Over the past year, the Trump administration’s science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) educational program garnered $300 million in pledges from big tech companies. Implicit in this push is the commonly accepted though questionable notion that millions of cutting-edge STEM jobs await US workers… | more…

There is much discussion on the left about the connections and relative importance of class, race, gender, and the environment. Some, like political scientist Adolph Reed, take a class-first approach and criticize those who place an emphasis on race and gender as engaging in an identity politics that often shades into support for the neoliberalism that has wreaked havoc on working people for the past several decades…. | more…

Howard Watizkin, author, with the Working Group on Health Beyond Capitalism, of Health Care Under the Knife: Moving Beyond Capitalism for Our Health, spoke about his life and his work, December 4, at the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine Colloquia Series… | more…

Fasanella’s father delivered ice to people in his Bronx neighborhood and his mother worked in a neighborhood dress shop drilling holes into buttons. In her spare time, she was an anti-fascist activist. The family’s experience informed his art just as Michael Yates’s working class roots and long career as a labor activist and educator shapes his latest book… | more…

One local human rights group has claimed 59 people have been killed, while some local residents and opposition politicians claim an even higher death toll. ¶ Because Washington backs the current Haitian government, however, you won’t have heard too much about this in the mainstream media…. | more…

The World Turned Upside Down? poses overarching questions for the new period opened by the Trump election and the continued growth of right-wing nationalisms. These questions are addressed through a series of essays that carefully map the national, class, racial, and gender dimensions of the state, capitalism, and progressive forces today. Sober assessment is crucial for the left to gain its political bearings in this trying period and the uncertainties that lie ahead. | more…

If you have ever felt overwhelmed by the problems facing working people on seemingly every front, economist and labor educator Michael Yates has written a timely book. In Can the Working Class Change the World? he makes the case that the working class — and only the working class — can indeed overcome economic inequality, eliminate racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination, and meet the challenge of environmental degradation and climate change…. | more…

Preparation and militancy, though essential, don’t guarantee success. In Oklahoma and Kentucky, union leaders cut a poor settlement to end the dispute over the heads of those teachers who took action. Gains in one school, or in a city, or even across a state, can only be provisional absent wider changes in the political field. Hence the need for a vision of society which will consolidate and build from such gains, as Howard Ryan articulates… | more…

Most people in the United States have been trained to recognize fascism in movements such as Germany’s Third Reich or Italy’s National Fascist Party, where charismatic demagogues manipulate incensed, vengeful masses. We rarely think of fascism as linked to the essence of monopoly-finance capitalism, operating under the guise of American free enterprise. But, as Michael Joseph Roberto argues, this is exactly where fascism’s embryonic forms began gestating in the United States, during the so-called prosperous 1920s and the Great Depression of the following decade. This book is a necessity for anyone who fears America tipping ever closer, in this era of Trump, to full-blown fascism… | more…

In a recent appearance on Nick Ferrari’s LBS show, Jacob Rees-Mogg defended the UK’s colonial past, saying that it was ‘not wholly a bad thing’ with ‘bad bits’ and ‘good bits’ such as Britain’s role in ending the slave trade which he describes as ‘really wonderful’. He has this Great White Man view of history, talking of noble ‘heroes’ such as General Gordon at Khartoum, as well as ‘rogues’. It is this sort of history that Gerald Horne eviscerates in this scholarly, brutal and powerful book…. | more…

Jeb Sprague, lecturer on sociology at the University of Virginia and author of Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, talks to Sara Montes de Oca of RT News about recent crackdowns on protesters demanding the ouster of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse | more…

When the time came to say our goodbyes and lal salaams (red salutes), I told the aged man that he should not have taken all this effort to come so far with us. He replied: ‘You have come all the way from Kolkata to learn about us, our struggles, our concerns. You care about us… | more…

Howard Waitzkin, author, with the Working Group on Health Beyond Capitalism, of Health Care Under the Knife: Moving Beyond Capitalism for Our Health, will be on hand at two gatherings in California’s Bay Area to talk about his book… | more…