labor

Norway's Unions Confront Neoliberalism: A Country Report from a Meeting of Left Trade Unionists in European

Asbjørn Wahl The Bullet
In the public sector, neoliberal, market oriented reforms have been the order of the day in Norway ever since the 1980s – regardless of what kind of government we have had. Increased control from above and increased demand for loyalty to management have contributed to undermining working conditions and workers’ control of their own work. Resistance against this development is slowly emerging.

Overthrowing Dilma Rousseff - It's Class War, and Their Class is Winning

Alfredo Saad Filho The Bullet
The judicial coup against President Dilma Rousseff is the culmination of the deepest political crisis in Brazil for 50 years. Dilma's second victory sparked a heated panic among the neoliberal and U.S.-aligned opposition. The fourth consecutive election of a President affiliated to the centre-left PT (Workers' Party) was bad news for the opposition, because it suggested that PT founder Lu¡s In cio Lula da Silva could return in 2018.

books

Goodbye New Deal, hello Wall Street

Adam Barnett Prospect
In this new book, Thomas Frank offers an analysis of today's Democratic Party that should serve as a cautionary tale for its supporters in this election year. Writing from the United Kingdom, Adam Barnett offers an appraisal of Frank's findings.

books

Lester K. Spence's 'Knocking The Hustle'

Brandon Soderberg The City Paper
The idea that "everything and everybody everywhere should operate as if they were a business" has emerged a working definition of contemporary neoliberalism. Another way of putting it is that "everything and everybody everywhere" should actually be a business. Lester K. Spence shows how this philosophy pains most of us while focusing on neoliberalism's effects on black politics. Brandon Soderberg offers an introduction to Spence's argument.

labor

How the Ruling Class Remade New Orleans

Thomas Jessen Adams Jacobin
The language of social justice has been used to sell intensified neoliberalism in post-Katrina New Orleans. On the tenth anniversary of the failure of the federally maintained levees, the keynote speaker at the annual Rising Tide Conference on the Future of New Orleans was DeRay Mckesson, a standard-bearer for Teach For America and the New Teacher Project — education “reform” organizations that played a crucial role in the destruction of the black middle class.

Neoliberalism Has Created New System of Dual Citizenship for the Poor and the 1%

Bill Fletcher, Jr. Alternet
The exit from a dystopian future does not rest with a brave individual or a small group of high tech activists who undermine the state. Rather, it rests in winning the confidence of millions that there is an alternative to chaos and dystopia that is not to be found in one or another variant of authoritarianism. This is the challenge for the global Left . . .

books

Hijacking Public Housing

Rhonda Y. Williams Southern Spaces
The history of public housing in the United States can be read, in part, as a history of the modern impoverishment of racial minorities, in particular, of the African American population. As reviewer Rhonda Y. Williams notes, Edward G. Goetz has written a "multi-layered analysis of housing policy and redevelopment," in a book that "explicitly examines black removal from urban spaces and the perpetuation of racialized poverty."

The Lost Counterculture

Stephen Maher Jacobin
Inherent Vice is perhaps the most brilliant depiction of the construction of neoliberal hegemony and the harsh end of the dreams of the 1960s generation. It speaks powerfully to the here and now, indicting the nostalgic escapism that yearns for “the sixties” and showing that this epochal world as commonly imagined never existed.

GroKo Politics - No Change of Key

Victor Grossman, Berlin Bulletin No. 67 Portside
The wrangling between the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) had two main goals. In its election campaign the SPD had tried to sound leftish so as to keep or win back the votes of union members and at least some progressive voters. But now, to become part of a "grand coalition" government, it had to tone down such escapades and sooth the fears of big biz bosses.
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