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.
BlackRock is being depicted as an environmental hero for its recent commitment to fight climate change — at the same time the Wall Street firm undermines climate action and helps companies hide dark money political spending.
Now that hedge funds are losing billions to Redditors buying stocks like GameStop, Wall Street wants heavy-handed intervention into the market, and brokerages have clamped down on the upstarts. It’s a reminder that there’s no such thing as “people’s capitalism” or “shareholder democracy” — the capitalist economy is structured to do what’s best for the business elite.
A hundred years years ago, Italy’s Communist Party was founded in Livorno. The Tuscan port city had a long history of defying authority — and in the 1920s, its working-class neighborhoods were heartlands of the resistance against rising Fascism.
Inmates at New Zealand’s Waikeria Prison staged a six-day protest against abusive conditions and collective punishment. Despite her campaign promises to reform a dysfunctional justice system, Labour prime minister Jacinda Ardern is ignoring their demands.
California’s post-Reagan drift into the welcome arms of the corporate-friendly Democratic Party has meant a politics that looks like an elite lifestyle brand. It’s a state where social liberalism reigns, but so does staggering poverty and inequality. The Democratic Party has failed California and unless things change, it will continue to fail our nation.
Not long after his inauguration, where he assured Americans that they “can overcome this deadly virus,” Joe Biden announced that as many as hundreds of thousands of coronavirus deaths are unavoidable in the coming months. But there’s only one reason for that — Biden preemptively ruled out pursuing a national stay-at-home order two months ago.
Much of the news these days is unhinged, but nothing can compare, in terms of pure lunacy, with QAnon. The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer, longtime observer of the far right, spoke with Jacobin to explain QAnon’s origins and evolution — and why he thinks the movement is here to stay even if “Q” and “The Storm” are never heard from again.
Rep. Markwayne Mullin, a Republican from Oklahoma, voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and has refused to wear a mask around other Congress members. Now, despite the CDC’s moratorium on evictions, his companies are trying to evict renters in the middle of the pandemic.
It’s easy for the Left to cheer when racists, fascists, and reactionaries are de-platformed by tech companies. But the censors aren’t our friends. We should champion free speech online — and argue that the best way to protect it is with a socialist program that brings privatized social media platforms into public control.
The battle for universal health care provision in the US has a long history, closely integrated with feminist demands. As far back as World War I, militant unions like the International Ladies’ Garment Workers radicalized the campaign for health care — and came within an inch of victory.
The online pranksters behind the great GameStop bubble of 2021 are probably going to lose a lot of money. But they’ve done the world a service by reminding us of the utter uselessness of the stock market, an institution that serves no purpose besides making a small number of undeserving people rich.
Nearly 6,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama are preparing to vote on unionizing. It’s the most important labor battle in the US right now — and Joe Biden should say he stands with the workers.
Violence against women in Mexico, including femicides, has skyrocketed in recent years. And despite presiding over a gender-equal government and decrying machismo, AMLO has done little to address the growing epidemic.
Democrats promised to provide a near-universal benefit of $2,000 checks. Billionaire-owned media is trying to convince them to ignore history and gut their proposal — a move that would be politically disastrous and worsen Americans’ already brutal suffering.
New research shows stay-at-home orders and eviction bans are key to stopping the spread of COVID-19. But Gov. Gavin Newsom is ignoring that research and reopening California with a weak eviction moratorium.
Jabari Brisport is one of six socialists now in the New York State Legislature, the most in a century. We spoke to him about how he came to democratic socialism, how elected officials can help build working-class power, and why his top policy priority is to tax the rich.
After Trump’s 2017 inauguration, the meme saturating our political discourse was neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting punched in the head. Today, it’s Bernie Sanders in mittens, dutifully but joylessly sitting through Biden’s inauguration. It’s a marker of our new political context: white nationalists thankfully don’t occupy the White House anymore, but nobody should cheer the neoliberal status quo.
Journalist Libby Watson started a newsletter to document the horrors of the US’s profit-driven health system. She spoke to us about the insurance industry’s windfall COVID-19 profits, Joe Biden’s phantom public option proposal, and how growing up with Britain’s National Health Service made her experiences with America’s grotesque system all the more enraging.
During the twentieth century, Mexican leaders shaped international institutions by demanding economic redistribution from wealthy countries to the Global South. But the system that emerged ultimately impoverished Mexico — and thwarted the ambitions of the decolonizing world.
The Chicago Teachers Union is locked in a standoff with the mayor as teachers defy orders to return to in-person teaching. If the mayor doesn’t back down, she’ll have a big fight on her hands — one that could look like the 2019 CTU strike that lasted fifteen days.