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.
The last year has seen the largest increase in billionaire wealth in history, but it has little to do with innovation — states across the world are pursuing policies which guarantee that the rich get richer.
Historians often neglect Japan’s New Left protest movement in the late 1960s, but it was one of the largest in any country. Radical student activists brought the university system to a halt — and changed the future of Japanese politics.
The first installment of reporting based on the Pentagon Papers was published half a century ago today in the New York Times. Pentagon whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg risked life imprisonment to expose the lies and brutality that the US war on Vietnam was based on.
In Britain, even as the Labour Party is in turmoil at the national level, left-wing city councils in places like Preston are bringing socialist policies to life at the local level.
Former Australian PM Kevin Rudd has come up with a plan for Labor that he calls the “Fourth Way.” But on closer inspection, Rudd’s would-be alternative is a rehash of the timid, conservative approach to politics that has kept Labor out of power for a decade.
After six weeks of massive protests against neoliberalism and state violence in Colombia, right-wing president Iván Duque is relying on brute force to stay in power.
Conservatives are rushing to ban “critical race theory” from public schools, arguing it is ahistorical propaganda. But their own version of US history is a sterilized, hagiographic account that closes off connecting the issues of yesteryear with the problems of the present.
Denmark’s parliament has condemned campus radicals’ political agenda for “undermining scholarly inquiry.” But the mainstream use of disciplines like economics shows that scholarship has always been political — the powerful just don’t like research that challenges their interests.
Disney has rebooted their legendary dalmatian-skinning villain, Cruella de Vil — and turned her into a scrappy, likable hero. The result is the complete mangling of one of the greatest Disney villains of all time.
One of the three hundred settlements founded by Franco’s regime, the village of Llanos del Caudillo is still today named in homage to the dictator. Villagers’ nostalgia for his regime reflects Spain’s failure to reckon with its past — and the ongoing struggle to gain recognition for fascism’s victims.
In 1966, Aboriginal stockmen, domestic workers, and their families at Wave Hill cattle station started a nine-year strike against work conditions that amounted to slavery. Frank Hardy, a communist author, helped the strikers tell their story to the world.
Democratic Party leaders have accused Ilhan Omar of “moral equivalency” because she rejected the brazen double standard underpinning US foreign policy. But Omar is right: murderous violence against civilians is no less criminal when Israel or the United States are the perpetrators.
Novelist Suzanne Collins has returned with a prequel to the Hunger Games trilogy. This time, she writes about the fictional world of Panem from the perspective of its ruling class, which makes her satire on our own society all the more cutting.
Slavoj Zizek has made some serious missteps in recent years — but he remains an important theorist for the Left in our postmodern, neoliberal era.
Yet again, both Republican and Democratic party leaders are attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar for telling the truth about American and Israeli war crimes. And yet again, Omar has nothing to apologize for.
We talk with historian Matt Karp about how ending our great age of inequality will take a renewed working-class politics.
Under pressure from labor leaders and insurance executives, New York Democratic leaders are blocking a vote on single-payer health care legislation in the state — even though it has majority support in the legislature.
Australian retail billionaire Gerry Harvey has rightly been vilified for describing COVID-19 as an opportunity for profitmaking. But Harvey was just stating the facts: the pandemic has enabled his class to get even richer off the backs of the working class.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s book Race for Profit reveals a basic truth about homeownership in a for-profit housing system: it can never produce equitable, just outcomes and dignified housing for all.
Without a change in US policy toward Guatemala and all of Central America, the thousands of asylum seekers fleeing violence and poverty will continue to come — no matter what Joe Biden or Kamala Harris say.