Benjamin Case is a researcher, educator, and organizer living in Pittsburgh.
It’s a dark time in the US and across the world, but the last two weeks actually give us some cause for hope. Cities are pledging to shift money from cops to public services, violent officers are being disciplined and fired, and a wave of left victories came in last week’s primaries.
Credit for the unprecedented wave of mass protests should go to anti-police brutality activists, movement journalists, and politicized young people. But let’s not forget the boys in blue themselves: cops’ vicious treatment of protesters proved to millions around the world that the protesters were right.
Just two days after the murder of George Floyd, a young welder and rapper named Modesto Reyes was killed by police in the New Orleans suburb of Jefferson Parish after a traffic stop. Why aren’t the deaths of Reyes and the other young black men recently killed by police in the New Orleans area national news?
Longshore workers on the East and West Coast are stopping work today to demand an end to racist police murders. We spoke with one of the protest organizers about the action — and why labor must take the lead in the fight against police violence.
Republicans are simply outraged at calls to defund the police. But for years, they’ve had no problem defunding the agencies tasked with enforcing laws against the world’s most hardened, powerful criminals: corporations.
Ilhan Omar, once a refugee, has become a major force in US politics. In her new memoir, she charts her journey from Somalia to the US Congress and explains why, despite hating her politics, she can’t help but admire Margaret Thatcher. Incredibly for a memoir like this, the book is actually good.
Critics declaring Bernie Sanders’s campaigns a total failure have discounted a basic socialist proposition: our metric for his success should not just be his winning or losing, but the extent to which the working-class movement has advanced.
The brutality we have repeatedly seen meted out by American police all over the country isn’t a bug of our political-economic system — it’s a feature.
Australia’s mean and punitive benefits system is a key tool for disciplining workers while amassing profits for private firms. The labor movement needs to join with the unemployed to overhaul it entirely.
Our cities have siphoned money away from public goods like education and social services, and funneled the cash into ever-larger, ever-more-militarized police forces. It’s time to reverse that.
While it’s far too soon to declare victory, let’s take stock of how far political demands have come since the 1992 LA Rebellion.
Donald Trump’s dangerous and unhinged response to the George Floyd protests shows why he must be defeated in November. But Joe Biden’s policy proposals and disturbing record on criminal justice suggests the era of resistance will have to continue with Biden in the White House.
Workers caught in the grip of the criminal justice system aren’t just denied their human rights by oppressive police and judges — they’re held under the thumb of their bosses. Mass incarceration is devastating for the labor movement.
Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have a vision of space that serves the narrow interests of capitalists. But we don’t want to be indentured servants on a Martian colony — we want solar exploration that benefits humanity as a whole.
Ever since the PSOE and Unidas Podemos formed a governing coalition in January, Spain’s right-wing opposition has denied its democratic legitimacy. Calls for police mutiny and resistance against the COVID-19 lockdown show how the Spanish right is imitating its Latin American counterparts, seeking to create a climate of chaos that can bring down the government.
The liberal establishment is desperate to return a centrist to the White House in November and reestablish the country’s more stable military dominance of the world order, disrupted only briefly by Donald Trump. Joe Biden’s terrible track record on foreign policy — including his championing of war in Iraq — suggests a return to Obama-style strong military interventions abroad.
Argentina’s 1976–1983 military dictatorship relied on widespread torture and disappearances to eradicate all political opponents, real or imagined. Seeking to conceal the junta regime’s one-sided terror, the Right still refers to those years as a “dirty war.” But the only accurate way to describe the dictatorship is as a period of “state terrorism.”
The COVID-19 lockdown has resulted in a drastic short-term fall in carbon emissions. Without structural change, however, we’re still on a disastrous trajectory. To avoid calamity, we need to transform our economic system.
China’s response to the pandemic has sharply contrasted with Trump’s, with a far stronger public health response in China but little aid for the poorest. Both countries’ responses to the crisis show that a strong state doesn’t stand in contradiction with neoliberalism — rather, it’s a key element of it.
On the 76th anniversary of D-Day, to honor those who perished in the struggle against fascism, we could do little better than to combat imperial hubris wherever we find it, including at home.