Roaming Charges: Nowhere Men

When Joe Lieberman arrived in the US Senate in 1989, Strom Thurmond greeted him by saying, “I understand we think a lot alike in the way we do things.” “Yes, sir, I think we do,” admitted Lieberman. Strom probably learned about this reassuring profile of Lieberman’s center-right political beliefs from his weekly lunch dates in the Senate cafeteria with Joe Biden who, like Lieberman, was one of the founding nowhere men of the Democratic Leadership Council, whose mission was to keep the Democratic Party from ever straying to the Left of Michael Dukakis… More

Congress Goes Berserk Over TikTok

Lots of people have been blamed for the frenzy to ban TikTok, from the CIA and FBI, to the mainstream media, to political elites, to AIPAC, to competitors like Facebook. But I blame Congress. They pulled the trigger. Now as we teeter on the abyss of a Steve Mnuchin takeover of TikTok – a development, make no mistake, that would be disastrous for everything from free speech to ownership of such a platform by a capitalist super-predator, to intelligent, rational foreign policy, to those who simply object to his let-them-eat-cake wife – we can thank the intellectual heavyweights on capitol hill who thought it would be a dandy idea to wade into a hopeless morass of hysteria and hokum and to extract from it an absolute monster of congressionally regulated speech. More

Labor Holds the Line in Argentina

This March, Argentina’s school year began with empty classrooms. The price of learning materials rose by 502 percent over the past year, leaving many children unprepared for the year to come. And the teachers? On strike after President Javier Milei announced deep cuts to their salaries. There’s something much larger happening here: Workers rights are More

A World Going in the Wrong Direction

The converging crises facing our world today shout out the fact that their roots are systemic. Tinkering around the edges won’t solve these problems, because they are embedded in the systems logic itself. The climate crisis is the signature of this. While definite progress has been made in deploying low-carbon energy technologies, overall carbon pollution has continued to increase because of the systemic economic and political assumptions under which dominant institutions operate. More