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.
As part of the debt ceiling deal, Joe Biden forfeited his authority to help student debtors and set a ticking time bomb for tens of millions of Americans whose student loan payments are about to restart.
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy thinks young people should earn the right to vote by joining the army, like in the sci-fi classic Starship Troopers. It’s a political nonstarter, but it says a lot about how conservatives see the world.
While it’s always refreshing to see the lives of working people centered in our media, the docuseries Working: What We Do All Day is hampered by the limitations of its host and narrator, former president Barack Obama.
The Supreme Court’s Glacier pro-employer ruling this week opens the door to further erosion of workers’ rights to strike. But the right to walk off the job is far from extinguished in the US, and workers shouldn’t let the court scare them away from doing so.
The original goal of the United States blockade against Cuba was to worsen conditions and inspire Cubans to overthrow their government. Regime change hasn’t been forthcoming. Now the US maintains the devastating sanctions as a threat to other nations.
The documentary Rabble Rousers tells the story of the New York activists who overcame enormous odds to build the Cooper Square community land trust — and points to the limits of movements that don’t contend for broader control over the state and capital.
This year marks the centennial of Mrinal Sen, one of India’s most brilliant Marxist filmmakers. His work combined a formal inventiveness that rivaled that of the French New Wave with an unflinching commitment to attacking the hypocrisies of India’s elite.
Kenyan content moderators at Meta have been fighting for better compensation for workers forced to watch videos of murder, rape, and ethnic cleansing. Meta was initially unwilling to give in to these demands, but Kenyan courts are intervening on the side of workers.
The state just has to make one small tweak to their parental leave proposal — otherwise a large number of new Pennsylvania parents will be ineligible for the program and receive no financial support while they care for their newborns.
Eritrea spent decades fighting for independence against enormous odds. Its people finally achieved their goal in the 1990s, but Eritrean leader Isaias Afwerki has since created one of the world’s bleakest dictatorships, prompting countless Eritreans to flee.
Leonard Leo’s massive conservative dark money network is quietly working behind the scenes to try to eliminate abortion protections at the state level.
Anthony Albanese’s Labor government is accusing Greens MPs of standing in the way of solutions to the housing crisis. But under Labor’s plan, the proportion of public housing will drop while rents keep rising.
Working-class reformer Brandon Johnson is now Chicago’s mayor. The next task, as socialist elected official Anthony Quezada argues in an interview, is to bring more ordinary people into the political process so Johnson can actually pass sweeping reforms.
Workers say Dollar General continues to understaff its stores and pay poverty wages. The alleged violations have gotten so bad that, this week, shareholders defied the company’s board of directors and approved a proposed third-party audit of safety conditions.
Claims that former Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters deployed antisemitic imagery at recent concerts in Berlin are baseless. The charges are being elevated by media figures and politicians who detest his advocacy for Palestinian liberation.
Microfinance and fintech have been sold as innovative solutions to poverty in the Global South. But for the most part, they’ve just enriched wealthy investors at the poor’s expense.
The deal that brought an end to the debt ceiling circus is not good — and Democrats didn’t have to let it become this bad.
Former soldier Ben Roberts-Smith has failed in his bid to sue journalists for exposing his war crimes in Afghanistan. His downfall is set to embarrass the political elites who championed him.
The election of the far right to Chile’s Constitutional Council is another major blow to the hope of a new constitution. But the Chilean left isn’t defeated yet.
Last week at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, over 150 resident physicians walked out and won a tentative agreement, marking the first time hospital doctors in New York City have gone on strike since 1990. We spoke with an Elmhurst doctor about the strike.