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.
B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, has taken an extraordinary step — following many Palestinian and human rights groups around the world — in calling the state of Israel what it is: an apartheid regime and thus anything but a democracy.
Joe Biden and the Democratic establishment refuse to push Medicare for All even as COVID-19 continues to ravage the country. That’s all the more reason for us to demand, alongside Bernie Sanders, that everyone get the health care they need free of charge until the pandemic is over.
In his inauguration speech Wednesday, Joe Biden promised health care that will be “secure for all.” But no amount of rhetorical triangulation can erase the fact that a single-payer system is the only viable alternative to the status quo.
The legacy of Margo St James, the trailblazing sex worker organizer who died earlier this month at 83, is more than her brazen personality, more than her bold and flamboyant tactics. She recognized that economic exploitation and gendered harassment are inextricably linked to police violence.
Joe Biden’s new ethics order will limit one revolving door loophole between government and lobbying — but not the loopholes Biden’s own cabinet picks used to make their fortunes.
In the first 24 hours of the Joe Biden administration, Teamsters are on strike in the Bronx, Chicago teachers are preparing to stop work, and even the staff of the New Yorker are engaged in a work stoppage.
In his inauguration speech yesterday, Joe Biden rightly identified a crisis of ignored truth and unending lies in American politics. Donald Trump enflamed that crisis, but the political class, the media industry, and Biden himself helped create it.
Founded 100 years ago today, the Italian Communist Party immediately faced a violent wave of repression, killing hundreds of militants. As policemen, business elites, and even liberal politicians swung behind Benito Mussolini, no party resisted the Fascist threat more than the Communists.
Inspired by the hardships faced by peasants in his native Abruzzo, Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara was one of the great anti-fascist novels of the twentieth century. But his own political journey was deeply conflicted, as he left behind his Bolshevik past to become a strident anti-communist.
The Italian Communist Party was founded 100 years ago today. One of its most remarkable early militants was Francesco Misiano — a keen internationalist who fought gun in hand in the German Revolution before becoming a leading light of Soviet cinema.
Founded 100 years ago today, the Italian Communist Party fought its most famous battles in the country’s Northern industrial heartlands. But in the Southern city of Naples, it had to tailor its activity to a more complex reality — a city whose large informal economy reflected the deep inequalities on which the Italian state was founded.
Joe Biden has issued a raft of executive orders that are surprisingly progressive. But we know who to thank: the organized left, which has helped transform US politics.
The United Auto Workers has fallen far from its postwar glory as the most important union in America. Flagrant leadership corruption has made things worse. But a recent settlement with the Justice Department opens up the possibility of democratizing the union, writes labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein.
In the end, Donald Trump didn’t destroy the American political system. He showed the world how corrupt, undemocratic, and reactionary it already was.
Today, on Inauguration Day, we shouldn’t forget that the business class has long stoked fears of democracy — and bankrolled the conservative movement that gave us the events of January 6.
Donald Trump won the presidency claiming he was a radical opponent of the political establishment. That was always a lie — and his four years in the White House revealed he was just another reactionary, capitalist billionaire.
Joe Biden will likely govern to the left of Barack Obama. But his willingness to spend has everything to do with capital’s relaxation of deficit worries — and where capital says “no,” no one should expect Biden to say “yes.”
President Joe Biden now has a choice: make friends with congressional Republicans or actually make progress on the multiple overlapping crises facing the United States. He can’t do both.
The departure of Donald Trump from the White House is cause for celebration. Our task now is to build a democratic socialist alternative to Joe Biden — and to oppose the Democratic establishment’s neoliberal agenda.
The “1776 Commission” report released by Donald Trump just before his exit from the presidency is so staggeringly awful, trotting out every moldy reactionary trope about the history of the United States it can, that it has to be read to be believed.