SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
poverty
Report Shows How IMF-Imposed Austerity Hurts Poor Countries Already Reeling From Iran War
"Instead of helping countries withstand another major shock," Oxfam's executive director said, the IMF "is forcing them to cut back on the very spending that can help protect people and recover."
Oct 13, 2026
The US-Israeli war with Iran has exacerbated economic hardship across the world. It's especially bad for the developing nations currently being forced to implement austerity programs by the International Monetary Fund.
Under IMF loan programs, countries struggling with debt are required to reduce government budget deficits by introducing spending cuts and tax increases that tend to hurt their poorest citizens. They often include cuts to public services and welfare programs, caps on government workers' salaries, and the elimination of subsidies that keep basic needs affordable.
According to a report out Monday from Oxfam—amid the IMF's annual meeting in Bangkok this week—24 of the 28 nations currently receiving IMF loans have been forced to implement austerity measures. Some of them, like Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau, are among the poorest nations in the world.
Even before the war—which has caused oil prices to soar and driven inflation worldwide—people in many of these countries were struggling to meet their basic needs and facing severe economic pressure: 51% were food insecure, and 57% lacked access to clean cooking fuel.
Emergency government programs have been able to backstop the worst effects for up to 130 million of the world's poorest people, according to a report published before the meeting by the United Nations Development Program.
But as those countries run out of resources, many are being forced to pivot, and the stiff requirements imposed by the IMF may exacerbate the hardship.
In Ecuador and Guinea-Bissau, the IMF is requiring governments to cut spending, raise taxes, or both to the equivalent of roughly 4% of the nations' annual gross domestic product (GDP).
The terms are even harsher for Sierra Leone, where the government is required to cut spending or raise costs equivalent to more than five times its annual healthcare budget.
A loan approved last week for Bolivia requires the government to slash as much as 8.5% of its GDP from the deficit—about twice its annual healthcare spending. The country has already been forced to eliminate a diesel subsidy that drove high prices down for consumers and businesses.
The IMF has acknowledged that these cuts are likely to make the strain worse for many low-income countries already suffering from the war, but said they had "no choice" but to cut spending or restructure their debts.
Oxfam International executive director Amitabh Behar noted that during previous crises like the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the IMF has enacted tools to ease the burden on nations in debt by providing emergency loans and access to foreign currency without requiring additional borrowing.
"But this time, the fund is taking a very different path," he said. "Instead of helping countries withstand another major shock, it is doubling down on austerity—forcing them to cut back on the very spending that can help protect people and recover—and leaving them even more vulnerable to the next crisis."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Development Without the Poor: The Footprint of the World Bank and IMF in Thailand
From October 12-18, 2026, the World Bank and IMF will hold their Annual Meetings in Thailand. Assembly of the Poor will mobilize to demonstrate that their policy prescriptions have inflicted severe harm on our people from the past to the present, and threaten our future.
Oct 06, 2026
Following World War II, the United States played a pivotal role in establishing the World Bank and the International Monetary Fundm or IMF. Originally tasked with post-war reconstruction, their focus soon shifted toward development aid for developing countries, including Thailand. In 1961, these two institutions guided the drafting of Thailand’s First National Economic Development Plan. They recommended large-scale infrastructure investments—ports, highways, and mega-dams—alongside import-substitution industrialization, agricultural reform through technology, chemical inputs, and genetic improvement of crops and livestock, as well as logging concessions aimed at generating national revenue. Land allocation programs were also introduced. Together, these policies triggered transformations that severely disrupted the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and peasants.
The recommendations of both institutions led directly to widespread deforestation and the destruction of natural resources through logging concessions and hydroelectric dam projects. Agricultural reforms degraded local ecosystems and drove up production costs while crop prices plummeted, pushing farmers into staggering debt and bankruptcy. Land allocation programs largely failed the rural poor; title deeds fell predominantly into the hands of bureaucrats, state officials, and wealthy investors. Smallholder farmers and peasants who did receive plots were left to clear and cultivate the land without government support, ultimately forcing many to abandon their holdings. A considerable number of people migrated to urban centers as cheap labor, crowding into slums area, facing homelessness, and becoming landless.
Development under the guidance of the World Bank and the IMF continued under subsequent National Economic and Social Development Plans—now in their 13th plan—yet consistently disregarded the poor. The two institutions hold joint Annual Meetings worldwide, having convened in Thailand for the first time in 1991. That same year, the World Bank approved a loan for the Pak Mun Dam in Ubon Ratchathani Province despite fierce opposition from many local villagers and civil society groups. The fallout from the dam was devastating: destroyed fisheries, extinction of fish species, community conflict and division, and electricity generation that fell far short of projections. It remains an indelible stain left by the World Bank in Thailand—one notably absent from its official history.
We reaffirm that genuine development must respect community rights over land, soil, water, and forests, uphold food sovereignty, and guarantee universal welfare as a fundamental human right.
The consequences of these development frameworks stirred widespread hardship among small-scale farmers, igniting protests, petitions, and grassroots resistance against top-down development in every nook and cranny. Escalating tensions between rural communities and the state led to arrests, prosecutions, violent crackdowns, and in some instances, the assassination of grassroots leaders. In December 1995, villagers impacted by dam constructions, communities evicted from forest areas, residents affected by the construction of an industrial plant, small-scale fishers affected by commercial fishing, marginalized workers, and slum dwellers gathered at Thammasat University and they announced the establishment of the “Assembly of the Poor” on December 10, 1995. The Assembly of the Poor moved their assembly to Khong Chiam District in Ubon Ratchathani Province, along the banks of the Mun River, where they drafted the "Pak Mun Declaration." The declaration proclaimed that local communities had been systematically impoverished by developmental policies that ignored their existence—leaving them poor not only economically, but impoverished in rights, opportunities, and political power. They declared that they had been made poor and would rise up to fight and demand that the state resolve their poverty.
Just two years later, during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis (the "Tom Yum Kung Crisis"), the IMF stepped in with a bailout package for Thailand. To ensure rapid debt repayment, the IMF imposed stringent conditions: passing laws to regulate water usage, privatizing state enterprises to reduce public spending and boost revenue, and enacting legislation to remove universities and hospitals from the civil service system. These policies directly burdened the poor and sparked widespread popular resistance.
On September 3 this year, the World Bank released its report titled Building Thailand’s Future Today, declaring that poverty in Thailand had been virtually eradicated and touting a vision to elevate Thailand to a "high-income country" by 2037 through investment in five future industries. For the Assembly of the Poor, this represents a new wave of resource grabbing: data Center projects consuming massive amounts of water and electric power at the expense of local communities; green economy agendas and carbon credits threatening community rights; luxury tourism displacing Indigenous settlements; free trade agreements undermining local seed sovereignty; and transit-oriented developments displacing the urban poor. The report also urged immediate policy recommendations to establish legal and institutional frameworks for economic corridors beyond the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC), paving the way for continuous, long-term structural development.
