Global News and Analysis

One reason bullshit jobs endure is that they are politically convenient for a lot of powerful people. - David Graeber

I got deployed to Afghanistan, and my experience overseas showed me that if anything, I was making a difference for those with power and wealth. In fact, I didn’t really find what we were being told in America to be reflective of what was really going on in Afghanistan. In the simplest of terms, I felt like we were the big bully and the purveyor of violence. I was just using all of this expensive equipment in one of the poorest places on earth to serve the interests of a capitalist class.

Source: The Nation

We remember the students, the generational conflict, the cultural explosion—but we forget that it was, at heart, a working-class rebellion.

On the morning of June 10, 1968—a couple of weeks after French labor unions signed an agreement with Prime Minister Georges Pompidou to put an end to a crippling general strike—workers at the Wonder battery factory in the northern Parisian suburb of St. Ouen voted to return to the job.

Later that afternoon, as union representatives conferred outside the factory gates with the rank and file, an amateur camera crew captured the scene. The group’s 10-minute film, Wonder, May ’68, focuses on a young woman who has drawn a crowd around her. read more

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

Most of our mainstream political discourse on “fighting inequality” has revolved – for years now – around the more narrow goal of eliminating extreme poverty. Few of our elected leaders ever dare suggest that maybe we ought to think about eliminating extreme wealth as well. Even the mere idea seems a laughing matter.

Congressman Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat, knows all this from personal experience. Earlier this year, in a talk to the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Ellison suggested that the time has come to start contemplating the notion of a “maximum wage”. read more

Source: In These Times

As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ net worth topped $150 billion last week, making him the richest man in modern history, thousands of Amazon workers across Europe went on strike.

The work stoppage, which lasted three days at some facilities, was one of the largest labor actions against Amazon to date, and the first to receive widespread coverage in the U.S. media. But the strikes and protests in Spain, Germany and Poland were just the latest in an escalating series of actions against Amazon in Europe, where workers belonging to both conventional unions and militant workers’ organizations are forging a transnational movement against the internet juggernaut. read more