Benjamin Case is a researcher, educator, and organizer living in Pittsburgh.
In St. Louis, the demand to defund the police has dovetailed with long-lasting struggles against cash bail and the abuse of prisoners. The Board of Aldermen’s passing of a bill that promises to start closing the city’s most notorious jail reflects the movement’s strength — but also the need for pressure to ensure that abolitionist demands are not watered down into merely cosmetic reforms.
José Garza, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is set to become Austin, Texas’s next district attorney after a movement-based campaign promising to end the drug war and radically downsize the carceral state. He says the Left is finally making its mark in Texas politics.
After we put out a call for remembrances of Michael Brooks, we received deeply emotional emails from his viewers and listeners all around the world about how he changed their politics — and often their lives.
Billionaires like Jeff Bezos aren’t obscenely wealthy because they work harder than everyone else or they’re more innovative. They’re obscenely wealthy because their corporate empires drain society’s resources — and we’d all be better off without them.
Michael Brooks was one of the funniest, most intellectually curious human beings I’ve ever known. He was also deeply committed to creating a better world.
Stacey Abrams shows every sign of becoming a fixture of national Democratic politics, thanks in part to unwaveringly positive press attention. Yet little of that media coverage has focused on her centrist legislative record or her coziness with the business world.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s blistering speech yesterday powerfully connected her experience of sexism with the broader issues of patriarchy and workplace harassment. It was proof, once again, that it’s very nice having democratic socialists in office.
With the push to reopen public schools amid a still-raging pandemic, many teachers are sounding the alarm. We spoke with one Philadelphia high school teacher who has been organizing his coworkers — and the end result may be a massive strike.
Since Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp reopened the economy, infection rates have skyrocketed. But the state has found a way to deal with the problem — by making the surge of new cases disappear from the government’s official COVID-19 tracking website.
In recent years, the European Union’s member states have built their migration policies around an evermore elaborate system of filtering people and finding ways to expel them. This effort to put up obstacles isn’t just expensive or inefficient, but outright antihuman — subjecting migrants’ lives to the whims of recruiters and opaque bureaucratic processes.
The music industry bounced back from a seemingly terminal post-Napster crisis, but the profits from streaming go to big companies and a handful of top artists. Can we build an alternative model that encourages more innovative — and more radical — music?
Hailing from a working-class Pennsylvania background, Robert Eshelman-Håkansson led the life of a bohemian intellectual before rising to become chief aide to the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He leaves behind friends and admirers throughout the US and in half a dozen countries around the world.
Corporations are a central driver of racial inequality in American society. But it’s not because they haven’t thought enough about racial injustice — it’s because their basic goal is to maximize profits, even when it decimates the lives of black people.
In March, Australia’s wage subsidy scheme and generous unemployment benefits stood out globally for their decent approach to the COVID-19 crisis. Now, as cases spike, those schemes are being eroded as government opts to push more people into insecure work.
Arizona governor Doug Ducey allowed pressure from Donald Trump and business leaders in the state to pressure him into prematurely reopening the state. Now the state is suffering the worst coronavirus numbers in the entire world.
Two weeks after being lauded for his task force policies, Joe Biden promised wealthy campaign contributors that changing corporate behavior “is not going to require legislation — I’m not proposing any.” The Left should be worried.
Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership has chosen to settle a libel action it had every chance of winning, as a way of marginalizing the party’s left wing. But that settlement can’t dispel well-founded criticisms of a controversial documentary that targeted Jeremy Corbyn.
Michael Brooks believed that every person, regardless of where they were born or where they lived, was worthy of fundamental human respect — and his dream was to create a more just world, not only for Americans, but for every working person on Earth.
Amid the pettiness and factionalism that so often plague the Left, Michael Brooks’s socialism was warm, vibrant, and intellectually omnivorous. We can all learn from his example.
GOP law enforcement officials are targeting Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire who bankrolls Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump’s political machine. The lawsuit breaks open a major financial scandal that threatens the world’s largest private equity firms — with global implications.