The MAGA movement has preyed on the economic decay and social malaise plaguing America’s neighborhoods, offering a suite of real and imagined villains to drive Trump’s ascension. The left must get back to basics, rebuilding the trust lost by the Democratic Party through genuine community building and connection across difference.
For the half-million people in the U.S. with kidney failure, survival rests in the hands of two powerful corporations — DaVita and Fresenius — that control over 70% of the outpatient dialysis market. But the history of dialysis isn’t a simple narrative of corporate consolidation; it’s a case study of how public funding can entrench private power in health care.
From the dialysis market to the pharmaceutical industry, health care is seeing growing consolidation and corporatization. Over the next month, this symposium will explore the financialization of various health care industries and begin to sketch the contours of a progressive pushback—how law, policy, and regulatory action can help erect guardrails to protect us from both illness and insolvency.
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.