Compounding this, the IMF instructed the Thai government to abandon universal social welfare in favor of "targeted welfare" to maintain fiscal discipline—forcing vulnerable citizens to undergo demeaning "poverty testing" to access basic welfare benefits. The Thai government swiftly embraced these recommendations and accelerated projects aligned with both institutions, once again shifting the burden onto the poor and small-scale farmers. This is not building the nation's future; it is mortgaging it to international capital under a development paradigm that has dominated Thailand since its First National Economic and Social Development Plans, keeping citizens impoverished in rights, opportunities, and political power for over seven decades.
From October 12-18, 2026, the World Bank and IMF will hold their Annual Meetings in Thailand once again. Assembly of the Poor will mobilize to demonstrate that their policy prescriptions have inflicted severe harm on our people from the past to the present, and threaten our future. We reaffirm that genuine development must respect community rights over land, soil, water, and forests, uphold food sovereignty, and guarantee universal welfare as a fundamental human right. What is happening in Thailand is not an isolated story; it is part of a global neoliberal model through which international financial institutions strip developing nations, the poor, and peasants of their policy sovereignty. Our mobilization during the 2026 World Bank-IMF Annual Meetings in Bangkok is an international struggle to expose these policies, demand accountability, and reclaim policy sovereignty for the people.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Ahead of High-Stakes Election, Analysis Details Economic Gains of Brazil Under Lula
"The past almost four years have seen Brazil accomplish a great deal in terms of bringing people out of poverty, creating jobs, curbing hunger, and raising standards of living."
Sep 30, 2026
An analysis released Wednesday documents some of the major economic gains that Brazil has made over the past four years during the third term of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is currently in a close battle for reelection against rival Flávio Bolsonaro.
The analysis, published by the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), finds that, between 2022 and 2025, the Brazilian economy grew by a cumulative 8.9%, easily outpacing the average rate of growth in other South American countries.
This growth has been coupled with a drop in the unemployment rate, which has fallen from more than 9% in the second quarter of 2022 to just 5.4% in the second quarter of 2026.
Both poverty and food insecurity fell dramatically in the first two year's of Lula's term, the analysis finds, and in 2025, "Brazil was removed from the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Hunger Map after chronic undernourishment fell below 2.5%."
CEPR's report also gives credit to Lula's policies for improved economic conditions, including a new minimum wage law, an expanded maternity leave program, and increased average payments to low-income families given through the Bolsa Família program.
The economy during Lula's term is far from perfect, however, and the report flags high interest rates set by Brazil's central bank as a key factor in raising consumers' borrowing costs and increasing the rate of household delinquency.
CEPR also noted the negative impact of online betting apps, which Lula has pledged to ban starting next month, on Brazilian workers.
"Brazilian households lost an estimated R$62.5 billion (US$11.2 billion) to online betting in 2025," the report says, "while some 802,000 Bolsa Família households spent more than 2% of their income on betting in January 2025."
Jake Johnston, CEPR's director of international research, said that "the past almost four years have seen Brazil accomplish a great deal in terms of bringing people out of poverty, creating jobs, curbing hunger, and raising standards of living."
"This was done," Johnston added, "despite the lingering impact of the Covid pandemic, external economic shocks that affected the global economy, and excessively high interest rates."
The first round of Brazil's presidential election is set to take place on Sunday, and recent polls show Lula with a narrow lead over Bolsonaro, son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is still serving a criminal sentence for efforts to instigate a coup after his loss in the 2022 election.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The United States Desperately Needs a Care Package
The care that families provide—raising children, supporting elderly parents, tending to those who cannot fully care for themselves—is among the most economically productive work in any society.
Sep 30, 2026
Every day in the United States, millions of people wake up and face a version of the same impossible arithmetic. They need to earn income. They also need to care for their children, their aging parents, a spouse or sibling with a disability, or themselves—especially when illness strikes. The market offers no solution to this equation. The government offers patchwork. And so families improvise—women in particular absorb the shortfall in unpaid labor, often at permanent cost to their earnings, their retirement security, and their own health.
This is not a private misfortune. It is a public failure, and an expensive one.
The care that families provide—raising children, supporting elderly parents, tending to those who cannot fully care for themselves—is among the most economically productive work in any society. Children who receive attentive, high-quality care in their early years are more likely to become healthy, educated, productive adults. Workers who can take time to recover from illness or to be present at a family crisis return to their jobs more quickly and with greater stability. Caregivers who receive adequate support are less likely to exit the labor force permanently, less likely to fall into poverty in old age, and more likely to participate fully in economic and civic life. The benefits of care are not merely sentimental—they are measurable, and they are large.
Yet the United States persistently underinvests in care and consistently treats it as a personal rather than a shared responsibility. We spend less than half of what comparable wealthy nations spend on early childhood programs as a share of GDP. We are the only high-income country without a national paid parental leave policy. Our system of support for elderly and disabled individuals is means-tested to the point of cruelty, requiring many families to exhaust their savings before receiving assistance and funneling care into nursing homes, even when home-based support would serve people better and cost less. The result is a care deficit that falls hardest on those least able to bear it: low-income families, workers in jobs without benefits, and the women who disproportionately provide unpaid care when public provision falls short.
The costs of this deficit are not borne equally. Research consistently documents that inadequate support for caregiving suppresses women’s labor force participation and depresses their lifetime earnings. Mothers who leave employment during their children’s early years—often because affordable care is simply unavailable—face lasting wage penalties that compound over careers and into retirement. Families caring for an elderly or disabled adult spend on average more than a quarter of their income on that care, a burden that falls with particular force on Black and Hispanic families, who have less accumulated wealth to draw upon. Children growing up in poverty face developmental disadvantages with lifelong consequences, yet more than one in four American children under seventeen are excluded from the full benefit of the primary federal child support program by restrictions that penalize the families who need help most.
These are not the inevitable features of a wealthy society. They are the results of specific policy choices—and they can be changed.
This week, as part of the Game Changers Webinar series, Nancy Folbre, Kate Bahn, Jaimie Worker, and Pilar Gonalons-Pons participated in this online discussion about how the "US Needs a Care Package" as they offered an overview of specific policy proposals for funding universal childcare, paid family leave, increased support for the elderly and disabled, and a guaranteed minimum income for children.
- YouTube
The Game Changers Care Package
Three bold, interconnected proposals—universal child care, paid family and medical leave plus long-term care support, and a monthly child allowance—would transform life for American families. Together, they form a coherent package that addresses caregiving at every stage of life: from infancy through old age. Other wealthy nations have already figured this out. It’s long past time the United States did too.
