The historian’s last two books speak clearly and directly to a world in which democracy is in crisis.
Our Blue State/Red District series investigates seven red districts that returned GOP incumbents to the House but voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the policy rifts between congressional representatives and their constituents.
Today California legislators returned to their jobs in Sacramento, facing a new year and, for Democrats, a distressing new reality: their first session under the incoming presidency of Donald J. Trump.
Immigrant families feel fear. Children cry in school. Racial incidents increase across the country. Corporate stocks tumble following one man’s tweets. Every White House cabinet nomination becomes an occasion for dire speculation.
In the otherwise dark year of 2016, California doubled down on its faith in people and the future with major victories for labor, the environment and public education. Here are five ways the Golden State left the light on for the rest of the country.
Interviews with a range of thinkers reveal the likely shape of things to come during a Trump presidency.
Lately Barbara Ehrenreich, who studied theoretical physics in Reed College, has been drawn to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle– as she contemplates the impending Trump administration.
Often called to television roundtables and policy conferences to speak about race, economic inequality and labor, progressive scholar Dorian Warren talked to Capital & Main last week on the coming Trump years.
Maria Elena Durazo knows about immigrant workers, labor and civil rights. She has headed up the hospitality union UNITE HERE’s Immigration, Civil Rights, and Diversity program since 2014.
Last fall, Robert Reich published Saving Capitalism, in which he called for a sweeping realignment of political power to counter the excesses of contemporary capitalism. A realignment has followed, but not the kind Reich had in mind.
If Bill McKibben was not optimistic about the future of the climate movement in the wake of the jarring U.S. presidential election, neither was he particularly sanguine before.
One clear winner to emerge from Tuesday’s statewide election was California education. Proposition 55, the wealth-tax initiative, swept to victory with a 62 percent approval margin. Its passage will extend until 2030 Proposition 30’s emergency stabilization funding passed by voters in 2012.
Most initiatives that appeared on the California ballot passed this Tuesday, but not everyone came away a winner. Capital & Main presents our writers’ analysis of what happened to eight key ballot measures – and why.
With a wink to Thomas Hobbes, this year’s election season has been nasty, brutish and long. Today it comes to an end, allowing us to look back on some of Capital & Main’s best reporting on issues that affect Californians on the most fundamental levels.
“This could be the shot heard round the world!” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders told a Los Angeles rally held Monday in favor of Proposition 61. About 650 office workers, health-care activists and California nurses gathered that morning in Pershing Square to support the drug pricing initiative.
Under state law, an independent expenditure committee can funnel unlimited amounts of money from corporations, nonprofits and wealthy donors, as long as it does not coordinate spending activity with candidates, who are under strict, albeit voluntary campaign limits. Next week Bill Raden will report on the unprecedented amount of contributions made by California’s charter school lobbies to influence nearly three-dozen state Assembly and Senate races, along with several local school board elections.
Co-published by The Nation
Ordinary working people, especially the young and people of color, have been so much and for so long exploited in Arizona that for many, labor and political activism have become lifelong governing passions, not just a matter of phone-banking on a weekend or two in an election season. Their long misfortunes have galvanized labor into becoming a voter registration powerhouse and a formidable organizer in the fielding of candidates.
A New Series This week Capital & Main continues to look at issues and individuals that are playing a part in this month’s election.
Last night’s Republican debate got underway following a day of national demonstrations in favor of raising the American minimum wage to $15 an hour — a day of protest accompanied by nothing-to-lose strikes by fast-food workers. The debate began with a question about raising the minimum wage. The first candidate to speak said America’s wages were, in fact, “too high” and that the current federal minim wage of $7.25 has to stay where it is.
The second presidential hopeful argued that the reason there are high unemployment rates among young African Americans is “because of those high wages.” The next candidate followed by calling the minimum wage “a disaster” for the 20th century and predicted catastrophe for the 21st should the day come when higher wages “make people more expensive than a machine.”
For a moment it looked as though the debate would become a contest to see which candidates would lower the minimum wage the most.
» Read more about: Not Debatable: Minimum Wage Movement Gains Ground »