May Day Protest Coverage from Media for the 99%
In the spirit of May Day, Dissent’s staff won’t be in the office today. For those looking for live coverage, we’ve embedded a Storify put together by the Media Consortium (www.mediaforthe99percent.com) featuring journalists from a number of left-leaning publications. Click the map at the bottom of the screen to see where protests and activities are happening (and to keep track of arrests) throughout the day.
... MoreThe First of May
New York’s labor unions had a banner day planned for the First of May in 1914, with parades and celebrations scheduled across the city. Finnish and Bohemian socialists were congregating on the Lower East Side. Carpenters and cloak-makers would begin their march from Chelsea, while the United Hebrew Trades intended to start near Little Italy. By the afternoon, all these various strands would join in Union Square for an inspiring demonstration of working-class power in the nation’s greatest metropolis.
Yet a note of apprehension threatened to spoil this grand pageant of solidarity. An... More
ALEC Retreats, the Right Wing Freaks
Customers should be able to know if companies that they are supporting with their purchases are busy spending money on groups that undermine environmental regulations, attack workers’ rights, promote “Stand Your Ground” gun laws, advance discriminatory “Voter ID” laws, and otherwise bolster the right-wing legislative vanguard. And if these consumers don’t like this behavior, they should be at liberty to take their business elsewhere.
That proposition seems to fall pretty safely within a free market, vote-with-your-dollars paradigm. In fact, watchd... More
A Resurgent American Left?
The United States today is engaged in a great debate not simply over the role of government, but over the country’s identity. The Right insists that the America is essentially a conservative country, which the Tea Party is bringing back to its true self. Its opponents, exemplified by President Obama, hold that America is a centrist country that typically avoids extremism of both Left and Right.
Both of these views are misleading. The truth is that the United States has always relied on a powerful, independent, radical Left, not so much for its everyday politics but during its times ... More
How We First Found “Ghost Factories”
A decade-long failure to investigate and clean up old lead factories was revealed by USA Today’s blockbuster expose of “ghost factories” last week. The paper’s fourteen-month investigation uncovered an inexcusable pattern of bureaucratic bungling by state and federal regulators. Ten years after environmental scientist Bill Eckel identified 463 old lead plants that were unknown to the government agencies, little had been done to test these locations and less to clean them up.
Eckel had tested eight o... More
[VIDEO] Student Debt Serfdom
As of today, the total level of U.S. student debt is estimated to have passed $1 trillion. To mark the occasion, the Occupy Student Debt campaign has planned 1T Day, centering on a “debt jubilee” that will be presided over by Reverend Billy in NYC’s Union Square at 4 p.m. today.
Below is video from this year’s Left Forum, where Dissent and Jacobin held a discussion on the politics of student debt in the United States. The panel,... More
Revive Socialism!
Last fall, Mitt Romney alleged that Obama “takes his political inspiration from Europe, and from the socialist Democrats in Europe.” I wish that were true, although socialism has American roots as well. But in point of fact, Romney could summon no evidence at all for his claim. In the richer European countries, citizens have the benefit of a cradle-to-grave welfare system—or did, until the current wave of austerity rolled in. Meanwhile, our president’s main achievement is a health-care bill closely modeled on the one designed by Romney himself.
It doesn’t seem to bother Republicans ... More
Sudan and South Sudan on the Brink of Catastrophic War
Traveling to South Sudan and the Nuba Mountains in January 2003, months after a ceasefire agreement had been signed between North and South, an unnerving conviction, a grim certainty, was expressed to me by every military and civil society official I spoke with, including John Garang, the deceased former leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army and Sudanese vice president: if war comes again to Sudan, it will be the most destructive of all our wars. This was an extraordinary observation coming from people who had just begun to emerge from a civil war that claimed well over 2 million liv... More
[AUDIO] Michael Kazin and Nick Serpe on WMPG, Portland Maine Community Radio
Earlier this month, on the invitation of the Machiah Center, Michael Kazin gave lectures in Portland and Orono, Maine, on his recent book American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation.
During the visit, Kazin and Dissent’s online editor Nick Serpe sat down with Alan Brewer for an interview on WMPG, Portland’s Community Radio Station. Click here to listen to the audio.
The Remarkable Non-Impact of the Norwegian Terrorist Attack
This week the case against Anders Behring Breivik started in a heavily guarded Oslo court. The security was not so much to protect the court against friends of the accused as to protect the accused against the potential wrath of the population. Breivik stands trial for killing seventy-seven people last summer, first with a car bomb in downtown Oslo, killing eight, and then on a shooting spree on the island of Utoya, killing sixty-nine mostly young activists in the Social Democratic Party. The gruesome terrorist attack was front-page news around the world and led to intense debates within We... More
