ZNetwork

4 days ago | znetwork.org | Jim Hightower

How ironic: The most inefficient bureaucracy in government turns out to be Donald Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”That could be humorous, except that DOGE — a creature of the right-wing Project 2025 — has been devastating to millions of people. And it’s about to get worse. Elon Musk — the flighty überrich autocrat put in charge of “efficiency” by his buddy Trump — is now going after the Social Security deposits of 73 million senior citizens.

5 days ago | znetwork.org | Sarah Schulman |Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

“We are all led to solidarity by a complicated array of emotional, political, material and coincidental experiences,” novelist, activist and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman told me recently as we discussed her new book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity. “What really matters in the end is what we conclude from all these influences.”Her reflections on the importance of solidarity are timely in this moment, as solidarity with Palestinians has become increasingly criminalized.

5 days ago | znetwork.org | Sarah Schulman

Sarah Schulman Sarah Miriam Schulman (born July 28, 1958) is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

5 days ago | znetwork.org | Eric Blanc

Factory jobs are not inherently good jobs. Even if Donald Trump’s trade policies bring factories back to the United States, workers need unions to make those jobs well-paying and safe — and Trump has been the most anti-union president in years. President Donald Trump and his defenders claim that his recent tariffs will usher in “a new Golden Age of American industrialization and prosperity.” As the president put it, “Tariffs are not just about protecting American jobs.

6 days ago | znetwork.org | Paul Rogers

Although Donald Trump is thoroughly unpredictable on many issues, his support for Israel’s government remains firm for now, allowing Binyamin Netanyahu to continue with the devastating war in Gaza. Israel aims to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its Palestinian population and repopulate it with Jewish settlers, according to work by the Washington-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.