Joseph A McCartin describes the making of an anti-union moment: “Although the data do not support the politically motivated attacks on public sector workers and their unions, a confluence of powerful factors has created a perfect storm that is overriding the facts, abetting efforts to scapegoat public employees and their unions, and making it easier for anti-union opinion makers to use a few outlying cases to drive a larger assault against the very concept of public sector unionism itself.” (Image: Paul Baker/2011)

Read Dissent's coverage of the protests in Wisconsin. Judith and Lewis Leavitt see in Madison the beginnings of a new class war in the United States; Andrew Kersten describes how the current struggle fits into Wisconsin's history of labor battles; and there's more on Dissent's blog by Paul Adler, Paul Buhle, Mark Engler, and Daniel Greenwood. (Image: protestors at the Wisconsin state capitol, Dennis Deary/Flickr/2011)

"Both legislators and media mavens argue that cutting into the social safety net is not merely necessary to reduce the deficit, but that it is mathematically inevitable," writes Amitai Etzioni. Such arguments, however, "fail to hold up-mathematically, morally, and politically." (Image: Social Security poster)

The Company Men is one of Hollywood's first serious attempts to grapple with the Great Recession. It is a "solid, intelligent, and unadventurous film," writes Leonard Quart. "[Director John] Wells grants little individuality and life to its characters and only skims the surface of the complex corporate ethos that shapes them." (Image: The Company Men)

In 1961, Robert Dahl described New Haven as a place where "power was dispersed across different social classes and economic interests," writes James Cersonsky. "In today's American city, Dahl's analysis runs dry. Decades of economic growth have contributed to income inequality and political marginalization rather than expanding the middle class...[W]e need an urban vision that is less technocratic and more critical of capitalist elites." (Image: March in New Haven, Matthew Evan Cobb/2010)

It wasn't just political grievances that set off the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. "Across the Arab world, the mantra of protests is the same: prices are too high, jobs are too scarce, and these autocracies are inept at solving the problem," writes Ariel I. Ahram. "As dictatorships teeter and some crumble, the question now is how new leaders will refashion the socioeconomic contract between ruler and ruled." (Image: Egyptian Market, H. Grobe/1987/Wikimedia Commons)

Michael Burawoy responds to Russell Jacoby's review of Erik Olin Wright's Envisioning Real Utopias: "These days, social scientists are concerned with what is, perhaps with what has been, but very rarely with what could be...Wright examines the empirical world in order to understand how it can be transcended." Jacoby resplies to Burawoy's argument. (Image: New Harmony, Indiana, by F. Bate in 1838 (Wikimedia Commons))

"The Euro is burning," writes Ulrich Beck, but few are rushing to defend the EU in its hour of need. "There is still hope for Europe, but only if it finally manages to escape the false alternatives bedeviling European political common sense: the principle that Europe's gain is the nations' loss....Anyone who wants national stability and security (social, financial, and environmental) must practice European solidarity." (Image:European Flag, S. Solsberg J. / 2005 / Wikimedia Commons)

Elia Suleiman's film The Time that Remains features four vignettes set in Palestine, spanning from 1948 to the present. Suleiman "has a hard time living with what he views as the volatile, oppressive, and absurd nature of being an Israeli Arab," writes Leonard Quart, "but it remains the experience that shapes his art."

Jo-Ann Mort describes the political possibilites that have opened up in North Africa: "...The revolution happening in Egypt today...is the beginning of something different for the Arab world. It offers the United States and Israel a young and educated constituency with which to engage...They are hungry for their chance to better their own countries, and they are looking less for enemies than for their own self-fulfillment." (Image: Army tank with Anti-Mubarak graffiti (Mona/Wiki. Commons/2011)

The United States has a president who "claims the post-ideological, responsible center" yet "stands accused of promulgating socialism by Americans who have no memory, and little understanding, of socialist ideology," writes John Summers. "Such is life after ideology." When Daniel Bell sounded ideology's death knell fifty years ago, he said little about its non-Marxist forms. "Of these forms, which focus disagreement and discipline action, contemporary America may need more." (Image: OTFW/Wiki. Commons/2010)

What accounts for Andrew Ross's journey from cultural studies celebrity to chronicler of deteriorating labor conditions? It was an "intellectual mugging," writes Kevin Mattson. "What once appeared to be a liberating application of high theory to essential aspects of political and cultural experience now seems silly. Tenured radicals have awakened out of their comfortable nineties slumber to reckon with full-scale catastrophe." (Images: Siebbi/2008/Wikimedia Commons; 2005/Wikimedia Commons)

Daniel Bell - sociologist, writer, editor, and public intellectual - died in late January at age ninety-one. Here, Michael Kazin, Morris Dickstein, and Daniel A. Bell remember his life and career. Writes Kazin, "For Dan, to be an intellectual was to be engaged, rationally but intensely, in the unending effort to define and realize a better world."

Last November, the federal government shut down eighteen websites alleged to have engaged in "wilfull copyright infringement." "While the November shutdowns were limited to a one-time, concentrated effort, the philosophy that guided them might soon become law," writes Liel Leibovitz. But it will do little to solve the problem of protecting intellectual property on the Net. (Image: banner used in Operation In Our Sites)

"If anyone thinks that the vitriol that Glenn Beck spews on his radio and TV shows can't stir people to aggressive and hateful action," writes Peter Dreier, "they should take a look at the postings on his website, the Blaze, about Frances Fox Piven." She is "'unnerved' by this recent wave of blog attacks and death threats...But she's determined not to let the right-wing assault intimidate her." (Image: Glenn Beck [Luke X. Martin/Wiki. Commons/2010])

In 2008, Candidate Obama criticized the Bush Administration's "reckless and cynical" policy in Darfur, arguing that "Washington must respond to the ongoing genocide...with consistency and strong consequences." "But Obama's policies, no less than Bush's," write Eric Reeves, "are 'reckless and cynical.'" Obama "cannot slough off responsibility for what he himself called a 'policy of genocide.'" (Image: Obama and Sudan Envoy Scott Gration; State Dept)

Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias “seeks to counter widespread cynicism about radical social transformation,” writes Russell Jacoby. But in the end, “the book is startling and depressing evidence of what has happened to American academic Marxism, at least its sociological variant, over the last thirty years. It has become turgid, vapid, and self-referential.” (Image: Robert Owen’s New Harmony, Indiana, engraved by F. Tate in 1838)

Though the Fox News Channel is often called a "biased" cable news station, "few dispute the journalistic orientation of the overall enterprise," writes Eric Alterman. "This is a mistake. Fox is something new...It provides almost no actual journalism. Instead, it gives ideological guidance to the Republican party and millions of its supporters...[It] functions as the equivalent of a political perpetual motion machine." (Image: Chuck Kennedy/White House/2009).

Joanne Barkan reports on how the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation have exerted influence on education policy in the United States. "A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels." See an MSNBC interview with Barkan about this article here. (Image: Bill Gates; Guety/Wikimedia Commons/2004)

A recent study reported the discovery of toxic chromium in tap water across the United States. The small amounts detected might not be dangerous, but as Ben Ross writes, "The appearance of scientific uncertainty can be used to ward off regulation of toxic substances, so money and influence are applied to create artificial disagreement." The histoy of suppressed information surrounding chromium toxicity is no different - and it "leads behind the curtains of history's center stage." (Image: Dr. Willard Machle; National Library of Medicine)