These proposals would work together to give families the flexibility they need. They build on policies that have already been put in place by individual states or experimented with at the federal level. They are game-changers because they are all conceived as free, universal benefits that would be funded by taxes on income from capital, rather than from labor. They all promise social benefits that far exceed their cost.
Other comparable nations have demonstrated this. Countries that have invested in universal child care, paid family leave, and adequate support for aging and disabled individuals have not sacrificed economic dynamism to do so. They have expanded women’s workforce participation, reduced child poverty, improved population health, and in many cases generated public returns that substantially exceed the cost of the investment. The evidence from states within the United States that have implemented paid family leave programs, expanded child care access, and shifted long-term care toward home- and community-based services confirms the same pattern: these policies pay for themselves in reduced poverty, improved health outcomes, and increased labor supply, while also producing something harder to measure but no less real—a reduction in the daily stress and insecurity that care gaps impose on ordinary families.
The three proposals developed in this Game Changers Care Package—universal child care, paid family and medical leave combined with expanded long-term care support, and a universal monthly child allowance—form a coherent response to this failure. They address caregiving across the full life course, from infancy through old age. They are designed to work together, with each reinforcing the others: affordable child care enables parents to work and earn; paid leave allows them to respond to family needs without permanent economic penalty; a child allowance provides a universal floor of support that no family falls below. Taken together, they represent not an expansion of welfare as it is conventionally understood, but a fundamental reorientation of how we value and support the work of care—recognizing it, at last, as the indispensable foundation of everything else the economy produces.
The time for modest adjustments has passed. The following pages make the case for something bolder.
Important synergies between the elements of this portfolio of proposed policies can
help overcome potential tensions between reducing child poverty, advancing gender equality, and rewarding family and community care provision in the U.S. Fully universal child care services address an immediate problem for parents of small children seeking to earn sufficient income to support their families and have long-run implications for women’s lifetime earnings trajectories. Paid family and medical leave, like home and community based long-term care for disabled individuals and the elderly, provides support for in-home care of dependents. A universal basic income for children in the U.S., which could also be referred to as a family allowance, builds on and expands current tax subsidies in ways that could dramatically reduce child poverty in the short run.
Advancing these policies in concert leads to a more complicated picture than choosing to prioritize one or the other (especially in terms of funding details) but it is more likely to help us achieve important common goals.[1] All three policy proposals emphasize the public-good argument for financing, and refer, where relevant, to social-cost-benefit analysis. Public expenditures on care provision are often interpreted as a drag on economic growth because growth is defined almost entirely in terms of Gross Domestic Product (the final value of all goods and services purchased in a country), and investment is defined in ways that largely exclude investments in the production, development, and maintenance of human capabilities.[2]
Policy issues vital to the care economy extend well beyond the three proposals here, inviting collaboration with other game-changing policy groups. The two most direct overlaps lie with the health care working group, and the labor working group. Out of respect for an initial division of labor we have omitted consideration of the health care system as a whole, policies regarding job flexibility, penalties for part-time employment, and rights to remote access to employment from home.
Note: The author is grateful for the assistance of Kate Bahn, Jennifer Glass, James Heintz, Julie Kashen, Katherine Moos, Laura Valle-Gutierrez and Jaimie Worker
Keep ReadingShow Less
New Trump Child Care Plan Would Strip Resources From Low-Income Working Families
The administration has proposed the worst possible plan to help struggling families.
Sep 28, 2026
Reporting in The New York Times describes an upcoming proposal from the Trump administration to use funds from the Child Care and Development Fund to provide “parent-based child care” in which a married parent could receive financial assistance to stay home to care for their children, while the other parent works. Providing additional income to support economically struggling families, including support for family members who want to be full-time caregivers for children, is a great idea. Pulling the funds to do so from the Child Care and Development Fund is not.
The CCDF was created in the 1990s to provide child care subsidies for low-income families, so parents, primarily mothers, could work or go to school. The program is severely underfunded, however. It serves just 16% of all eligible children and just 17% of eligible children, age 5 and younger. That leaves hundreds of thousands of eligible children sitting on waitlists. Worse, some states don’t maintain a waitlist or have simply implemented an “enrollment freeze,” turning eligible applicants away rather than adding them to a waitlist.
Who are the families that rely on subsidized childcare?
Not adequately funding the CCDF hits low-income families, families with infants and toddlers, and families headed by single parents the hardest. To even be eligible for the program, federal criteria require families to earn less than 85% of the state median income. And states can make the income requirement even more stringent. For example, in seven states, a family with an income above 150% of the poverty line—just 47% of the state median income in Florida or 41% in Ohio—would not qualify for child care assistance. In 20 states, a family with an income above 200% of the poverty line would not qualify. This is just 55% of the state median wage in Michigan.
The most recent data on the characteristics of families served by CCDF show that in 2023, 82% were headed by a single parent. In many states, an even larger share of families participating in the CCDF program are headed by single parents: 95% in Alabama, 93% in Illinois, North Carolina, and Ohio, and 92% in Pennsylvania. These are families with little choice but for the head of household—mothers in 75% of cases—to engage in formal employment if the family is to survive.
Then there are parents of infants and toddlers, pre-school-age children for whom child care is the most costly. The program provides subsidies for children up to age 13, but younger children are more likely than older children to receive subsidies. This reflects the fact that infants and toddlers have the greatest need for care, but parents often face a shortage of affordable qualified providers. This is in part due to younger children requiring more qualified providers than older children require and smaller child-to-staff ratios. In a Pulse Household Survey, 15% of all parents reported not working because they were caring for children, but for parents of the youngest children aged 0 to 4, it was 35%.
Consequences of moving forward with the Trump–Vance plan
If married couple families are added to the list of eligible families without substantially increasing funding to provide subsidies to all eligible families, as is reportedly proposed, it will do significant harm to families of all types, whether they are married or not and whether they rely on subsidies or not.
With the new strain on available funds, families currently relying on the CCDF could lose the subsidies that allow them to provide even a modest living for themselves and their children. Without the subsidized care provided by the CCDF, these families could work full-time for most of the year just to pay for child care. In Alabama, for example, a minimum-wage worker working full-time would have to work 29 weeks—the equivalent of working from January to July—and use every cent of those wages to be able to cover unsubsidized child care for one infant. In North Carolina and Ohio, these workers would need to work from January to October.
These are parents who want to work to support their families but cannot afford unsubsidized child care. They also cannot afford not to work.
Reducing the availability of child care funding for working mothers and fathers will not only hurt families who rely on child care subsidies, it will hurt all families who rely on child care. Siphoning these funds away from working families—disproportionately Black single mothers—will also deprive child care providers of a key source of revenue, potentially leading them to charge other families more for care, be forced to shed staff, or even close down. With families in so many communities across the nation already experiencing a child care crisis, this would exacerbate the shortage issue.
