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Luke Savage is a staff writer at Jacobin.
Since the pandemic began, the biggest corporations have been rewriting their compensation rules to ensure their CEOs continue raking in multimillion dollar payouts. The result: a 29 percent pay hike for the average CEO, even as the average frontline worker has been hit with a 2 percent wage cut.
After last week’s calamitous election for the Labour Party, party leader Keir Starmer was asked to explain his “vision” for Britain. His humiliating inability to answer the question was a window into the hollowness of Britain’s center.
The current round of partisan shadowboxing around unemployment benefits misses the point: the purpose of a real welfare state is to free people from the drudgery, precarity, and misery of low-wage work.
More than any Marxist text ever could, the COVID-19 emergency cash relief programs — and the furious reaction to them from employers — lay bare the raw truth about capitalism: bosses’ profits depend directly on workers’ remaining terrified of destitution.
Jon Stewart rightly scorned cable news’ empty bickering during a 2004 CNN Crossfire appearance that went viral again this week. But calls for post-partisan decency still miss the point: we need a positive agenda to improve people’s lives, not empty calls to be the adults in the room.
True, the parameters of American liberalism have clearly shifted. But Joe Biden’s actions in his first 100 days have revealed an administration whose most fundamental objective is to restore the Republic to its pre-Trump state — not to undertake its reconstruction along totally different grounds.
Many political and business leaders are defending unethical vaccine patent hoarding. But Sen. Chris Coons recently achieved new levels of repulsiveness, invoking Red Scare rhetoric, the Capitol riot, and the Constitution to justify protecting Big Pharma’s profits.
Over the past few months, pharma giants like Pfizer and Moderna have become household names and fodder for affectionate memes. But their prominence reflects how the market has cannibalized science and public health during a global crisis. Big pharma still is not your friend.
It’s hard to come up with a better encapsulation of capitalism’s dreary imprint on culture than the latest innovation in the field of advertising: the retroactive insertion of product placement ads into classic movies.
The US public poured billions of dollars into developing a COVID-19 vaccine, yet drug companies are reaping the profits and jealously guarding the intellectual property from poor countries. Let the drug companies cry: we should release the vaccines immediately.
The global battle over drug company patents for COVID-19 vaccines is the latest skirmish in the irrepressible conflict between property rights and human rights. It’s no surprise that Bill Gates, the monopolist billionaire, has taken the side of patents.
Around the world, the global pandemic has spurred widespread public hunger for radical economic and political change. It’s a historic opportunity the global left must seize — or risk watching as it’s seized by the Right.
A Democratic leadership that trumpets its support for progressive legislation while refusing to abolish the filibuster looks more interested in pantomiming a fake reformist agenda than actually realizing one.
Modern-day elite philanthropy serves the same purpose as it did in the days of the robber barons: reinforcing the power of the rich.
With his HBO documentary series Q: Into the Storm, filmmaker Cullen Hoback manages to demystify QAnon, exposing the mechanisms that underpin the right-wing conspiracy theory — above all, how it gives its followers a way of making sense of the spectacular failure of so many powerful institutions.
WeWork, the coworking start-up once valuated at $47 billion, was a cult masquerading as a company pretending to be a movement. Focusing on its “charismatic” CEO, Adam Neumann, a new Hulu documentary misses a chance to expose the irrationality and waste of an economic system that lets such charlatanism thrive.
Despite labor’s recent defeat at Amazon in Alabama, the current moment holds out cautious hope for the movement — not least because of a solid majority in favor of trade unionism in American public opinion.
When human rights lawyer Steven Donziger won a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the oil giant Chevron, the company retaliated by setting out to destroy Donziger’s life. Now in his twentieth month of house arrest on the orders of a Chevron-linked judge, his Kafkaesque story is a window into the corrupt and corporate-captured US legal system.
A coalition of ultra-wealthy oligarchs and Republican leaders is conspiring to kill HR 1, the landmark voting rights bill that will be up for a vote this year. In a newly uncovered secret recording, the conspirators bemoan the unpopularity of their effort — even with rank-and-file conservatives — and underscore how conscious they are that their antidemocratic agenda depends on curtailing democracy.
HBO’s QAnon documentary has been criticized for its hands-off approach to its subjects, who include some of the most reactionary characters on the internet. But the film is a deft portrayal how a dangerous conspiracy theory could emerge from the internet’s fever swamps and cause real world damage.