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.
From California to Massachusetts, companies like Uber and Lyft are promoting legislation that misclassifies gig workers. What’s worse, they’ve convinced some people that their pursuit of cheap labor is actually a crusade for equality.
You can redistribute income and power from capital to labor. But if you want to make sure that the final income distribution is sensitive to differences in household composition, there is no substitute for a universal welfare state.
In the days of the British slave trade, “commercial abolitionists” urged against the purchase of slave-made goods. This business-friendly approach counseled consumer abstention as a form of political advocacy — just like the “ethical capitalism” of today.
From brutalism to Stranger Things, Western pop culture is full of nostalgia for Cold War aesthetics and lost futures. Young people in ex-Soviet countries have developed their own version, Sovietwave — a music genre that summons up the spirit of the space age.
Jeff Bezos and other billionaires are investing big in anti-aging science. There’s nothing wrong with that — but there is something wrong with a world where the rich can fund their pet research agendas while ignoring crises that primarily affect the poor.
Processing chips have become central to our lives, running smartphones and TVs alike. But disruptions in the chip industry are driving up inflation — and exposing the industry for the ugly capitalist oligopoly that it is.
Dark money groups funded by the fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch are lobbying Supreme Court justices to block the Environmental Protection Agency from limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
We’re in the midst of a new psychedelics boom across the United States. These drugs can provide incredible healing and understanding — but not under the dictates of a pathologizing, profit-obsessed health system.
California has filed a civil rights lawsuit against Elon Musk’s Tesla based on shocking evidence that the company’s Fremont plant is operating as a systematically racist, segregated facility where discrimination is the norm.
All professional sports team owners are evil. But the sight of billionaire LA Rams owner Stan Kroenke hoisting the Super Bowl trophy on Sunday should inspire particular revulsion — he’s one of the most despicable owners on the planet.
Inflation is threatening to push millions into poverty. Forget what the establishment says: workers should demand higher wages right now.
Far-right organizing in Australia is nothing new. But time and again, coalitions of anti-fascists, union militants, and community organizations have stymied the far right’s rise. That history stands as a resource for the Left to draw from today.
This spring, New York’s Democratic Socialists of America is eyeing a promising state senate race between Kristen Gonzalez and Elizabeth Crowley that could put the group in position to form a significant bloc of legislators in the state’s upper house.
The news that Blackwater founder Erik Prince was working with former spies to go after Trump opponents is just the tip of the iceberg. Former intelligence officers and other denizens of the national security state are increasingly meddling in domestic US politics.
Starbucks workers are channeling the frustration shared by millions of food service workers into a unionization drive. It’s the most exciting new organizing campaign in the United States.
Libertarian think tanks are already gearing up to make the dystopian case for extending private property rights to the moon. It’s a blueprint for expanding the power of the world’s plutocrats on a scale never seen before.
Neither mainstream American political party has a compelling message for working-class voters. As a result, voters are starting to vote in line with their cultural opinions, not their class interests. Unfortunately, that’s good news for the Right.
Once again, pundits have begun beating the drums for a presidential ticket split between a Democrat and a Republican in 2024. It’s a return to the elitist thinking that was still dominant in 2016 — and a recipe for disaster in the fight against the Right.
The New York Times suggests that Modern Monetary Theory had a real moment in the sun after the pandemic-induced economic contraction. But monetary and fiscal stimulus is just the normal way of responding to recessions.
As British political life exhibits ever more morbid symptoms, the reissue of Elizabeth Taylor’s 1971 novel Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is well-timed. Its sharply observed and amusing portrait of England’s post-imperial decline speaks to us across the decades.