We should fully fund the CCDF and provide needed support to all families
So many American families are already struggling to pay for the basic necessities, including rent, food, and gas. In an economy that requires dual-earner households where possible, child care subsidies provide struggling families with some basic support at a time when prices continue to rise, and safety nets, including health care subsidies, food assistance, and even heating assistance, continue to be cut.
It’s notable that instead of providing real solutions to the affordability pressures many Americans face, Vice President Vance—who has championed this policy—and Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services are proposing what is effectively an attack on single parents, working parents, and working women in an effort to center married households and to push a political and cultural agenda about supporting supposedly “traditional” values. We must invest in families, regardless of their composition—married couples, single mothers, or grandparents caring for their grandchildren. We should fully fund the CCDF to ensure all eligible families are supported.
Keep ReadingShow Less
How Riding the Subway as a Kid Changed the Way I See the World
At the time, I hated riding on the subway. But more than 50 years later, I’m grateful for that commute—for the way it forced a visceral reminder of our shared humanity.
Aug 23, 2026
It was 1974. The Bronx was burning. Abandoned cars littered the streets, and New York City teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. I’m still surprised my overprotective Holocaust-survivor parents let their preteen daughter ride the subway to school every day, but somehow they did.
For five years—from eighth grade through high school—I took the No. 5 Dyre Avenue train from our apartment in the Pelham Parkway neighborhood of the Bronx to my Jewish day school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The commute was nearly an hour each way and always coincided with rush hour.
Mornings weren’t so bad; I lived near the beginning of the line and could usually get a seat. But heading home, the 86th Street platform was packed five to eight people deep.
When it was my turn to board, I would throw my entire body weight onto the person in front of me, as the person behind me did the same. We all pushed forward together, forcing ourselves into an already crammed car, as more people tried to pack in behind us.
The more choices we have about how we travel or whether we go to private schools or fancy gyms, the easier it becomes to spend our lives among people much like ourselves. Distance makes it easier to dehumanize.
Once the doors closed, we stood packed together in a dense sea of bodies. When the train lurched, the entire crowd swayed as one. Usually, I breathed through my mouth to avoid the smell of sweat and bad breath. I tried to pull away from a hand on my behind that might have been accidental, but probably was not. I remember thinking I was too young for this.
At the time, I hated riding on the subway. But more than 50 years later, I’m grateful for that commute—for the way it forced a visceral reminder of our shared humanity.
Now, like three-quarters of Americans, I go everywhere by car. It’s faster and more convenient but I never see my fellow travelers—only their vehicles speeding past on the highway. And while I don’t miss the discomfort of the subway, I feel more cut off from other people’s lives.
When you don’t see people, you know them less. When entire groups remain unseen it becomes easier to turn them into abstraction—to fear them, dismiss them, or vilify them. It’s much harder to do that when you’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with someone, both of you grasping the pole as the train jolts you from side to side.
These were the days before smart phones or even portable music players. There was little to distract me from just looking and listening to the people around me. For two hours a day, I heard people speaking Spanish. I absorbed its rhythms long before I understood the words. Years later, when I finally learned the language, I picked it up quickly.
The subway exposed me to a depth of poverty I hadn’t seen in my own working-class Jewish neighborhood. I saw people asleep on the seats, curled around garbage bags that held everything they owned. There was a young man with no legs or lower torso who moved through the cars on a wheeled platform, collecting money. I watched him cross the treacherous gaps between cars as the train rattled and swayed.
The subway also showed me where people lived. Unlike highways, which are designed to bypass neighborhoods, the elevated train trestle cuts straight through them.
The No. 5 ran through the South Bronx at a time when more than 80% of buildings had burned or been abandoned. On dark winter evenings, we passed through blocks of hollowed-out shells, with the occasional occupied apartment. From the train I could see into people’s living rooms, glowing blue from the television.
As a teenager, I didn't know much about redlining, disinvestment, or the policies that had helped create those conditions. I only knew that children my age lived there and I wondered what it was like to grow up in what felt like a war zone.
There are, of course, other ways to encounter difference. My husband, a nurse in one of the poorest communities in Massachusetts, has cared for people from all walks of life. But that’s a different kind of interaction. People meet him when they’re sick, in pain, or in crisis. When you commute, you’re simply sharing space.
But not all forms of transportation create the same kind of shared space. Recently, riding the Amtrak train home from Philadelphia, I watched miles of rundown brick rowhouses slide past the window. Some were boarded up. Inside the train, however, the conversations I overheard were about road races in Cancun and the best spin classes in Manhattan. The passengers' lives appeared far removed from the neighborhoods we were passing through.
Having last lived in a city decades ago, my rural life is now quieter, more controlled. I move from one place to another sealed inside a car. It’s comfortable and efficient. But it’s made my life smaller. It’s made it possible to live a life where one rarely sees anyone outside one’s own orbit.
How can that not affect one’s ability to empathize—if your neighbors, coworkers, and classmates all reflect some version of yourself? The more choices we have about how we travel or whether we go to private schools or fancy gyms, the easier it becomes to spend our lives among people much like ourselves. Distance makes it easier to dehumanize.
Which is not to say that riding the No. 5 Dyre Avenue made me a kinder person. I still judge people; I could be nicer and more patient. But the commute gave shape and texture to lives I might otherwise reduce to stereotypes. Day after day, it reminded me that everyone, just like me, was simply trying to get home.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'How Cruel': Child Advocates Rip Trump's Plan to Gut Head Start
"This proposed rule would fundamentally alter Head Start and break the promise that America has made good on for decades to offer the children born furthest from opportunity with the best our country has to offer in early childhood education.
Aug 07, 2026
Advocates for early education and vulnerable children are denouncing a new rule issued Thursday by the administration of President Donald Trump that would severely weaken the Head Start program relied on by families and communities nationwide.
"At a time when the US faces the highest rate of child poverty of any major country, how does Mr. Trump respond?" asked Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), in response to the rule. "Instead of expanding access to early childhood education, he is moving to dismantle Head Start and the standards that keep its 700,000 kids safe. How cruel."
Head Start—created as a federal program in 1965 and "designed to prepare America’s most vulnerable young children to succeed in school and in life beyond school"—has been an ongoing target of the Trump administration, which has moved to eviscerate the program's funding and voiced support for scrapping it completely.
Speaking with NPR, journalist Coral Davenport, who reports for the New York Times, explained that early childhood educators fear the changes being proposed represent the most sweeping changes—more like "erasure" than "reforms"—to the program since its founding:
The Trump administration is proposing a major overhaul of Head Start, with new guidelines that could fundamentally change how the program is run nationwide.
