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.
Supermarkets under capitalism are exploitative and ecologically damaging, shaping what we produce as well as what we consume. In public hands, following a different logic, they could supply the creative core of a democratically planned socialist economy.
FDR’s Federal Writers’ Project employed thousands of out-of-work writers to produce guidebooks, compile local histories, and collect stories of the country at a moment of turmoil. We need an equivalent program today.
Alberta’s politicians want to graft a tech sector onto the province’s unsustainable petrostate economy. Instead of combining Big Oil with Big Tech, they should be using public investment to foster green development and a just transition.
Esther Bejarano, who died Saturday at age 96, was an Auschwitz survivor and a lifelong communist. A talented musician, in later life she continued to raise her voice against the resurgent far right, setting an example for anti-fascists everywhere.
Texas’s new “heartbeat bill” offers private citizens $10,000 to successfully sue organizations that help women get abortions. It’s a public subsidy for the anti-abortion movement that harms working-class women.
South Africa’s immense poverty and inequality have been weaponized by former president Jacob Zuma and his supporters through a massive economic sabotage campaign. Any response must address the miseries saturating the country as well as the chaos now unleashed.
Even before the pandemic, America was in the midst of a massive housing crisis. Now, it’s far worse. Our housing agenda has to include investing in public housing, universal rent control, just-cause eviction, and a broad push to decommodify housing.
The rise of online learning during the pandemic has accelerated the already rapid growth of the educational technology sector. But the Silicon Valley firms taking over the classroom remain far too unaccountable — and they’re massively extending the automated processes that unfairly decide children’s futures.
Billionaires like Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk are parasites, worse than socially useless. But they’ve got to justify their existence somehow, so, like five-year-olds, they’re now pretending to be astronauts.
After weeks-long massive protests were put on pause, Colombia’s future is more uncertain than ever. The 2022 elections will be critical in determining whether the country will return to the miserable status quo under the thumb of the United States, or blaze a new leftward path.
From a decades-long US occupation to violent foreign-backed coups, Haiti’s history is riddled with disastrous imperial interventions that have helped keep the country mired in poverty. There’s zero justification for more American interference in the country.
The anti-abortion movement has grown increasingly militant in recent years — and increasingly successful. The liberal pushback isn’t cutting it. We need a leftist strategy to defend abortion rights.
Sunday’s Bulgarian general election saw victory for TV personality Slavi Trifonov’s “anti-party.” This celebrity vehicle talks of replacing corrupt parties with experts — rehashing pro-business dogmas that have already dominated Bulgaria for decades.
Ned Kelly is Australia’s most famous and beloved outlaw. He didn’t only defy the colonial police, he also left behind a revolutionary manifesto decrying oppression and poverty that demands to be read.
Thanks to shortsighted nationalism and corporate power, it’s now expected to take until 2078 to achieve global vaccination. The lesson is clear: COVID can’t be overcome until we put human needs before private profit.
If people like Joe Biden and Marco Rubio actually cared about Cuban lives, they would lift the crippling blockade and end the 62-year-old US war against Cuba.
The space race playing out among billionaires like Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk has little to do with science — it’s a PR-driven spectacle designed to distract us from the disasters capitalism is causing here on Earth.
We shouldn’t allow the titanic revolution of the Civil War and Reconstruction to obscure a crucial fact: In the antebellum North, an interracial movement fought for, lost, and then kept fighting for black voting rights and equal citizenship rights.
Joe Biden’s top domestic policy adviser, Susan Rice, owns a big stake in a company whose pipeline was just backed by the White House. It’s just an ordinary day in a world where the superrich control both the economy and the government.
As protests break out in Cuba, some politicians are calling for US intervention. That would be a disaster. The best thing the United States can do to help the Cuban people is lift its brutal, inhumane embargo.