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.
Is journalism’s job to afflict the comfortable? Or is it to kiss the ass of the powerful with hosannas to how smart, talented, and charming they are? In the case of WIRED’s recent profile of Pete Buttigieg, it’s clearly the latter.
The Pakistani authorities arrested former PM Imran Khan earlier this month, provoking a violent backlash from his supporters. Pakistan is going through a profoundly dangerous crisis where miscalculation by the main political actors could result in disaster.
The campaign for Greece’s election this Sunday has been mostly uninspiring, with little hope of an end to austerity. With Syriza’s capitulation in 2015 still weighing heavily, the radical left faces an uphill struggle to overcome the mood of despair.
The Biden administration has laid the groundwork for a financial firm to use the fragile Colorado River as a route for oil trains — amid heightened concerns about derailments that could cause untold environmental damage in a drought-prone area.
Democrats want you to believe their commander-in-chief is an ultraprogressive master negotiator. The GOP wants you to believe they’re a newly reborn party of the working class. The never-ending debt ceiling standoff reveals just how absurd both tales are.
When Zionists use the trauma of the Holocaust to defend Israeli apartheid, they are betraying the spirit of “never again” that was supposed to ensure the world would never stand by as human rights atrocities were committed.
Last week, Turkey’s opposition deprived autocratic president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of a first-round victory. But in order to win, the opposition will need to unify liberals and leftists around secularism and economic justice.
If the Biden administration wants to stop the mass displacement that is leading enormous numbers of Cuban and Venezuelan migrants to the US-Mexico border, it should end the sanctions that have made life in those countries all but impossible for average people.
Many Nordic countries use the “Ghent” unemployment system, where unions rather than the state administer benefits. Some on the Left have applauded this approach — but leftists in the US would do well to avoid it.
Florida’s GOP-controlled legislature just sent Gov. Ron DeSantis a bill that would put more state pension money in the hands of his prospective Wall Street donors. The bill could put DeSantis on the wrong side of a long-standing anti-corruption rule.
As the writers’ strike continues, we should look back at the Hollywood blacklist. The blacklist didn’t just ruin many workers’ careers — it narrowed the range of acceptable movies and contributed to the conservatism of the 1950s.
If you’ve ever visited New York City’s Washington Square Park, chances are good you’ve seen and heard Colin Huggins playing classical music on his piano. Huggins is incredibly talented — and he’s also homeless. Why not make him a city employee?
After claiming for months he wouldn’t negotiate budget cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, Joe Biden is doing just that. In caving to the GOP’s threats, Biden is empowering them to demand even more.
As capitalism took shape in the United States during the late 19th century, there was nothing metaphorical about the idea of class war. For American workers facing the merciless brutality of employers and the state, it was simply a fact of life.
Electric vehicle manufacturing in the US is overwhelming nonunion, but 1,400 workers for an electric bus manufacturer in Georgia have just unionized. It’s one of the labor movement’s biggest victories in the South this century.
Leader of the French Revolution Maximilien Robespierre is often portrayed as a crazed fanatic. It’s thanks to the work of his equally revolutionary sister Charlotte Robespierre that the egalitarian basis of his legacy survived.
Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac collaborated with the fascist regime in Croatia, whose atrocities shocked even the Nazis. The US Congress then spent years attempting to free him in the name of anti-communism.
In the late 1800s, Southern black farmers built a mass movement to resist oppression. Though often forgotten today, the black populists and their acts of cross-racial solidarity terrified the planter class, who responded with violence and Jim Crow laws.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been putting huge sums of state retirement money into underperforming private equity firms that have donated to his campaign efforts.
In Welfare for Markets, Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora show that cash transfers emerged as an alternative to the welfare state favored by a left that had abandoned hope in socialism and a right hostile to democratic management of the economy.