Launched in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Head Start serves 700,000 children ages three to… pic.twitter.com/YsDgM4OzX7
— PBS News (@NewsHour) August 6, 2026
The Children's Defense Fund (CDF) warns that the new rule, published in the federal register by the US Department of Health and Human Services, represents a new attack on Head Start that would "dismantle the program from the inside out."
The rule, according to the CDF, will result in the "stripping away of most of the quality standards that define what children and families actually receive" when they are part of the program, "including the requirements that ensure children are safe and supported, that hold programs accountable to the families they serve, and that guarantee the comprehensive services children need to arrive at kindergarten ready to learn."
In a letter stating their opposition to the attack, CDF—joined by EdTrust, Legal Defense Fund, NAACP, National Center for Learning Disabilities, National Urban League, The Arc, and UnidosUS—warned that Head Start "will exist in name only, offering unequal services based on where the child lives," if the rule is finalized.
According to the coalition:
The proposal strips away most of the quality standards that define what services children and families actually receive, including the requirements that ensure children are safe and supported, that hold programs accountable to the families they serve, and that guarantee the comprehensive services children need to arrive at kindergarten ready to learn. We urge the administration to withdraw it.
Over the past year, the administration has delayed funding that programs depend on to keep their doors open, cut the federal staff who support them, and proposed eliminating Head Start entirely. Each of these moves has created uncertainty for the providers who run these programs and the families who count on them. We oppose this latest attack on Head Start, which will harm the children and families the program was built to serve.
The signers of the letter called on the administration to rescind its proposal and said Congress must "stand behind Head Start and reject these changes so that we maintain the promise of Head Start for future generations."
Democratic lawmakers in the US House and Senate joined Sanders in slamming the move.
"Trump is trying to destroy Head Start—and he's hoping you won't notice," said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). "He's gutting basic standards and protections for over 700,000 kids, after he already tried and failed to defund the program altogether. We need to speak up and SAVE Head Start."
Trump is trying to destroy Head Start—and he's hoping you won't notice.
He's gutting basic standards & protections for over 700,000 kids, after he already tried and failed to defund the program altogether.
We need to speak up and SAVE Head Start. pic.twitter.com/zDgGqFxVaC
— Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) August 6, 2026
"Head Start is not just preschool," said Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) in a social media post. "For hundreds of thousands of children from low-income families, it is where they learn to read, receive basic health screenings, get support for disabilities, and begin kindergarten with a real chance to succeed."
The regulations that govern Head Start, which Trump's HHS now wants to eliminate, said Levin, "are the difference between children getting the care and support they need or being left to fall through the cracks. Why on earth would anyone want to take that away from them?"
As Murray noted, "this rule is not final," meaning there remain avenues to defeat it.
When a previous Trump memo detailing the desire to eliminate Head Start leaked, said Murray, "we got loud and he backed off. We can protect Head Start again, but it's going to take all of us speaking up and taking a stand for our kids."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump's GOP Is Ripping This Nation Apart. The Question Is: Why?
The morality of today’s Republican Party has been laid bare. But it boggles the mind the depth of this destruction and cruelty.
Jul 14, 2026
Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill — which gave the top 1% fully $118 billion this year in tax cuts — turns a year old this week and Republicans in Congress actually celebrated the largest cuts to food assistance and Medicaid in American history.
They told us it was about fraud, about lazy people gaming the system, about restoring the dignity of work. Exactly a year later we can now see what it was really about in a line of cars outside a food bank in Phoenix.
That’s where ProPublica found Ana Alvarez on a recent morning, a single mother of five who works at a restaurant and lost her family’s SNAP benefits last September. She reapplied in December and the government still hasn’t processed her application.
She calls the agency every week and gets told to keep waiting, so she clips coupons, her kids don’t go to the zoo anymore, and as the summer heat bears down she’s doing grim arithmetic on rent, the car payment, and the electric bill that keeps the air conditioning running. She’s one reason Arizona has lost more than half of its SNAP recipients in a single year.
In Michigan, a widow named Sarah works two food service jobs to raise her 9-year-old daughter on $219 a month in food assistance, help she’s needed since her husband died suddenly six years ago. Last Christmas one of her employers wrote a single number wrong on her renewal paperwork, one missing zero, and the state cut her off.
And in Atlanta, Human Rights Watch documented a 36-year-old supermarket cashier who was working and meeting every requirement until she gave birth in late 2025, at which point Georgia shut off both her Medicaid and her food stamps, claiming she’d failed to report the job she was standing at every day. She’s spent the months since trying to get her coverage back while the medical bills pile up. In the party of family values, apparently, having a baby is now a firing offense.
None of these women are cheats or freeloaders. They’re workers, mothers, widows: exactly the people these cynical Republicans swear they’re protecting. But the numbers tell the story: more than 4 million Americans have been pushed off SNAP since the bill passed, the steepest drop since Clinton’s 1996 welfare cuts, and in just the 13 states that publish the data, roughly 808,000 children have lost food assistance.
The Congressional Budget Office projects millions more will lose Medicaid as the work requirement paperwork machine grinds through the states, even though more than nine in ten of the people targeted are already working, in school, caring for family, or disabled.
The cruelty built into the bill isn’t a side effect: it’s the whole reason for the “enhanced” paperwork requirements. Every mother who gives up in frustration, every widow tripped up by a typo, every application left to rot in a backlog is a line item of savings that can translate into a larger tax cut for Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg while the poorest households actually see their taxes go up.
That’s the morality of today’s GOP laid bare. They looked at Ana Alvarez’s five kids and Sarah’s daughter and that new mother in Atlanta, and they decided the billionaires needed the money more.
Every day, it seems, we see or hear about another way in which Trump and his lickspittles in Congress and the various federal agencies are tearing down our country, weakening our defenses, pitting Americans against each other, looting our government, and making life harder for everybody except the morbidly rich.
The question nobody seems to have an answer to is, “Why?”
— Is it that, as Craig Unger seems to suggest, that Trump’s been a Russian agent for decades and is setting us up to lose to the newly-forming Axis of Russia and China?
— Is it that he spent so many years burning with rage and embarrassment at not being accepted by New York high society that he’s just come to hate America?
— Could it be that American-values-hating foreign powers that have poured literally billions of dollars into the Trump family are paying him to tear us apart so they’ll never again have to endure the humiliation of having their human, civil, and women’s rights records called out by a future administration?
— Is it possible it’s all just to pay for tax cuts for billionaires?
— Or are his, Vance’s, and Musk’s white supremacist, Christian nationalist, libertarian, and/or neo-Nazi ideologies so intense that they’re willing to essentially burn the country down just to expel immigrants, deny benefits to people of color, elevate the rich, crush unions, and re-subordinate women?
