When Karen Lewis and her Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators took power in the Chicago Teachers Union in 2010, the landscape for labor in her city and country was bleak. She rose to the moment — and helped transform what was politically possible for a teachers’ union and the labor movement as a whole to accomplish.
The media made the Lincoln Project and New York governor Andrew Cuomo into heroes of 2020. Now they’re both engulfed in scandal, and it’s time to hold them accountable.
Anti-colonial revolutionary Thomas Sankara fought to transform Burkina Faso into a truly independent, self-governing nation before his assassination in 1987. But as a recent film shows, Sankara’s legacy continues to inspire struggles against oppression despite ruling elites’ efforts to erase him from public memory.
The late AFL-CIO leader John Sweeney was an admirable figure who had a vision for reinvigorated US labor unions. But he only tried to reform a union movement that needed a more fundamental refoundation.
France was once the heartland of revolution. Today, its left is battered, and its far right is rising. To understand why, we have to look at François Mitterrand’s socialist government’s turn from radical reform to neoliberal austerity in the 1980s.
After the bloody suppression of the Polytechnic students’ uprising in 1973, universities became a symbol of Greek democracy — and for decades, police were banned from even entering campuses. But on Thursday, parliament voted to create a special police force to patrol universities, as the right-wing government mounts a troubling crackdown on supposedly “dangerous” student groups.
Five years ago, Bernie Sanders proclaimed on national television, “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend.” If this was the one moment of note that emerged from both Sanders campaigns, all the time and money and effort still would have been worth it.
One of the top national security think tanks backing the Biden administration, the Center for a New American Security, has been taking money from every major defense contractor while pumping out a steady stream of research supporting those companies’ interests. It’s yet another sign that Biden’s promised “return to normal” has, unfortunately, arrived.
The Senate filibuster isn’t just an impediment to even mildly progressive legislation — it’s one of the most antidemocratic aspects of a deeply antidemocratic institution. It should be abolished immediately.
The energy that Karen Lewis brought to the labor movement through her Chicago Teachers Union presidency still vibrates through unions across the country. If you look closely at the fire in educators standing with students and community members in recent years, you can see Lewis’s unwavering determination in the flames.
For a moment, it seemed like the centrist think tank Third Way was abandoning its commitment to austerity. No longer: Third Way is now boosting a campaign to deny $1,400 COVID-19 survival checks to tens of millions of Americans and undermining the push to raise the minimum wage to $15.
Liberal pundits have found a new icon in New Zealand’s center-left leader, Jacinda Ardern. Ardern may be personable and engaging, but just like Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau, her government isn’t meeting the urgent needs of working people.
Nobody likes corruption. But the modern politics of “anti-corruption” is built on both domestic and international double standards. Corruption is not some alien virus that enters and disrupts a system, it is a symptom of all that is wrong with the world that liberals are vainly striving to restore.
International organizations like the IMF are pressing Global South countries to cut their fuel subsidies in the name of fighting climate change. But don’t be fooled: these are neoliberal measures that do little to reduce emissions while hammering the livelihoods of poor and working-class people.
In her new novel Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler paints a bleak portrait of a social media–addled world saturated with loneliness and alienation. It’s incredibly accurate. But there must be a way out of the nightmarish social landscape she depicts.
John Sweeney, who won the AFL-CIO presidency in 1995 as part of a progressive reform leadership slate called New Voice, died earlier this month at the age of eighty-six. He failed in his quest to revive the US labor movement — but he succeeded in pushing the main body of trade unionism firmly to the left.
In the recent GameStop saga, Chamath Palihapitiya portrayed himself as a defender of the little guy and floated running for office. But beyond the shrewd PR, he’s just another corporate-friendly Third Way centrist with an intense devotion to free-market triumphalism.
The fall of the Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, ten years ago today, was a triumph for popular mobilization. But the revolutionary forces lacked the political organization and vision needed to head off a counterrevolutionary backlash that restored the authoritarian state’s power.
For decades, presidents have used their power to declare emergencies to sideline badly needed regulations and entrench the national security state. Now a group of Congress members led by AOC is proposing that those powers be used for good: to force action to avoid a climate catastrophe.
Former Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis’s bombastic way of painting the union’s class enemies as out-of-touch corporate hacks was genius political theater, and her commitment to democratic, militant unionism was unflagging. Lewis played an integral role in transforming teachers’ unionism — first in Chicago, then around the country.