As the Trump administration moves to roll back clean energy tax credits, the real question isn’t whether renewable energy will survive, but who will own and control the infrastructure that powers America’s future.
In Democracy in Power, Sandeep Vaheesan argues that New Deal rural electrification efforts can serve as a model for public power in today’s energy system. There are, however, important differences between the political economy of rural electrification and that of today’s climate crisis. Understanding these distinctions can help us be clear-eyed about the political hurdles facing modern public power movements.
Calls for public ownership often highlight the downsides of private ownership: how capitalist firms prioritize profit over providing quality services at fair prices. But what, specifically, do we value in its public counterpart? While Sandeep Vaheesan defends public ownership in the power sector primarily on democratic grounds, the left should emphasize its potential to address key obstacles to rapid decarbonization.
What can the history of publicly-governed electrical utilities in the twentieth century teach us about today’s struggle for an accountable power sector? Sandeep Vaheesan kicks of a symposium on his new book, Democracy in Power, by tracing the history of electrification during the New Deal and offering a blueprint for a publicly-led path to decarbonization.
Universities’ decisions in dealing with the 2008 financial crisis laid the foundation for the current financial and social crisis in higher education.
One in three Americans has a debt that has been handed over to a collection agency. Lawmakers continue to throw credit at the problem and punish borrowers when they struggle to repay. To escape this cycle, we need an approach to debt relief based on the principle of human dignity, a foundational concept in human rights law.
In The Quiet Coup, Mehrsa Baradaran takes the conversation about neoliberalism beyond the realm of economics, focusing instead on legal revolutions, the conservative reaction to the Civil Rights Movement, the legacy of decolonization, and the alliance between libertarians and the Christian Right.
Though the urban-rural divide can sometimes appear like a primordial fault line in American political life, it is a relatively recent development. The Democratic Party’s collapse in the countryside was the predictable consequence of decisions to prioritize certain constituencies to the neglect of others, as it championed the shift to the metropolitan knowledge economy.
Javier Milei aims to dismantle the welfare state and eradicate left-wing social movements. To what extent can the law stop him?
Recent years have witnessed a sea change in consumer protection, ushered in by a new generation of enforcers who reject many of the basic premises from the neoliberal era. They aim not merely to ensure that consumers have the information necessary to discipline firms through choice, but to prevent businesses from using their power to shape markets in ways that take advantage of consumers.
As neoliberal attacks on progressive taxation emptied public coffers, states and municipalities increasingly turned to fines and fees to generate revenue. More fundamentally, criminal punishment became a necessary correlate to a state that must enforce property rights against an ever-growing multitude.
Butler’s speculative fiction uses the freedom dreams of Black Americans to show how the structure of a political economy not only reflects but also shapes legal concepts. By challenging the perceived permanence of existing power structures, Afrofuturism creates space for envisioning new, emancipatory futures.
Academic freedom, a key indicator of the climate of university life, has seen a sharp decline in recent years. This change has been driven by both state and market forces, and reversing it will require not only defending the university we have, but building the university we want.
The intellectuals of the neoliberal movement are best understood as the losers of societal change — rearguard protectionists who decided that rather than concede to democracy, they would subvert and delegitimize it.
Soon after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the news filled with panicked complaints about “retail theft.” This manufactured crisis replicates the longstanding strategy of the Chamber of Commerce in nurturing a conservative backlash to social movements.
