Jimmy McMillan, too, wants to put a stop to rent-seeking. David Shankbone, via Flickr
Reviews

Rent Control: A Review of Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles’s Captured Economy

Maybe we shouldn’t put too much faith in the hope that the rich will want to rein in their bad behavior.


The rents are too damn high. That’s the conclusion of Brink Lindsey (of the center-right Niskanen Center) and Steven M. Teles (of Johns Hopkins University and Niskanen) in their book The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality. By “rents,” Lindsey and Teles don’t mean what you’re late in paying your landlord, but rather “rent” as economists understand it: profits in excess of what a free market would normally allow. In recent years, they argue, large corporations and wealthy individuals have taken larger and larger slices of the economic pie not by creating things of value—inventing the next iPhone-like innovation, say—but by using government policies to quash competition. This involves not just “regulatory capture” (a social-science term for when the industry fox watches the consumer henhouse) but a broader takeover, with all levels of the government—both those who write the rules, and those who enforce them—bending the knee to particular business interests or organized elites.

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Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

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Palmyra's Great Colonnade, photographed in 2007. Alper Çuğun, via Flickr
Blog

Waiting for Syria


Sand continued to drift in through the open doors. The overhead fan swirled the grit into our clothes, hair, eyes, teeth. The women wore their hijabs tight across their faces, their eyes cast down, stealing glances at James and me. It was hard to tell what they thought of us, the only white people at the crossing. Certainly they were suspicious—mostly of me, I sensed, even though my head was also covered.

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Dian Parker is a freelance writer who has published in a number of magazines and literary journals. She is currently working on a collection of narrative nonfiction. Email: dianparker9@gmail.com

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US Marine Corps amphibious assault vehicles approach the USS Peleliu in Oura Bay, Okinawa. Joshua Hammond (US Navy), via Flickr
Nago, Japan
Interviews

All Your Bases Belong to Us: A Conversation with Japanese Activist Hiroshi Inaba

US military bases occupy a fifth of the Japanese island of Okinawa. The latest round of base construction, says activist Hiroshi Inaba, threatens not only the environment but also the idea that the Okinawan people have a real say over what a foreign military does on their land.

Eliza Egret and Tom Anderson

More than six decades after America’s post-World War II occupation of Japan officially ended, more than 50,000 US troops remain there. Over half of them are stationed on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, an island with a population of 1.3 million, which the United States values as a strategic base close to China and North Korea.

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Reviews

Collateral Damage: A Review of Helen Benedict’s Wolf Season

Helen Benedict’s novel Wolf Season describes how old wounds from the Iraq War linger on in the lives of three women.

Priya Malhotra

In her latest novel Wolf Season, Helen Benedict tells the stories of three women in a small town in upstate New York coping with the trauma of war—not just the direct experience of violence and death, but also the collateral damage it inflicts on loved ones. Rin is a rape-scarred Iraq War veteran who has returned to her hometown of Huntsville. Naema is an Iraqi refugee who lost her husband during the conflict and now works in the town as a doctor. Beth is a military wife dealing with an abusive husband and a troubled child.

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Carol Prior, a key activist in a grassroots movement to stop the Carmichael mining project in Australia. Photo by Alex Bainbridge, Green Left Weekly.
Bowen, Australia
Interviews

Canary in the Coal Mine: A Conversation with First Nations Activist Carol Prior

The Indian corporation Adani is establishing one of the world’s largest coal mining operations in Australia, affecting Aboriginal lands as well as the Great Barrier Reef. The toll on the land and sea, says Juru elder and environmentalist Carol Prior, will be felt around the world—in the loss of a rare and beautiful ecosystem, and a rare and beautiful culture.

Eliza Egret and Tom Anderson

In Australia, a new mining megaproject threatens to devastate the Great Barrier Reef and the land of First Nations peoples. The planned Carmichael mine, set to be one of the world’s largest, will be located in the northeastern state of Queensland, within the vast Galilee Basin. It will be owned and operated by the Indian conglomerate Adani, which plans to export most of the coal to India by sea, via a soon-to-be-expanded port that sits on the Great Barrier Reef.

