Daniel Pantaleo, the rogue police officer who choked the unarmed 43-year-old Black man named Eric Garner to death for allegedly selling single untaxed cigarettes, will not go to trial. Garner was murdered on July 17, 2014 in his native borough of Staten Island.
Dystopian narratives have long been an alluring and thought-provoking form of entertainment, especially for those who take an interest in studying social and political structures. From classics like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World to the current hit, The Hunger Games, these stories play on our fears while simultaneously serving as warning signs for the future.
The Brazilian working class is facing the most savage assault on its living standards in over a decade. And it is not just the industrial workers who are under attack. The landless rural workers, public and private salaried employees, teachers and health professionals, the unemployed and the poor are facing massive cuts in income, jobs and welfare payments.
Many summers ago, just freed from the enforced boredom of high school, I signed up for a course on Marxist economics. Andy, the teen I worked with, asked if I would accompany him. I envied him his dad, a transplanted Marxist Scotsman, and I relished the transgression I was invited to undertake, especially as a recent apostate from Catholicism.
Economist Richard Wolff says workers are returning to jobs with lower wages, fewer benefits, and less job security than they had before the financial crisis hit.
From 1948 to 1973, hourly compensation grew instep with the productivity of the typical American worker. This means that, for about a generation’s time, economic prosperity amongst workers in the United States virtually reflected productivity. In the ensuing forty years, however, inequality exploded. The Washington Post has reported that income for the bottom 90 percent of American households has only nominally grown since 1973, when this group commanded nearly 70 percent of national income.
Over the past 30 years, wealth has grown exponentially and has become increasingly concentrated foremost in the upper .01%, then the .1%, followed by the 1% and the upper 10%-20%.
The large scale, long-term concentration of wealth has continued through booms and busts of the real economy, the financial and IT crises. Wealth grew despite long-term economic recessions and stagnation because the so-called recovery programs imposed austerity on 80% of the households while transferring public revenues to the rich.
Former labor organizer Bill Barry discusses the tenuous relationship between the working class and undocumented workers, and the forces that keep these groups at odds.
This week we bring you an exclusive report on the pandemic that’s infecting the globe. Insurrecto-Riotosis. The first wave of the pandemic was reported in the city of Nantes in France following the police murder of 21 year old eco-defender Rémi Fraisse.
This contagion quickly spread to Belgium where 100,000 peeps hit the streets in Brussels to show their anger to a proposed package of austerity cuts.
Centuries ago, explorers, and economically charged navigators, firmly put to rout the idea of a “flat” world. Today, rather than equalizing development’s inborn global disparity, and rather than leveling the economic playing field, globalization has ushered into existence tremendous instances of developmental corrosion—especially among poorer states. Richer nations, and their ruling plutocracies, have grown incredibly wealthy as a direct result.
