Benjamin Case is a researcher, educator, and organizer living in Pittsburgh.
Last week’s riot was an attempt to undermine the nation’s democratic procedures. The response from some political elites is unwittingly trying to do the same through calls for unnecessary new terror laws.
Israel and its supporters are ramping up efforts to outlaw solidarity with Palestinians in the name of combating antisemitism. But these authoritarian maneuvers can’t hide the fact that Israel is losing the battle for public opinion over its denial of Palestinian rights.
There is no twenty-first-century capitalism without the shipping and oil industries. And understanding the global economic system means understanding their operation in the Arabian Peninsula.
As far-right rioters rampaged through Congress, Britain’s centrist commentariat absurdly insisted that Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters are equally dangerous. Such allegations of left-wing extremism evoke the crudest Red Scare tactics — and whitewash the conservatives who have been enabling Trump for years.
Last week’s right-wing riot at the Capitol was egged on by politicians and organizations that have received substantial dark-money funding from corporate interests. It’s past time to enact reforms to end the era of dark money — and find out who exactly is bankrolling the anti-democratic far right.
Investigative reporter Ken Klippenstein, who will soon be joining the staff of the Intercept, has honed the craft of Twitter trolling to an art form. But he’d prefer to be known for his journalistic scoops, based on a painstaking analysis of declassified documents and a roster of sources working in the bowels of federal agencies.
In India, the transformation of Delhi Ridge from a site of working-class politics to a site of breezy recreation shows how a world-class megacity is made under the spell of neoliberalism. Workers are pushed to the side in order to make way for the affluent.
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s failure to contain the virus in the earliest weeks of the outbreak doomed New York to far more suffering than it needed to endure. Now, with a vaccine here, he is again proving his unfitness to lead his state through the worst crisis it has faced in modern history.
Apologists for capitalism like to point to its historically progressive aspects, like its supposed use of “free labor” rather than older forms of labor compulsion. But throughout its history, as the system has conquered new territories for capital accumulation, it has embraced and depended on the most coercive forms of “premodern” production relations.
Impeachment could, in theory, turn Donald Trump into an even bigger symbol of a rotten political and social order. It could help bury the Reagan order once and for all. But establishment Democrats would never be interested in the type of impeachment that fundamentally challenged the status quo.
Big Ag had a field day last year at the federal trough, gulping down more subsidies than ever before. We can do much better — promoting sustainable farming while empowering farmworkers and challenging the power of Big Ag.
The Republican Party is frozen in place, unable to move beyond Donald Trump but unsure of what to do even if it could. The Democratic establishment is firmly in charge of their party. We’re stuck in a bankrupt interregnum — with little chance of breaking free one way or the other anytime soon.
British suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst was a militant campaigner for women’s right to vote. As a socialist, she also refused to uncouple the women’s movement from the fight for equality across all of society.
The riot at the Capitol on Wednesday was a symptom of right-wing weakness, not power. The real danger isn’t a MAGA coup, but a restoration of the neoliberal status quo that produced the nightmare of Trump and his minions.
Joe Manchin, the Democratic West Virginia senator who is a Republican in all but name, represents a state suffering immense economic hardship under COVID-19. Yet he is threatening to block a new round of $2,000 survival checks that his constituents — and all of us — badly need.
The National Association of Manufacturers has strong ties to the Trump administration and a long history of waging war on one of the most important democratic institutions in the United States: unions. Of course it couldn’t help releasing a statement about the storming of the capitol and the need to “preserve democracy.”
Mike Pence built his political career on theocratic extremism, Dickensian economics, and sycophancy toward Donald Trump. It’s a little late for him to be posing now as a defender of democracy and a counter to Trump’s authoritarianism.
The US government claims to be supporting the Syrian Kurds in the fight against ISIS. But it is attempting to bring a more moderate leadership to power in a bid to weaken the Kurds’ revolutionary project in Rojava. Washington will never be a friend of self-determination.
Monday’s court ruling against extraditing Julian Assange to the United States is a welcome relief for his supporters. But the court also rejected his defenses on the grounds of journalists’ rights to seek and impart information — a ruling that will further thwart scrutiny of the national security establishment.
Corporate-backed conservative groups like the US Chamber of Commerce, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, and companies like Chevron have all issued statements decrying Wednesday’s occupation of the Capitol — without acknowledging the role they played in helping elect the politicians who egged on and fueled the attempt to overturn the presidential election.