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1 month ago | 
phenomenalworld.org | Zaynab Quadri |Andrew Elrod |Tim Barker
Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office is set to accelerate the growth of the US defense budget. Having increased from $590 billion to $742 billion during the first Trump administration, a 26 percent increase, annual defense spending has rapidly regained its place as a congressional priority since the Obama years.
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2 months ago | 
dissentmagazine.org | Andrew Elrod |Ned Resnikoff |Brian Callaci |Sandeep Vaheesan
Tenants on the March: An Interview With Cea Weaver “Organizing tenants has the potential to shape the political landscape for decades to come.” ▪ Winter 2025 In many parts of the country, rising rents have hit a political limit, as politicians, unions, and community organizations increasingly recognize the centrality of housing to the cost-of-living crisis.
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Feb 14, 2025 | 
jacobin.com | Andrew Elrod
The current leadership crisis inside the Democratic Party has left many despairing the future of organized politics. Politically captive to landlords and developer groups locally, to employer associations and their financiers nationally, the Democratic Party entered the Trump administration the same way it ended Joe Biden’s: immobilized. “We’re not going to swing at every pitch,” explained House leader Hakeem Jeffries on January 29.
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
dissentmagazine.org | Peter Dreier |Andrew Elrod |William Kornblum
The Battle Over Los Angeles’s Mansion Tax The Measure ULA campaign shows how a housing-labor coalition can transform the political landscape, even in the face of staunch special interest reaction. ▪ Winter 2025 Carlos Casillas, a fifty-year-old renter in Los Angeles, lives in a 150-square-foot studio apartment in Highland Park, a longtime Latino neighborhood that has been gentrifying. The rent is $1,450 a month. “I had no choice,” he said. “I needed a place to live.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
phenomenalworld.org | Sandeep Vaheesan |Andrew Elrod
President Joe Biden began his term with Rooseveltian ambitions. Perhaps the most exemplary were those to remake the electric power industry. To this end, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the United States’ first national climate law, could disburse as much as $800 billion over the next ten years for clean energy investment if it survives without amendment.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
dissentmagazine.org | Michael Kazin |Andrew Elrod |Aziz Rana |Mark Engler
The Decline of Union Hall Politics To become a party based among workers again, Democrats must remember that partisan commitment often grows from local roots. ▪ Fall 2024 Everybody knows most white working people no longer vote for Democrats, but there’s no agreement why. Leftists blame neoliberals for enacting policies that deregulated business instead of redistributing wealth.
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Oct 11, 2024 | 
phenomenalworld.org | Kate Mackenzie |Tim Sahay |Andrew Elrod
At September’s UN General Assembly in New York, Brazil’s President Lula described the international financial system as a “Marshall Plan in reverse” in which the poorest countries finance the richest. Driving the point home, Lula thundered, “African countries borrow at rates up to eight times higher than Germany and four times higher than the United States.”Lula is not alone in this diagnosis.
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Oct 3, 2024 | 
phenomenalworld.org | Henry M.J. Tonks |Ella Coon |Andrew Elrod
A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism By Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein Princeton University Press, 2023 Campaigning for the presidency in the midst of the 2008 economic crisis, Hillary Clinton would put this arch question to critics of her husband’s presidency: “I always wonder what part of the 1990s they didn’t like: the peace or the prosperity?” Historians of the United States agree that such nostalgia for the 1990s misinterprets the...
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Sep 26, 2024 | 
phenomenalworld.org | Andrew Elrod |Ted Fertik |Daniela Gabor |Tim Sahay
Total debt stood $2 trillion higher than before but $500 billion had been purchased by the Social Security trust fund. ↩For the popularization of the idea that federal borrowing would “squeeze out” corporate investment, see “Simon Voices ‘Horror’ at Size of Deficit in Ford’s Budget, Denies He Will Quit,” Wall Street Journal, January 17, 1975, p. 3; “Burns Gives Ford Package Mixed Review, Vows Moderate Fed Anti-Inflation Policy,” Wall Street Journal, January 31, 1975, p.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
dissentmagazine.org | Lily Geismer |Simon Torracinta |Jacqueline Jones |Andrew Elrod
A New Suburban Politics A more capacious suburban politics—beyond the myth of the white, affluent enclave—is fundamental to addressing the problems of racial segregation and economic inequality that shape American life. ▪ Fall 2024 Patchwork Apartheid: Private Restriction, Racial Segregation, and Urban Inequalityby Colin GordonRussell Sage Foundation, 2023, 284 pp.
