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.
Slowly but surely, the idea of social housing — a public housing model most commonly associated with the socialist government of “Red Vienna” — is moving from being a leftist dream to a concrete policy agenda item in a number of US states.
The story of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton’s assassination by Chicago Police and the FBI has finally been made into a movie. Judas and the Black Messiah is uneven as a film, but it’s a small step toward a serious reckoning with America’s past.
On Thursday, Australians woke to find Facebook had banned all news on the platform. Liberal PM Scott Morrison has refused to back down over the laws that triggered the move. Beneath the rhetoric, Morrison’s stand is about serving the interests of News Corp, not saving democracy.
An interview with Andrés Arauz on his surprising journey to the verge of state power, what his ally Rafael Correa accomplished in Ecuador, and how he plans to win April’s election, rebuild his party, and deepen the Citizens’ Revolution.
Throughout the country, teachers are being forced back into schools before it’s fully safe. And while many teachers’ unions are waging valiant fights against unsafe reopenings, too many of them are losing.
New York legislator Ron Kim confronted Governor Andrew Cuomo over his move to give nursing home executives immunity for their deadly negligence during COVID. Cuomo responded with threats of retribution. We talk to Kim about the episode.
In Sunday’s Catalan elections, pro-independence parties topped 50 percent support for the first time. But with popular mobilization on the decline, pro-independence forces will need to answer the social needs of the working-class majority if they are to rally a broad front against Spain’s inflexible constitutional order.
This week, Emmanuel Macron’s higher education minister alarmed researchers and students by calling a formal investigation into the alleged “Islamo-leftist” atmosphere in France’s universities. The announced witch hunt is a worrying assault on critical inquiry — and shows the neoliberal government’s willingness to amplify baseless far-right talking points.
What a surprise — the Texas energy disaster has been turned into a yet another culture war scrimmage field, pitting right-wing advocates of fossil fuels against liberal supporters of renewable energy. But the red vs. blue framing conceals something important: when it comes to the climate, Texans are far to the left of their representatives.
With the Chicago Tribune’s publishing company on the verge of being swallowed up by the hedge fund industry, capitalism’s ongoing destruction of the free press through downsizing and asset-stripping has become the number one threat to American democracy.
The union organizing campaign currently underway at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama could prove to be the most important labor fight in the South since the failure of Operation Dixie, the movement’s last large-scale push to organize the South in the late 1940s. The story of that historic effort holds lessons for the struggle today.
Leftists have been burned so many times by Hollywood depictions of radicals. So it’s a welcome surprise when, once in a blue moon, mainstream filmmakers actually do the history of American radicals justice, as in the new film on Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers, Judas and the Black Messiah.
Rush Limbaugh was a right-wing demagogue who also happened to have considerable talents as a broadcaster — and he used them to make the world a worse place for the ordinary people he claimed to speak for.
Republicans are gearing up to use gerrymandering yet again to entrench their power and smother democracy at the state level. But Congress has the constitutional authority to ensure a “republican form of government” prevails at the state level — and it should act immediately to quash partisan gerrymandering and attacks on voting rights.
Some prominent academics have taken to lecturing teachers and their unions for insisting that reopening schools is still too dangerous. Those academics are wrong: teachers are insisting on a safe, solidaristic approach to opening schools back up that protects parents, students, staff, teachers, and all of us.
If you’ve found yourself impulsively shopping online during quarantine, you’re not alone. And there’s no shame in it. But this is our corona-capitalist dystopia: purchasing things we may or may not need while desperately needed public services are left to rot.
For the better part of a year, New York governor Andrew Cuomo has basked in an absurdly undeserved, media-driven reputation as a wise and competent COVID-19 statesman. Now reality is finally catching up with him.
The first round of Ecuador’s presidential election handed first place to left-wing candidate Andrés Arauz. It was a total repudiation of Lenín Moreno’s neoliberal agenda. But more work is needed to cement a coalition that can win power and an anti-austerity program.
Socialist New York State Sen. Julia Salazar has some harsh words for Andrew Cuomo’s botched handling of COVID-19, his “power grab” at the pandemic’s beginning, and his refusal to tax the rich: “It is dangerous for Gov. Cuomo to continue to be the most powerful person in our state.”
An attack on El Salvador’s main opposition party has left two people dead and amounts to one of the worst acts of political violence since the peace accords signing in 1992. The country’s right-wing president, Nayib Bukele, should be held responsible for helping to stoke the violence.