These are serious questions for which I can’t find credible answers that explain the entire spectrum of their behavior. Why would Trump and the GOP:
— Condemn 12 million Americans to sickness and early death by gutting Medicaid (and the biggest cuts don’t even kick in until right after this fall’s election)?
— Destroy American soft power by killing USAID, thus condemning millions to death?
— Fire so many workers at the Social Security Administration that just getting through to sign up or get help has turned into a multi-day slog?
— Gut the State Department at a time diplomacy is most needed for world peace?
— End food assistance (SNAP) for millions when one-in-five American children experience hunger?
— Refuse to enforce laws and rules that allow workers to form unions in their workplaces?
— Propose forcing all new Medicare recipients onto Medicare “Advantage” corporate scam plans?
— Refuse military aid to Ukraine for over a year to give Russia time to finish off their genocidal job?
— Stop the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from going after fraudsters and banks when they rip people off?
— Eliminate a major NOAA program designed to warn communities about the dangers of flooding and other extreme weather crises?
— Politicize the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Election Commission?
— End net neutrality so none of us are safe online?
— Shut down anti-cyber-warfare operations in the federal government?
— Defund university research that leads to innovation and saves lives?
— Cut unemployment insurance benefits across Red states?
— Terminate support for people with student loans and gut scholarship programs?
— Slash Affordable Care Act outreach budgets and allow junk insurance plans?
— Reverse over 100 environmental rules, including those on clean air, clean water, and chemical safety?
— Weaken Dodd-Frank, including gutting oversight of “too big to fail” banks and stress tests for mid-size financial institutions?
— Dial back OSHA workplace safety standards and inspections?
— Cut taxes to rich people while raising them via tariffs on working class folks?
— Change the Federal Trade Commission to allow more monopolistic, rip-off corporate behavior?
— Make it harder to vote and harass Blue states by demanding their voter information?
— Work to prosecute women who have miscarriages or abortions?
— Make it harder to qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI)?
— End auto emission standards and increase our reliance on fossil fuels?
— Pack the courts with judges the American Bar Association says are “unqualified”?
— Destroy our faith in our elections and set up election workers for harassment?
— Fire the Inspectors General (who find waste, fraud, and abuse) across multiple federal agencies?
— Weaken whistleblower protections?
— Put the military on the streets of our cities in violation of Posse Comitatus?
— Use state power to punish political opponents and those who’ve investigated Trump’s crimes, alleged Russian collusion, and corruption?
— Create a network of concentration camps across America?
— Allow a shadow cabinet of billionaires and theocrats via Project 2025?
— Attack judges and prosecutors, leading to violence and threats of violence?
— Foment violence (like on January 6th) as a political strategy?
— Destroy our asylum and refugee systems?
— Pardon insurrectionists, rapists, cybercriminals, and other wealthy criminals?
— Defund the IRS so they can no longer audit the morbidly rich, leading to the loss of hundreds of billions in federal revenues?
— Ban books and censor libraries?
— Criminalize trans and queer people?
— Roll back gun safety measures?
— Defund the arts, humanities, and public media?
— Gut vaccine and other programs that keep Americans healthy?
— Nakedly politicize the military?
— Expand federal surveillance powers while kneecapping oversight?
— Criminalize free speech, particularly on college campuses?
— Attempt to revoke birthright citizenship?
— Attack press freedom and bar the Associated Press from the White House?
— Sabotage the US Postal Service?
— Undermine the census?
— Scale back civil and women’s rights enforcement?
— Normalize autocratic language like “vermin,” “scum,” and calling immigrants “animals”?
— Expel millions of brown-skinned immigrants who’ve already gone through the legal process to get work permits and are on a path toward citizenship?
— Create international fiscal chaos with an on-again, off-again TACO tariff policy?
— Cancel the suicide hotline for queer kids?
— Gut our national parks and sell off our federal lands to wealthy friends of the administration?
— Create a vast, secret, unaccountable police force with masked officers whose identity is concealed?
— Allow the president to accept hundreds of millions in obvious bribes from foreign powers in violation of the Constitution?
— Work so hard to conceal the crimes of a notorious sexual predator?
And this, of course, is just a partial list of the ways Trump and the GOP have weakened our nation, reduced our standing and prestige in the world, corrupted our government, and immiserated working class families.
Many of the theories about why Trump and the GOP would enthusiastically do so much damage to our people, our military, and our democracy contradict others.
For example, why would billionaires want tax cuts at the expense of damaging the economy that made them rich? Why would we promote a muscular military policy like bombing Iran while simultaneously destroying morale within the ranks of our military and kneecapping our intelligence agencies?
“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is,” sang Bob Dylan back in the 1960s.
Today, we’re there.
Why do you think Trump and the GOP are working so hard to ruin our country?
Keep ReadingShow Less
Democrats Rally Around ‘Affordability,’ But ‘Precarity’ Is a Better Slogan
Americans need something more ambitious and less transitory than relief at the checkout counter.
Jul 09, 2026
Janeese George’s recent victory in the Washington, DC, mayoral primary and wins by progressive Democrats in New York and Colorado last week are signs that Zohran Mamdani's election was not a one-off, and that populist, “eat the rich” messaging is effective across a broad swath of voters. But as the US heads toward midterm elections, Democrats are having a hard time finding a partywide motto with similar resonance. Since last fall, they have been focusing on “affordability” because the slogan resonates with working-class voters; their main message is that things are too expensive and that the cause is unchecked corporate greed.
But here’s the problem with focusing on affordability: It addresses poor and working-class Americans as consumers rather than as workers. It ignores the stagnant hiring environment and Americans’ widespread anxiety about getting and keeping jobs. And it fails to differentiate between short-run price pressures, such as the ones created by the war in Iran, and prolonged economic trends. Campaigning on affordability could leave Democrats laser-focused on unclogging temporary economic bottlenecks without a strategy for the long term. And affordability candidates must contend with the awkward fact that, by some measures, US wages have actually outpaced inflation. Some big-ticket items, including college tuition and airfare, are more affordable now than they were a decade ago.
If Democrats want to win this fall, promising to curb inflation and pinning the blame for high prices on corporate greed is not enough. Candidates should instead focus on precarity, the sense that American jobs and the future are hanging by a thread. I am a historian who studies how the economic concepts we use shape the politics we pursue. I have also seen firsthand how low-paying, precarious work and short-term contracts have engulfed higher education and how precarity has become a rallying cry for student workers and contingent faculty seeking to unionize.
If Democrats want to win this fall, promising to curb inflation and pinning the blame for high prices on corporate greed is not enough.
