Mark Engler

This spring is a season of confrontation at the shareholders' meetings of U.S. banks and other major corporations. And this week, Bank of America has been in the spotlight.

On Wednesday, about 750 protesters rallied outside the bank's annual meetings in Charlotte, N.C., brilliantly rebranding the event...

Over the past several years, few annual occasions have been more symbolic of the direction of political discussion in our country than Tax Day. This year, the IRS due date bears witness to the impact of the Occupy movement in American politics.

Back in 2009 and 2010, Tax Day protests...

It is a myth that Gandhi said, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." But that old saying nevertheless carries a lot of truth when it comes to social movements. And it is always a pleasure to see a worthy target...

Can you be an environmentalist and support things like the Keystone XL pipeline and hydraulic fracking? Not likely, but it's conceivable. Can you be an environmentalist and oppose the power of the environmental movement? I think not.

Recently, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera has written several columns defending some...

Over the past decade, Reverend Billy has become a familiar face in social justice circles. He can often be found at protest events in his trademark white suit, priestly collar and dyed-blond pompadour. When he's performing, he speaks with the fervor of an evangelical preacher. Yet his message is,...

This past Saturday was "Bank Transfer Day," a day of action in which thousands of people moved their money from "too big to fail" banking titans into credit unions and smaller regional banks. While it's hard to tell precisely how many people followed through on their threats to...

Conservative historian and Harvard professor Niall Ferguson has a funny habit. He asserts himself as a timely political commentator by weighing in on a debate about a hot contemporary problem. But then he proposes policy measures so dramatically inappropriate to the issue at hand that his comments become the opposite...

No matter how disastrously myopic they might be, it seems that economists can do no wrong in the eyes of many.

If there was one outcome of mainstream economists failing to recognize the multi-trillion dollar housing bubble of the past decade and being roundly blindsided by the most significant economic...

Full disclosure: I find New York Times columnist David Brooks exceedingly annoying, and I have no intention of reading his most recent book, The Social Animal.

Having said that, I'm having a good week, and Brooks a very bad one. Either that, or he's remaining willfully ignorant of the acutely...

We often hear about the revolutionary power of the Internet to take down authoritarian regimes. Less often do we consider how online technologies can provide dastardly means for repressive governments to locate, monitor, and persecute dissidents.

The geniuses over at the RSA Animate have recently posted an annotated...

What a difference a year makes. Twelve months ago, on Tax Day 2010, we witnessed what was probably the apex of the Tea Party movement. At that time, the media swarmed right-wing tax protests and eagerly reported on the activities of the burgeoning grassroots movement.

As I wrote...

Since this past month has been the 200th anniversary of the British Luddite protests, that movement has been getting some attention. Some of it has raised the valid and interesting question of whether those demonstrators of old should really be described as anti-technology.

[Cross-posted from the "Arguing the World"...

The stimulus program passed by the Obama administration in February 2008 never got much respect. Neo-Keynesian voices argued that it was not nearly large enough, and I agree with those criticisms. But, more often, right-wing talking points seemed to influence mainstream beliefs. Too many people seemed to accept...

First Glenn Beck tries to claim MLK; now the Pentagon?! This has gone too far.

You might remember Martin Luther King, Jr., as someone who railed against the triple evils of "racism, materialism, and militarism." But according to Obama's Department of Defense, "today's wars are not...

Well, 2011, it's been nice. But I think we've worked enough already. In any case, we've already made enough money. Time to call it a year.

This is a ridiculous idea, right? Yet, as the Canadian Financial Post reported at the beginning of the week, "Top CEOs will...

Effective celebrity activists use their fame to bring attention and credibility to legitimate representatives of social movements.

That, in a nutshell, is my standard of celebrity activism done right. Ineffective celebrity activists... well, they do all sorts of things wrong. But, most fundamentally, they approach issues without any awareness of...

I think we need a new aphorism or analogy to counter the old saying, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." This is the principle that President Obama has once again offered up, this time after disastrously caving in to the Republicans over tax cuts...

On November 20, Chalmers Johnson, scholar of East Asian development and critic of American empire, died at age seventy-nine.

While Johnson arguably finished his career as a member of what White House press secretary Robert Gibbs calls the "professional Left," he did not begin it that way. I

On the far side of the Atlantic, a future Queen of England has been selected. The office of the Prince of Wales announced on November 16 that Prince William, the second in line to the British throne, has become engaged to Kate Middleton, a nice, middle-class young woman who was...

It was about this far into his first term, back in late 1994 and early 1995, when President Bill Clinton truly fell under the spell of malevolent strategist Dick Morris. Stung by the heavy losses brought on by the "Republican Revolution" in the 1994 midterms, Clinton began to believe that...