The Great MAGA Job Scam: Plotting New Sweatshops

They say they’re “bringing back jobs,” but what they really want is a desperate, powerless workforce with no healthcare, no unions, and no future — just the way Wall Street likes it…

This Week in People’s History, May 7–13, 2025

Cartoon of Herbert Hoover staring glumly at the ashes of John Parker's Supreme Court nomination
A Racist, Anti-Worker Judge? Not This Year (1930), Curtains for Smallpox (1980), Covid Kills Jobs, Too (2020), The Road to Revolution (1775), A Bad, Bad, Day in Augusta (1970), Even a King’s Word Is Not Law (1215), Red-Baiters Go Home! (1960)

Why Motherhood Is Harder in Some Countries Than Others

Eleanor J. Bader explores with Four Mothers author Abigail Leonard how national policies and cultural norms in Finland, Japan, Kenya and the U.S. shape the first year of motherhood—and redefine what it means to parent in vastly different societies.

As Aid Ends, Empire Endures

Western donors are cutting budgets, but the aid model they built—rooted in control and dependency —still shapes Africa’s development. As aid shrinks, the work ahead is not just to survive the cuts, but also to refuse the system that made them matter.

Powerful New Protein Editors Probe Living Cells

Scientists deploy self-splicing protein subunits to insert strange new additions into target proteins.

Israel Sees Unprecedented Spike in Media Censorship

In 2024, Israel's military censor banned 1,635 articles from publication and partially redacted another 6,265 — part of a wider assault on freedom of press.

Russia Is in Demographic Free Fall-Putin Isn’t Helping

The Russian president is enacting one of the world’s most extreme natalism programs—and one of the weirdest.

Ryan Coogler’s Road to “Sinners”

The film represents a departure for the “Black Panther” director, and a creative risk; it grapples with ideas about music, race, family, religion—and vampires.

Trump’s Newest Executive Order “Unleashes” the Cops

The new order effectively allows police to get away with murder. And that’s just the beginning.

US Defeat in Vietnam

The US invasion of Vietnam was a catastrophe for the Vietnamese people, resulting in millions of deaths. Fifty years ago today, the US-backed regime finally collapsed as North Vietnamese forces took control of Saigon.
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Culture

poetry

Procreation Obligation

Rebecca Foust You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems
Taking George Orwell's classic text, 1984, as her foundation, poet Rebecca Foust casts a cold eye on the pronatalism of today's religious conservatives.

film

With His New Film, Alex Gibney Shines a Light on Dark Money

An interview with Alex Gibney Jacobin
Jacobin sat down with the prolific muckraking filmmaker Alex Gibney to discuss his new documentary The Dark Money Game, on the terrifying ramifications of Citizens United and how it’s empowered the same oligarchy now unleashed by the Trump administra

food

FDA Making Plans To End Its Routine Food Safety Inspections, Sources Say

Alexander Tin, Edited By Nicole Brown Chau, Paula Cohen CBS
Thomas Gremillion, Consumer Federation of America, criticized the Administration's reckless disregard for its policies' effects on the detection and prevention of foodborne illness and said plans to replace federal food inspectors merit suspicion

tv

How the UFC Went MAGA

Jacob Debets Jacobin
MMA used to be home to oddballs unified by a love of beating each other up inside cages. But since Donald Trump’s first presidency, the UFC has rebranded the sport as a refuge for the “anti-woke sports fan,” while breaking unions and censoring the me

Labor

labor

May Day Follow Up

May Day Strong
Sign up for a national call on May 8th to discuss next steps in the fight coming out of May Day actions.

labor

Learning From the 1990s Labor Party

An interview with Mark Dudzic Carl Rosen Jenny Brown Howard Botwinick Jacobin
As capital ratcheted up its assault on labor in the 1990s and Democrats embraced a neoliberal agenda, some labor unions launched their own political party.

labor

Rallies in US Over Workers’ and Immigrants’ Rights

Rachel Leingang, Léonie Chao-Fong in Washington and Marina Dunbar in New York The Guardian
People organize in nearly 1,000 cities with focus on rallying against Trump administration and ‘billionaire profiteers’

labor

Workers Defy the Billionaire Takeover on May Day

Luis Feliz Leon In These Times
May Day will be a national demonstration that will polarize today’s struggle not along resentful, racist lines of immigrant vs. “native”, but along the class-struggle lines of workers vs. billionaires.

Friday nite video

video

How to Prevent Future Trumps

If America doesn't respond to the calamity that's befallen the working class, we will have Trumps as far as the eye can see

video

Waltz Departs the Group Chat, Trump Departs Reality

Michael Kosta continues coverage of Trump’s 100th day in office with reports from NewsNation’s town hall, where the president racially slighted Stephen A. Smith and Pam Bondi’s ridiculous claims about fentanyl deaths 

video

Who's Breaking Immigration Law: Not Who You Think

Corporations are bringing in hundreds of thousands of foreign farmworkers under the H-2A visa program: basically a human trafficking scheme — to replace farmworkers who unionize and fight for higher pay.

video

Trump & Tariffs | John Oliver

John Oliver discusses the ongoing chaos surrounding Donald Trump and tariffs, why the past week could have lasting repercussions, and why your grandma might be looking to start an OnlyFans.