The Orchids That Bloom in the Dark

The migrant domestic workers of the U.K. organization Waling Waling are fighting for their dignity and human rights

On a warm, wet London Saturday, a group of Filipina women meet in Regent’s Park. They are joined by a few friends from North and West Africa, several small children, and a couple of men recording the event on camera. They spread blankets on the grass which they quickly cover ...
Read More
The Orchids That Bloom in the Dark

Five Years of Silence

How states and corporations use public records exemptions to cover up deal details

The Tennessee legislature last week approved a massive new deal for a Ford electric vehicle and battery plant at a site about 50 miles east of Memphis. The legislation creates a “megasite” authority that will dole out $884 million in state funds: $500 million in corporate handouts to Ford and ...
Read More
Five Years of Silence

A World Beyond Capitalism

As workers contemplate the post-pandemic world, they know one thing: they need the big changes that mutual aid organizing has already imagined

It has been such a long time since American workers have pressured employers in such large numbers that some are calling this month “Striketober.” More than 10,000 John Deere United Automobile Workers (UAW) are on strike across the country after rejecting a tentative agreement that failed to adequately increase wages, ...
Read More
A World Beyond Capitalism

How (Some) Rich People Work Toward Redistribution

Sociologist Rachel Sherman talks to Guillermina Altomonte about “class traitors” challenging how we think about wealth

By all measures we live in an era defined by profound inequality. Most recently, while millions of Americans lost their jobs and became poorer during the pandemic, U.S. billionaires became $1.8 trillion richer. Rachel Sherman, Professor of Sociology at The New School, has long been interested in how the wealthy ...
Read More
How (Some) Rich People Work Toward Redistribution

“Opportunity Zones” Are a Game Only the Rich Can Play

Too often they bring storage facilities and upscale college housing, but not economic prosperity

On SW Taylor Street in Portland, Oregon, there is a shiny new glass-and-steel building with a fireplace in its grand lobby. Developers got approval for the posh retail and office project in 2016 and, a year later, a local gas utility inked a 20-year lease to house its headquarters there. As it ...
Read More
“Opportunity Zones” Are a Game Only the Rich Can Play

A Displaced Worker in a World of Goods

What Winslow Homer’s Old Mill teaches us about the world industrialization made

A woman in a red jacket, lunch pail in hand and eyes forward, travels to work. She ascends a ramp leading from a meadow of wildflowers, over a millpond to a small water-powered textile factory. Winslow Homer painted Old Mill in 1871, but its subject looks back fifty years to the first ...
Read More
A Displaced Worker in a World of Goods

China’s Thirty-Year War between State and Capital Has Taken a Decisive Turn

If the financial complexities and implications of the Evergrande case could be boiled down to a tabloid headline, it would read: “XI TO BUILDER: DROP DEAD.”

As part of its recent campaign to regulate capital and to rein in capitalists, Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has set their sights on the China Evergrande Group. Last week, Asian and global markets sank quickly on the news that Evergrande was unable to ...
Read More
China’s Thirty-Year War between State and Capital Has Taken a Decisive Turn

The “K” in the Economy

Private equity and the rise of permanent capital

The consensus is that the road to economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic is K-shaped: certain sectors and populations will thrive while others stagnate or decline. Outsized online retailers and digital infrastructure providers, like Amazon, have experienced boom times, while many Main Street small businesses have gone bust. Those with a stake ...
Read More
The “K” in the Economy

Welcome to the Chip Wars

Intel wants another HQ2 contest, this time for chip manufacturers.

_____ The Amazon “HQ2” contest—in which hundreds of cities threw everything including the kitchen sink at Amazon in the hopes of landing a new facility—was a national embarrassment showing just how tight corporate America’s grip on economic development policy is (at least until New York said no way). In a recent interview with ...
Read More
Welcome to the Chip Wars

Branding Myself

How a freelance writer’s summer internship made her reconsider how to market herself

_____ This past summer, I was an intern at Sarankco, a creative studio and consultancy located in Manhattan. According to the firm’s website, Sarankco specializes in “developing brands that create awareness; designing experiences that influence behavior; and creating communications that drive engagement.” As a freelance writer who had previously written for The ...
Read More
Branding Myself

The Big Tax Breaks Behind Big Chicken

All subsidizing these giants does is reinforce the status quo

_____ The Guardian published a good piece recently by Nina Lakhani, who looked at the power Tyson — which is one of the largest meat processors in the world and the largest chicken processor in the U.S. — has over local communities, businesses, and workers. “When a company like Tyson can get ...
Read More
The Big Tax Breaks Behind Big Chicken

The Commons versus Capitalism

Can commonality dodge the threat of capitalist exploitation and develop into an organizational principle for complex societies?

_____ Although every proprietor knows his own, … all things, so long as they will last, are used in common amongst them. Thomas Morton regarding the Five Nations in North America Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the concept of the ‘commons’ has steadily ascended in significance in activist circles, scientific literature ...
Read More
The Commons versus Capitalism