Mask-off outbursts by Maga insiders and most strikingly, the destruction and reconstruction of the presidential seat, with a huge new $300m ballroom, means Trump isn’t planning to leave the White House when his term ends, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
Latest editorial
Debt, a core tool of capitalism
Far from being opposed to it, capitalism depends on debt as a way of enforcing loyalty to the profit system from those that have the least to gain from it, explains JOHN GREEN
The debt phenomenon is not just found in the housing market and the student loan business, but everywhere you look. Capitalists depend on selling ever more products; if they can’t sell, they make no profit. That is why we are urged to buy ever more consumer items by slick advertising and seductive publicity.
BEN CHACKO speaks with Knesset member OFER CASSIF about rising political violence, the prospects for peace and his continuous ‘silencing by suspension’
The City is leaning on Rachel Reeves to cut welfare spending — when what’s needed is cuts to all the benefits given to the mega rich, corporations and banks to help them not pay or blatantly dodge their fair share of tax, explains BERNIE EVANS
The choice between two Blairites to revamp the tepid centrism of our ruling party doesn’t even come as cold comfort as we wander the city streets suffering from their third decade of austerity and the fifth of wage stagnation, writes MATT KERR
ANN HENDERSON looks at the trailblazers of the Women’s Trade Union League and their successful fight for female factory inspectors — a battle that echoes in today’s workplace campaigns
HENRY FOWLER puts the strike of public-sector workers in New Zealand in the wider context of deteriorating employment conditions throughout the world’s major economies
MAT COWARD looks back at a protest 105 years ago this month, whose reporting by the media bears uncomfortable similarities with demos today
BEING in debt and being unable to pay it off is one of the recurring nightmares for so many people and it has been the basis for many tragic lives in novels — most famously in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield.
In David Copperfield, the clerk Wilkins Micawber was incarcerated in a debtors’ prison after failing to meet his creditors’ demands. His long-suffering wife Emma stood by him, despite his financial exigencies that forced her to pawn all her family’s possessions.
Micawber’s name has become synonymous with someone who lives in hopeful expectation but is always financially on the edge. This has formed the basis for the Micawber Principle: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.”
Similar stories
Our housing crisis isn’t an accident – it’s class war, trapping millions in poverty while landlords and billionaires profit. To solve it, we need comprehensive transformation, not mere tokenistic reform, writes BECK ROBERTSON
In the second extract from her new memoir, former NUM headquarters staffer HILARY CAVE recounts the bitter struggle to provide sustenance for strikers’ families, and the invidious role of David Willetts – now in the House of Lords
Charles Dickens was facing a return to the destitution that had blighted his childhood, and it was this which drove him to write the remarkable best-seller which changed the politics of Christmas forever, writes MAT COWARD
Modern Christmas as we know it, with its trees, dinner menu, cards and time off from work, only dates back to the early days of modern socialism as we know it, writes KEITH FLETT, checking in on Marx, Engels and the Chartists in the 1800s