Within the workplace, the content and conditions of work are largely controlled by employers who often have an interest in degrading the quality of work, both to increase productivity and to increase their control over employees in the workplace. Outside the workplace, employers have both an incentive and the power to undermine measures that would improve the quality of work through the political process.
I just haven't waded into that territory. Obviously, if someone crosses some huge line, it's never something that I rule out. It would have to be kind of an egregious thing. I've said this both to my colleagues here and I say it across the board, you're never going to see me tell someone that they should never run.
Work, in the words of Karl Marx, is a "means of life" in two senses. It is, first of all, an instrument for human life. It is the activity by which we reproduce ourselves from day to day, from year to year, from generation to generation. But work also forms, so to speak, much of the matter of human life, at least for most people in any society with which we are familiar.
There's a window of opportunity for a left-wing nominee that may not come again for a generation. Democratic-socialist and liberal victories in New York City and elsewhere - with potentially more this fall - have changed the political playing field.
Populism may well have been the defining word of the previous decade: a shorthand for the insurgent parties that came to prominence in the 2010s, challenging the dominance of the liberal centre. But no sooner had it become the main rubric for discussing both the far left and far right than commentators began to question its validity: worrying that it was too vague, or too pejorative, or fuelling the forces to which it referred.
Dare, or the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, was created in 1983 by the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County school district. From the start, the program was a success. Its stated goal was "to equip elementary-school children with skills for resisting peer pressure to experiment with tobacco, drugs and alcohol." The initiative was embraced by police departments and politicians, and within just a few years the Dare curriculum had spread to more than three-quarters of the country's school districts.
Democratic Representatives Mike Thompson (CA-04) and Richard E. Neal (MA-01) even introduced a bill called the American Affordability Act, which promises to reduce housing, educational, and childcare costs with a variety of tax credits. Congressional campaign professionals have been urging candidates from coast to coast to adopt an "affordability agenda." And-for good reason-recent polling shows that the cost of living tops the list of voters' concerns.
In January, Florida Rep. Randy Fine made a typically bigoted post on X about his colleague in the House of Representatives, Ilhan Omar. The post was in conversation with a specious right-wing conspiracy alleging that Omar's net worth had increased, nefariously, through a variety of unspecified means-perhaps cryptically linked back to her Somali heritage. Fine asserted that to "solve all this," Omar ought to be "denaturalized and deported."
All I said to people who say, you have this tension, we didn't have any attention. All I said is, if you want to be a legislator and pass bills, it's important to have the votes to do it. It doesn't help to go online and criticize the people that you want to have because they're not as progressive as you are. She's been a star, eloquent, forceful, and the rest. And she gets along very well with Hakeem Jeffries. They have a New York connection, but I'm so glad she's here.
Traditionally, critiques of bureaucracy take the perspective of the little man caught in the obtuse machinations of faceless corporations or an unyielding state. Kafka's Joseph K., for example, or Catch-22's Yossarian. Even The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy begins with protagonist Arthur Dent lying in front of a bulldozer to thwart an intransigent planning department. In recent years, we've seen the return of anti-bureaucratic mobilization,
Mayor Wilson's clothes were purchased at Goodwill. One thousand Seattleites crowded into City Hall, hundreds of whom had never thought of it as their home. Along with me, Katie invited three speakers who presented a mosaic of hope: a Somali American graduate student, a formerly homeless man, and an elder who reminded us over and over again to be courageous and not content.
A friend recently told me a story that made this reality impossible to ignore. Her elderly parents live near an elementary school not far from the nation's capital. For several years, they had been quietly raising money to provide groceries and basic supplies for families whose children were going hungry. When Republicans suspended SNAP benefits, the need surged overnight. What had been a steady act of care suddenly became an emergency response.