Precarity has great sloganeering potential. It names a phenomenon that straddles the working and the middle classes. More importantly, precarity messaging could help Democrats connect with younger voters, who are not yet fretting about childcare or housing prices but are very much worried about artificial intelligence, automation, and the lack of entry-level jobs.
Precarity sets in the moment someone begins thinking about entering the workforce. High schoolers and college students across the country ask themselves, “Will there be jobs for me? What can I add to the new A.I. economy?” Affordability rhetoric cannot answer these pressing questions. But running on an anti-precarity agenda would give Democrats the opportunity to lay out bold plans for working- and middle-class Americans, including strengthening safety nets for recent graduates, bankrolling programs that train young Americans for the many well-paying blue-collar jobs that go unfilled, and retraining workers when occupational demand shifts.
They should also capitalize on labor unions’ popularity, which has in the past decade returned to historic highs. Expanding workers’ collective bargaining rights should be a core part of the Democrats’ midterm platform. Only by empowering labor unions and strengthening worker protections will elected officials be able to deliver on eliminating precarity. Unfortunately, the Democrats’ other major campaign slogan, “abundance,” has drawn opposition from workers’ groups. Unions are wary that the push to cut red tape and supercharge new housing and infrastructure construction could come at the cost of hard-won wage and training standards.
Widespread unionization can eliminate bottlenecks and lower prices by ensuring that workers are better coordinated and trained, helping to avoid the accidents, delays, and manpower shortages that cause construction prices to soar. Lawmakers hoping to deliver on promises of abundance should start by creating stable jobs and secure futures for the workers who are expected to build new houses and energy infrastructure.
Of course, Democratic candidates do not have to choose between campaigning on increasing affordability or eliminating precarity. These are complementary messages, and they point to related problems. So far, however, Democratic pollsters have yet to fully test a worker-centered slogan and battleplan. Americans need something more ambitious and less transitory than relief at the checkout counter. Prices go up and down, but secure and satisfying jobs can last years, if not decades.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Paradoxical Utopia of the World Cup
No other event, short perhaps of a nuclear war or a comet strike, could bring the entire planet together.
Jun 17, 2026
Simon Kuper is 56 now. His first memory of a World Cup, if not his first-ever vivid memory—for many of us who grew up outside the United States, the two are often the same—was the 1978 final between the Netherlands and Argentina. “I recall that night as vividly as almost anything else in my childhood,” he writes in World Cup Fever. “A World Cup is like Proust’s Madeleine. Each new World Cup reminds you of past World Cups, and the people you watched them with.” The book is a history of the World Cup through a few dozen madeleines.
For Americans, it’s as good a guide as any to a tournament of paradoxes, this too-big-to-fail quadrennial festival of corruption, cheating, profiteering, nationalist chauvinism, and mostly crappy soccer that nevertheless can hypnotize and transport to a utopia of competition as idealized and convincing as Pelé’s deification of the sport as “the beautiful game.” I think we watch not so much for the thrill—you have to admit that most games at this watered-down level are snoozfests (“such a party off the field but so dull on it,” as Kuper writes) but for the nostalgia of a game that never existed, but that we reimagine with every match.
“So much of a modern World Cup is repetition, especially as you grow older,” Kuper writes. “After decades of tournaments shown live on TV, each new France-Brazil or England-Argentina or Holland-Germany is just a repeat of earlier versions. Each victory or red card or controversy is a quotation of past ones. A match can never mean as much as it did the first time around. Win or lose this one, you know it isn’t the end of the story: At some point in the next few decades, there’ll be a replay. Repetition turns down the emotional dial of World Cups.”
He’s right, with a caveat: The World Cup is like Jorge Luis Borges’s idea that we rewrite every story every time we read one. The very same game will be remembered a billion different times in a way that the World Series or the Super Bowl or cricket’s World Cup never could be, because no other sport has the World Cup’s reach. No other event, short perhaps of a nuclear war or a comet strike, could bring the entire planet together.
It exists to transform illusion into reality. The illusion is that we are one world playing the same game, speaking the same language, respecting the same rules, existing on a level playing field regardless of origin, race, religion, even fifa ranking.
So just as the tournament is a paradox of beauty and foulness, we all have paradoxical relationships with it, even those of us who don’t follow it. Our refusal to follow it is itself a statement, like the citizen who snubs the ballot box on election day. They, too, are making a statement. Like it or not, the World Cup reminds us that we are on the same planet, that we all share the same blood that kicks a ball the same way, but with a billion splendid variations.
No two soccer fans will see the same game the same way or ever agree about anything soccer, just as I had my differences with Kuper’s book and some of his interpretations: “And once your country has won the World Cup once or twice, it’s generally enough. The more you win, the less it matters.” Tell that to the winners. But he’s better placed than most to guide us. His lineage reads like a demographic World Cup. He was born in Uganda to South African parents, spent his early years in England as a British citizen, moved to the Netherlands when he was 7, studied in England and the United States (Oxford, Harvard), was naturalized a French citizen, now living in Paris with his French wife and raising French children who identified as French, and spent most of his career covering soccer for the London-based Financial Times.
The 1978 World Cup was the first of his innumerable crushing disappointments, as World Cups always must be for 95% of fans. Every four years there’s only one winner out of 195 nations. That one stung Kuper more because the Dutch lost the final for the second time in a row, having lost to Germany in 1974. This time they were playing in Argentina, whose team had blatantly cheated its way to the final. It wasn’t unusual for a tournament stitched in fraud and corruption since its first edition in 1930. It still is, fawning to authoritarian regimes, from Benito Mussolini’s Italy to the junta’s Argentina, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, dictatorial emirs’ Qatar the last time around, and now Donald Trump’s diminished America. Thankfully Canada and Mexico are here to redeem this World Cup, which they also share.
The murderous military dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla showcased the 1978 World Cup the way Adolf Hitler showcased the 1936 Olympics, as a distraction masked in bogus legitimacy. Videla had the “disappearance” of some 30,000 dissidents to his name by the time he was done, and that night watched the final alongside Henry Kissinger, a fellow criminal against humanity, who had also helped Videla rig a match to ensure Argentina’s appearance in the final.
