attempted to demonize conservation groups by facetiously claiming they get rich by suing the Forest Service. As one of the organizations that frequently takes the Forest Service to court to make it follow the law like the rest of us, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies files lawsuits under the Equal Access to Justice Act. But it’s not to get rich, it’s to ensure...

BY EVAN STEWART – JAIME KUCINSKAS Image by Anupam Mahapatra. As the United States gets less religious, is it also getting more selfish? Historically, religious Americans have been civically engaged. Through churches and other faith-based organizations, congregants volunteer, engage in local and national civic organizations and pursue political goals. Today – the rise of a politically potent religious right over the past 50 years notwithstanding – fewer Americans identify with formal religions. Gallup found that 47% of Americans reported church membership in 2020, down from 70% in the 1990s; nearly a quarter of Americans have no religious affiliation. Meanwhile, other kinds of meaningful practice are on the rise, from med...