Frances Abele CM is Distinguished Research Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy Emerita at Carleton University. She is a research fellow at the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation and the Broadbent Institute. Much of her work focuses on indigenous-Canada relations.
It’s been 70 years since the CIA-backed coup in Guatemala ousted President Jacobo Árbenz. He was punished for standing up to Chiquita — but today, the firm might finally be held to account for its ties to a far-right paramilitary group in Colombia.
Private equity firms are scoring huge payouts from manufacturers to take on the financial risks of people getting sick from asbestos poisoning — and using ruthless legal maneuvers to delay and deny compensation to victims.
Canada’s arms export data reveal a disturbing trend: billions in military goods flowing to authoritarian governments accused of human rights abuses. Global autocracies now outnumber democracies, and Canada appears happy to sell arms to the highest bidder.
Novelist Ghassan Kanafani was assassinated by Mossad agents this week over 50 years ago. Exiled as a child during the Nakba, he would never return to Palestine — except in his fiction.
No protest to simply register discontent, no preaching to the choir, no fool’s errand organizing campaigns: Jane McAlevey was deadly serious about smart, effective strategy for the working class, and she demanded organizers around her be the same.
The fine-graining of data collection and increasing isolation of consumers is leading to surveillance pricing, a new trend where corporations exploit personal information to set individualized prices for each person.
The late labor strategist Jane McAlevey’s horizons were never limited to winning particular campaigns or even to revitalizing unions. What she wanted above all, and what she believed was possible if our side got “serious,” was for workers to take power.
Deindustrialization has helped create a right-wing turn in many Midwestern towns. Long traditions of labor militancy can explain why it hasn’t in others.
The world craves Italy’s Castelvetrano olives. But Italy doesn’t want the workers needed to pick them.
When and where organized labor’s been on the move.
Instead of imposing collectivization from above, Julius Nyerere tried to build a rural socialism based on the values of Tanzania’s villages.
This small town was envisioned as a socialist paradise. Now it’s Trump country.
What happened when assimilated German Jews tried to settle their Eastern European brethren in rural America?
The leading thinkers of Marxism stressed how important it was to govern in partnership with the peasantry. When communist states imposed collectivization by force, the results were disastrous.
Capitalism spread through India’s countryside without developing it.
In Brazil, Lula has wagered that concessions to agribusiness elites are necessary to advance his redistributive project. Yet these very elites may undermine his whole program.
Supposedly the first of four films, Kevin Costner’s dull and messy Western throwback, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, is almost certainly dead on arrival.
Country, folk, and bluegrass songs that capture the realities of rural labor.
Country music became the sound of Richard Nixon’s coalition in the early 1970s — but it has always been too unruly to be fully co-opted by a reactionary agenda.
White Rural Rage is another attempt to blame the Democratic Party’s decline in rural counties on mean and bigoted white Americans.