Americans have seen their wages shrivel as manufacturing has been repeatedly outsourced to low-cost jurisdictions such as China, Bangladesh and Vietnam.  Much of the prevailing conventional wisdom over the past few decades has been that manufacturing is not a necessary part of a wealthy nation, that we live in a “post-industrial” world, that is, one […]

Count Germany as the latest country to abandon the market fundamentalism that has characterized economic policymaking in the West for the past 40 years. A recent piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine featured a public call from Deutsche Bank, urging sweeping state participation in efforts to reconstruct a new car industry fit for the 21st century, […]

The COVID-19 pandemic presents an existential conundrum to the structure and principle of employer-based health care and its various supporters and dependents. The loss of a job often cuts off access to health care, adding greater weight to the challenges of dealing with this public health crisis. And this is widely exacerbated by a longstanding […]

DAILY CALLER—Marshall Auerback discusses how a principled populism that addresses working-class interests could emerge in the GOP.

“Populism” is a term that since the modern era has been generally trotted out to mean a political attitude that reflects widespread anger and resentment against powerful elites, while among stenographers for the power class, populism has been reflexively trotted out to warn against the passions and wants of the mob. Who is using that […]

The likely configuration of the new Senate represents a potential obstacle toward some of the grander Democratic Party policy visions outlined in President-elect Biden’s program.  Almost certainly, we can forget about a Green New Deal (barring the possibility of a few wind turbines and solar panels being thrown into a broader policy that emphasizes public infrastructure). […]

As President-elect Joe Biden has been announcing members of his new team, he has been equally prone to pass on the message to the rest of the world that “America is back”.  While some degree of international re-engagement is a good thing, let us hope that the new administration understands that simply reconstructing the old […]

It’s now clear that Joe Biden will be America’s next president. While Democrats will undoubtedly celebrate this fact, the overall election results should give little comfort to them, given their failure to re-establish the party’s historically successful New Deal coalition, especially the working-class component.  If any election was ripe to reconstitute this coalition that sustained […]

As widely expected, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and 11 states have filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of using anticompetitive tactics to illegally monopolize the online search and search advertising markets. After the recent House Subcommittee Report came out, this action was only a matter of time. The question is […]

A House of Representatives sub-committee report on large technology platforms has determined that Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are abusive monopolies.  Matt Stoller has summarized the report’s recommended course of action: “ (1) a legislative break-up and restructuring of big tech platforms to restore competition online (2) a strengthening of laws against monopolies and mergers, […]

Amber and David Lapp have written movingly about the current plight of America’s workers (here and here). The commodification of labor that they describe is not new by any means. Over the last 40 years, inequality has mounted, and workers in turn have seen their quality of life eroded, as their income share of GDP […]

The Republican Study Committee’s American Worker Task Force has just released a new report, “Reclaiming the American Dream: Proposals to Empower the Workers of Today and Tomorrow”.  As such it represents another in a series of recent attempts to make the GOP the natural home for labor. There’s some good ideas in the paper, notably […]