Today's Liberal News

“On the Kill Floors”: Essential Workers in Meatpacking Plants Still Lack Safety & COVID Protections

Amid a surge in COVID-19 cases, we look at the experiences of meatpacking workers during the pandemic and beyond. Dulce Castañeda, a founding member of Children of Smithfield, a Nebraska-based grassroots advocacy group led by the children and family members of meatpacking workers, says conditions in the meatpacking plants during the pandemic remained as usual.

How old television reruns scarred a generation: Part 2

Welcome back to a not-at-all political look at some television shows that somebody thought was a good idea but would live on as low-key means to scar a generation staying home sick from school. It’s not at all political, because we’re all very sick of politics and don’t want to talk about it anymore.

One in five houses is bought by someone who never moves in, real estate firm says

I’ve never owned land. Homeownership wasn’t really something that was talked about beyond my immediate household, but it has always been a dream of mine and a dream of my mother’s. For years before my mom bought her first home, we were renters, staying in two- and three-bedroom apartments, sometimes just us and sometimes with my aunt and cousins. That said, after years of renting herself, my grandmother was able to buy a home.

Private colleges aren’t the only places leaving students with serious student loan debt—I would know

Talking about student debt and talking about the cost of college are topics that generally go hand-in-hand. While some progressives, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, argued on behalf of eliminating all student debt, period, others in the Democratic Party, like President Joe Biden, have taken up a much more conservative stance: forgiving up to $10,000 in federal student loans per borrower.

State colleges and universities play a funny role in this dialogue.

Want to fight economic and racial inequality at the same time? Think union

Happy Labor Day, if a Labor Day that represents the cut-off date for unemployment benefits for millions of people and on which the federal minimum wage hasn’t risen for well over a decade offers much to be happy about. But it is a day to celebrate workers—and the labor movement that has built what power U.S. workers have.

So let’s take a few minutes to make clear the difference that unions have made, both to their members and to all workers.

“Massacre of My Dreams”: Reporter Bilal Sarwary on Fleeing Kabul & How Afghans Are “Thirsty for Peace”

We look at the crisis in Afghanistan with Bilal Sarwary, an Afghan journalist who was based in Kabul and reported on Afghanistan for 20 years before he fled with his family after the Taliban seized power. We first spoke to Bilal on August 18, three days after the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan after the U.S.-backed Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. At the time, Bilal was hoping to stay in Afghanistan, but just days later he and his family boarded a flight to Doha.

How to Deradicalize Your Town

When I first went to Mechelen, Belgium, the summer was hot and angry. Leaders everywhere in 2018 seemed to be building ever-higher walls and declaring new definitions of us and them. In the United States, the Supreme Court upheld President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. In Israel, the Knesset passed a law rendering the right to self-determination in the State of Israel a privilege “unique to the Jewish people.

2020 Was Almost Worse Than 2008

On Thursday, March 12, 2020, the news from the financial markets was grim. America’s stock markets suffered losses worse than anything in 2008. Only Black Monday, in October 1987, and the darkest days of 1929 were worse. That was bad, but for insiders, the stock market was not the real worry. A “correction” was in order. The world was heading into shutdown. It was to be expected that share prices would fall.

Another Extremist Law That Americans Have to Live With

Once again, politicians and judges are limiting abortion without any understanding of what pregnancy can, and often does, ask of the human body. To conservative legislators in Texas, a new law banning abortion after about six weeks of gestation is a ploy to subvert Roe v. Wade. But to doctors like me, the measure reveals how thoughtless its designers are and how willing they are to let pregnant patients suffer and die.I’m an obstetrician who specializes in high-risk cases.

American Spies Are Fighting the Last War, Again

Twenty years ago, al-Qaeda hijackers carried out the worst-ever terrorist attack on American soil, killing nearly 3,000 innocents, terrifying the nation, and forever changing the course of history—ushering in America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.Yet September 11 was also something else: our worst intelligence failure in more than half a century. It was a surprise attack that should not have been a surprise.