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The city of Oaxaca's zócalo, or central plaza. M. Thierry, via Flickr
Blog

Ghost Lives

Robert Joe Stout

“Mira!” Erika wagged a slim forefinger toward vendors, gawkers, and ice cream-smeared toddlers moving through the city of Oaxaca’s central plaza as she turned to face me. “You think you’re seeing people but they’re not people, they’re ghosts!”

Erika had taught high school for nearly thirty years and was a member of the state teachers’ union. She had recently participated in a strike for better salaries and working conditions—a strike that the government had crushed just months earlier. “Ghosts,” she repeated with a sigh. “Oaxaca exists in the past. Maybe all of Mexico does.”

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Blog / Political Prose

The Dual Economy


In his new book The Vanishing Middle Class, MIT economist Peter Temin provides a short and accessible take on this country’s deeply unequal economy, which he argues now represents two different Americas. The first is comprised of the country’s elite workers: well-educated bankers, techies, and other highly skilled workers and managers, members of what he calls the “finance, technology, and electronics sector” (FTE)—the leading edges of the modern economy. A fifth of America’s population, these individuals command six-figure incomes and dominate the nation’s political system, and over the past half-century, they have taken a greater and greater share of the gains of economic growth. The other America, what he calls the “low-wage sector,” is the rest of the population—the dwindling ranks of clerks, assemblers, and other middle-income workers, and an expanding class of laborers, servers, and other lowly paid workers.

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Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

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News

Women’s March

Amid war and ruin in Syria, a Kurdish-led movement has established a society ruled by radical democracy—of, for, and by women.


Women and girls marching with flags
Women and girls march through the village of Derbesi to celebrate International Women’s Day 2016.

A few years ago, I began hearing remarkable stories about a social movement in northern Syria. Not far from the wreckage of Aleppo, a society founded on principles of direct democracy and women’s rights has taken root in the predominantly Kurdish region known as Rojava. There, in defiance of the Islamic State’s brutal patriarchy, women are leading the way in political decision-making and fighting on the frontlines in their own battalions.

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Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com

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Photo by Amy, via Flickr
Blog

Human Subjects

Jennifer Kotlewski

In 2013 I moved to Ndola, a city in northern Zambia, to work on an HIV research project. Ndola is the hub of the country’s copper mining industry, a bustling commercial center that draws entrepreneurs from South Africa and beyond. My organization worked with government clinics in villages around the Ndola area to provide HIV and family-planning counseling, care, and education. I’d recently graduated from a master’s program in public health, and a US-based research organization had hired me to co-lead a year-long study of HIV infection among women.

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Photo by Patrick Emerson, via Flickr
Jacksonville, Florida
Commentary

Failing Grades

I was torn about failing a fifth-grader. In a poor, predominantly black school, there were plenty of tests but few right answers.

Chris Schumerth

“Man, I don’t know any of this stuff!”

It was Lamar, one of my fifth-grade students. He and his classmates were taking a reading assessment. Within minutes, Lamar had given up.

“Mister Schuma, I ain’t doing this!”

“Lamar, you need to be quiet while your classmates are testing,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll do fine if you give it a shot. No more talking.”

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Photo by David McNeary, via Flickr
Blog / Political Prose

Trump’s American Dream: You’ll Have to Be Asleep to Believe It


While there are many reasons why Donald Trump won the election, it’s clear that the movement of the white working class away from the Democratic Party had something to do with it. Given that this demographic seems to have put Trump over the top in the Electoral College, what do we expect his administration’s policies to do for this group—and for the working class (which, importantly, is increasingly nonwhite) more broadly?

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Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

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Blog / Political Prose

The Spiritual Crisis of the Modern Economy


The sun shining on a cityI’ve written a piece for The Atlantic about the hollowness of our modern economy and the effect it has on the working class.

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Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

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personal stories. global issues.