2024 will become, as every national election since 2016 has, a referendum on Trump and MAGA. In that circumstance, Joe Biden—despite holding the support of only about 40 percent of the public—will have to be favored by the Democratic Party for reelection, assuming a health crisis doesn’t derail the octogenarian president.
The new young trade unionists desperately need the skills, knowledge, and toughness of the older generations. The old established unions need the drive, vigor, and esprit de corps of their new comrades. When these two trends merge, the labor movement will be back on the road—with a vengeance.
The social pillar that supported this political achievement of the Right was the mobilization of the ruling class and the affluent upper-middle classes, with their potential to pull along with them a certain broader audience.
On May 7, the Chilean right scored a major victory in elections to choose delegates to draft a new constitution for the country. The conservatives, who mostly want to maintain the current constitution drawn up under the Pinochet dictatorship, have more than the 60 percent support in the constitutional council they need to write the new constitution without having to offer any concessions to the left.
Marxist economic theory suggests that slumps will happen when the profitability of capital starts falling; eventually leading to a fall in total profits in an economy. Those profits can further be squeezed by increases in the cost of capital i.e. interest costs on borrowing.
The article is the first of a three-part series, first published in French at Tendance CLAIRE of the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) in France. The text is supported by the Clear Tendency of the NPA and the International Workers’ League.
There are by now an estimated 100 million people globally who have fled their homelands or become internally displaced by war, political repression or ethnic violence; by environmental destruction or economic collapse; or in many cases, by lethal combinations of these modern plagues.
First Republic is the third bank to fail after the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature. In total, $47bn in bank assets have disappeared into smoke, the losses being taken in part by the shareholders and holders of the bonds in these banks. But there has also been a cost to public funds.
So far in 2023, state lawmakers have introduced a record-breaking least 483 anti-trans bills. Put differently, only four states have not done so. These include banning parents from allowing their teens to attend drag shows, barring insurance companies from covering gender-affirming medical care (already in use for several decades), and even making it illegal for parents and medical providers to dispense gender affirming care to minors.
This “new machine” is supposed to press the corporations to pay their fair share. But given the dynamics of electoral politics—where there is always another election to plan for—and where Johnson will be looking to shore up his support, that “new machine” can become the vehicle by which Johnson’s wing of the Democratic Party co-opts another generation of activists.
This year alone, state lawmakers have introduced a staggering 483 anti-trans bills, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker, which compiles information from civil rights groups and other sources. Only four states have not had an anti-trans bill introduced this session.
Not only are the strike days consecutive, but all doctors have been called out, including those who work in emergency care. This puts the BMA at the forefront of the present trade union upsurge, and it is a significant step forward from the union’s last wave of strikes in 2016, which ended with the government unilaterally imposing an unpopular contract on junior doctors.
Senior officials in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right Cabinet—including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—and numerous right-wing lawmakers joined a crowd of as many as 20,000 pro-apartheid demonstrators who marched to Evyatar in a bid to legitimize the outpost, The Times of Israel reports.
What is certain is that credit terms are tightening, bank lending will drop and companies in the productive sectors will find it increasingly difficult to raise funds to invest and households to buy big ticket items. That is going to accelerate economies into a slump this year.
It is undeniable that the situation for Palestinians has become more dire over the last decade. The Israeli state has shifted even further to the right. After decades of military occupation, polls and surveys suggest that about 60 percent of Jewish Israelis favour segregation from Palestinian Israelis, and that 60 percent identify as right wing (rising to 70 percent among those aged 18-24).
