Cristina Groeger is a history professor at Lake Forest College and a member of the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America.
Universal cash assistance programs have provided an indispensable financial lifeline for households and the economy as a whole during the pandemic. But contrary to many advocates of a universal basic income, the past year’s experience offers no model for a left policy agenda in normal times.
By one estimate, Elon Musk owns more than a quarter of all active satellites orbiting Earth. Though his fantasy of becoming emperor of Mars probably won’t materialize, we have to scale back the unchecked power of deranged Bond villain types like Musk before it extends from Earth to the skies.
Yesterday, the Biden administration took two long-overdue steps toward potentially ending the Saudi war on Yemen. But the president has to provide more clarity on what exactly his administration is willing to do to halt Saudi Arabia’s brutality and remove the boot from the neck of Yemenis.
At the end of 2020, Victoria’s parliament passed a motion calling for a Green New Deal. But the plan drawn up by Australian Labor premier Daniel Andrews is market-driven and won’t come close to achieving the kind of large-scale public transformation that we need to avert disaster.
Believe it or not, the data all point to television, not social media, as the most powerful reality-warping medium for most Americans. Unsurprisingly, that is not the impression you’d get from listening to the cable news–driven discourse on the subject.
With Chicago teachers deadlocked in a fight with mayor Lori Lightfoot over reopening schools, a group of public school parents and students staged a “sick-out” from online learning, protesting moves for a quick reopening.
So many of us feel exhausted and inadequate, lacking joy in our work and beating ourselves up over our supposed laziness. But we’re not lazy — we just live under an economic system that wants to wring more and more work out of us.
Jacob Lawrence was one of twentieth-century America’s most celebrated black artists. In Struggle, his series of paintings on the American Revolution, he opened up new territory in American history by venturing beyond the narrow set of topics like Harlem, jazz clubs, and cotton plantations which had become synonymous with black art in mid-century America.
For years now, fact-checking has been wielded by mainstream journalists against Bernie Sanders’s left agenda. Case in point: Jeff Bezos’s newspaper’s recent attacks on Sanders for telling the truth about how the Republican tax cuts benefited the rich like Bezos.
With an election due this autumn, Norway’s once-dominant Labour Party has been out of government for almost a decade. If the Norwegian left can’t recapture the spirit that underpinned its greatest achievements, an impressive legacy of social reform will be under threat.
The coup in Myanmar has exposed the faulty foundation of the country’s democratic transition. We spoke with an organizer in Myanmar’s burgeoning labor movement — which will be central to the fight against authoritarianism in the coming days and months.
In response to the Capitol riot, new legislation proposed by New York Assembly members Ron Kim and socialist Zohran Mamdani would divest public money from firms whose executives bankroll shadowy far-right groups.
A collective wail of anguish went up after news broke that Dolly Parton’s working-class anthem “9 to 5” has been repurposed for a Squarespace ad lauding “working, working, working.” Our grief is justified. But the song’s deformation into a hollow jingle says more about capitalism than Dolly.
Jeff Bezos joined Black Lives Matters’ calls for racial justice last year. But Amazon workers in the majority-black town of Bessemer, Alabama are trying to unionize — and Amazon has fought them tooth and nail.
The US Chamber of Commerce is pushing Democrats to slash COVID-19 relief checks for millions of people. And corporate Democrats appear to be listening.
Jeff Bezos is stepping aside as Amazon’s CEO having made a fortune of almost $200 billion. It’s an attempt at reputation rehabilitation — but he can’t escape the legacy of exploitation he leaves behind.
The Italian president has appointed former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi to form a “nonpolitical” government. In fact, this is the latest in a string of technocratic administrations designed to impose unpopular austerity measures — a deeply ideological program that Italians have never voted for.
A British government ad campaign targets lockdown rule-breakers, blamed for undermining measures to tackle the pandemic. But the real problem is the government’s failure to set effective rules to start with — scapegoating individual behavior even as it has allowed the virus to let rip in crowded schools and workplaces.
The Robinhood trading app is an attempt to commercialize a powerful but thoroughly fictional myth: that finance can be democratized while ownership and control remain in the hands of powerful capitalists.
As part of its anti-union agenda, Alberta’s right-wing government has wrested control of workers’ retirement funds from a joint board that gave them a guaranteed say. Workers in the province are preparing to mount a legal challenge to the power grab.