I remember that final too. It was my second. My first was Germany-Holland in 1974, my one and only memory of watching with my dad, who died two years later. We watched Argentina-Holland live, my mother, my grandmother, our Dutch Catholic priest, and me on our black-and-white TV in the dining room of our house in Hamlaya, a tiny village in the mountains of Lebanon where we thought we’d escaped the war and where the signal from Cyprus was always clear. Father Niederer didn’t have a TV. He spent the evening with us and his high hopes, especially after the Dutch managed to hold Argentina to a tie through the first 90 minutes. In the 90th minute a Dutch striker had almost won it, hitting the goal post instead. Extra time briefly ended Father Niederer’s faith as Argentina scored once, then again to take the title in a 3-1 match. The junta won. All those masses for nothing. Kuper had also watched with his grandparents when he was 8 in Leiden, the smaller town between Amsterdam and The Hague. For Kuper, the next two decades were all TV watching, then as an in-person spectator until he started reporting about the World Cup for the Financial Times in 1994, the first the United States hosted (with Kissinger’s help). This year will be his ninth. He now proposes to tell you A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments, as goes the book’s subtitle, by synthesizing four decades of his reporter’s notebooks. (The English edition calls it A Footballing Journey in Nine Tournaments: Snobs would have you believe that calling it anything but football is a misnomer. I don’t play that game and use the terms interchangeably.)
Wisely, Kuper is not interested in recounting matches. Football matches are like military battles and soap operas. “There’s nothing deader, for a writer, than a dead football match. I’m sorry, but you really had to be there,” he writes. Kuper is interested in the unexpected insights into national character that an improvised dance party might reveal; in the endemic corruption of a tournament that turns us all into addicts every four years; in the failed promise of economic booms that leaves the poor in host countries like Brazil, South Africa, Qatar, and Mexico as exploited as in colonial times. The colonist is fifa, the dictatorial soccer federation expecting to reap $14 billion from this year’s tournament.
Kuper describes the exploitation in South Africa, Brazil, and Qatar, the regressive, repressive American ally that spent more than $200 billion preparing for a 2022 tournament built on the graveyards of imported labor working in near-slave conditions and without rights. “Under Qatar’s traditional ‘kafala’ system, migrant workers were practically the property of their employers,” Kuper writes. “A boss could deport an employee for no reason, or hold their passport and keep them in Qatar against their will.” Qatar had promised to reform the kafala system. The moment Argentina hoisted the 2022 trophy at Lusail Stadium, all promises vanished. Now Saudi Arabia, an even more regressive, undemocratic country with its own kafala system, is set to host in 2034.
The book at first felt disheveled, jumping from one scant segment to another like so many rapid passes in a game, as if Kuper was eager to throw in every anecdote he could find in his notebooks. Kuper’s interview with Diego Maradona, one of the game’s greatest players and one of its most distasteful characters, is pointless other than to show Kuper scored the five-minute encounter.
European journalists have no problem buying access, either, or accepting lavish gifts: “I flew to the Chelsea-Manchester United Champions League final in Moscow as a guest of UEFA, the European football authority. I had a fabulous room in the five-star Marriott Grand Hotel. (Did UEFA corrupt me? I don’t think so.)” He never makes the connection between that sort of payola and the buying of referees and game-fixing he documents so well.
Some of his insights are no more penetrating than comparing Germany’s emerging prosperity on and off the pitch in 1990 to a bus driver’s “villa with a veranda in a spotless village,” or telling us that “A World Cup can’t change a country. But it can divert an individual’s life path,” as if there were anything comparable between France’s decline into riots, fading power, and economic stagnation after the 1998 World Cup with his decision to quit the Financial Times and become a French citizen. As all World Cup books must, this one pays homage to cheaters like Maradona, biters like Uruguay’s Luis Suárez, criers like Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, and charisma-challenged virtuosos like Messi, now hobbling through his last show.
Soon you get used to the Kuper style. It has the verve of 1970s Dutch football—total football, as they called it—placing every element of the game in service of the story without letting judgments necessarily mar the exuberance. Yes, the game is corrupt—there’s a hint that even Nelson Mandela had a part in the $10 million bribe disguised as a cultural gift that bought the World Cup for South Africa—but there was that priceless moment when the Japanese let loose on their own soil at the Japan-Belgium match in 2002 and showed the world a joy we’d rarely seen. There may have been hooliganism in the past, but in pubs and on trains fans from opposing teams typically drink and dance together. Kuper unfortunately doesn’t venture into calculating the demographics of World Cup-conceived babies every four years. I suspect the cross-fertilization is as rich as during the Crusades. But he documents an alarming incidence of heart attacks during every tournament.
Another paradox: World Cup play is inferior to anything you’ll see in club football in top leagues in England, Germany, Spain, Italy, and France: Any of those countries’ top clubs could beat all but the four or five highest ranked national teams at the World Cup, if not even them. Any league match is technically more proficient and cohesive than a World Cup match. Any league match lacks those ridiculous disparities we’re going to see when, say, Spain plays Cape Verde or Germany plays Curaçao, that Caribbean Dutch protectorate with the population of Flagler County (think Ronald Reagan’s Marines invading Grenada).
Just 16 countries traveled to Germany when I watched my first World Cup in 1974. The format went to 24 in 1982, then 32 in 1998, and now 48 countries—a quarter of the planet’s nations. There’s really nothing wrong with that. Elitism is over. We can’t democratize the world. We can democratize the World Cup, though there’s no doubt fifa expanded the thing to shake down more cash even as it dilutes and cheapens play. The federation’s mercantilism handed Mexico and Canada only 13 games each, compared to 78 in the United States, an imbalance as insulting as our president’s attempts to destroy both countries’ economies while ridiculing one and reducing the other to a mass of criminals, and getting a fifa “prize” for it.
Still, we look past the absurd. “Most football fans took it for granted that FIFA was corrupt,” Kuper writes, needlessly capitalizing the federation’s acronym the way some media still capitalize “covid.” Diseases should not so blithely be respected. “They’d heard the stories of officials stashing bribes in secret bank accounts. However, fans care more about what happens on the field. Once we start to doubt that the matches we are seeing are real, the emotion we invest in World Cups becomes pointless.” In the spirit of magic realism, why not give Curaçao and Cape Verde a chance on the same stage as the greats? It’s not as if the American team belongs there, either, if it’s quality we’re looking for. But there they are.
We’re mostly missing the point if we watch the World Cup for quality. Like the Olympics but without the frazzle of a zillion sports scattered like so many pixels on our screens, it’s our quadrennial dreamland on these simple, perfectly groomed fields where cubism and leaves of grass meet so the world’s teams kick around a planet-shaped sphere as luck and fate outscores the best of them.
“The World Cup exists to transform reality into illusion,” the Mexican novelist Juan Villoro wrote in an article for The New York Times this week. I think of it more in reverse: It exists to transform illusion into reality. The illusion is that we are one world playing the same game, speaking the same language, respecting the same rules, existing on a level playing field regardless of origin, race, religion, even fifa ranking. The reality is that for those five weeks, away from the dingbattery of dignitaries and fifa’s sycophantry, away from the tensions between Canada, Mexico, and the United States—on the pitch, in pubs, in living rooms, in street parties, in the palmed stadiums of our smartphoned hands and maybe even in our hearts, despairing as we are the rest of the time—that illusion may well be true.
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy