If today’s unionization rate in the US was the same as it was forty years ago (already a low bar, as that number is significantly down from the mid-1950s peak), the number of union members would be well over 30 million instead of about 17 million. In fact, though the workforce has increased by some 56 million since the early 1980s, the number of union members has fallen by over 3 million.
NATO’s 2022 “Strategic Concept,” Its First New Plan Since 2010, Declares Russia A “Threat” And China “Systemic Challenge.”
It demonizes the Eurasian powers as “authoritarian actors” and “strategic competitors,” essentially declaring a second cold war to maintain Western hegemony.
The US-led NATO military alliance has published a historic new plan outlining its goals. The document, officially titled the 2022 “Strategic Concept,” is the first such blueprint NATO has released since 2010.
Dispatch from the largest event in the organization’s 43-year history
“The white collar crime syndicate known as Corporate America is hereby put on notice that the working people of America have had enough!”
—Sean O’ Brien, Labor Notes 2022
“Fuck Jeff Bezos!”
—Christian Smalls, Labor Notes 2022
It is a testament to the power of On Necrocapitalism: A Plague Journal that a set of interventions written across the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic should remain so potent and resonant as we approach its fourth year. Writing about events as they happen is fraught with the risk of quickly sounding dated, that the authors will focus on aspects that didn’t have much cultural longevity or that the conclusions and predictions will soon ring hollow. None of these weaknesses haunt the incisive and at times magnificent On Necrocapitalism.
Dennis Gruending is an Ottawa-based author and a former member of Parliament from Saskatchewan.
The organized medical profession of the day was opposed to medicare and threatened to strike. People who supported the plan began to organize citizen-led community clinics and recruit sympathetic doctors to staff them.
New disclosures reveal RCMP surveillance of meetings on government-funded clinics at the dawn of medicare in the early 1960s, Dennis Gruending writes.