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 start-up trading app Robinhood invoked Occupy as it promised to fix a “rigged” financial system. But the firm now faces class action lawsuits for scamming its millions of novice customers — showing that “democratizing” finance is just a way of finding more people to prey on.
In the wake of last week’s attack on the Capitol, some are calling for the Armed Forces to prosecute pro-Trump rioters in military court. But relying on military courts won’t shore up American democracy — it will empower a punitive judicial system that is used to quash dissent within the ranks.
Last week, Google workers announced the formation of the Alphabet Workers Union, a groundbreaking step in organizing tech workers at one of the world’s largest tech giants. We spoke to two of the union’s rank-and-file members about the organizing effort, how unions can fight for democracy on the job, and why blue- and white-collar workers need to organize together.
Matteo Renzi’s move to split Italy’s center-left government is a distraction from its COVID-19 response — and could even force Italians back to the polls. But what’s really at stake is the shape of its post-crisis recovery, as neoliberal technocrats again threaten to return to office.
Today marks 80 years since James Joyce’s death. Joyce’s flirtation with organized socialist politics was brief, but he continued to find inspiration in socialist texts throughout his life.
GOP lawmakers are resisting new metal detectors at the Capitol building — less than three years after voting to install them at schools all across the country.
My uncle, LeRoy H. Wood, spent years in a federal prison for “conspiring to teach the advocacy of the overthrow of the US government by force and violence.” He was a Communist peacefully organizing for civil and economic rights. And he was punished to a far greater extent than Donald Trump will ever be.
The pandemic has exposed some terminal defects in Canada’s deregulated, privately owned airline industry. Nationalization is the best way to make air travel viable, environmentally sustainable, and in tune with social needs.
The police and national security state need far less power, not more. We should oppose any attempts, by both Democrats and Republicans, to use the Capitol riot to pass new domestic terrorism legislation expanding state surveillance powers.
Canada’s pension funds are profiting from financialized long-term care while widespread negligence is killing residents. It’s time to take the company that is behind this rapacious profiteering into public ownership and fully socialize Canada’s health care system.
The $2,000 survival checks for all Americans would immediately deliver enormous benefits to the millions facing eviction, starvation, and bankruptcy. The case against those checks that is currently being argued by Joe Manchin and Mitch McConnell is bogus.
Going to the movies feels fundamentally different from simply streaming videos: it’s a collective experience, and often inspires discussion and argument. In 2021, when the pandemic finally recedes, we should build socialist film clubs.
Joe Biden used to brag that he practically wrote the Patriot Act, the Bush-era law that massively increased government surveillance powers. Given his purported plan to pass a new domestic terrorism law once in office, the danger is real that the January 6 Capitol attack will be used as an excuse to severely curtail our civil liberties.
A reporter for Jacobin traveled to the Kurdish province of Dersim to investigate the recent discovery of a mass grave from a 1937 massacre. But far from being forgotten, it’s an atrocity that still haunts the region today, with millions of Kurds in Turkey struggling for freedom against Erdoğan’s latest crackdown.
The big-budget Wonder Woman sequel is an ugly, tedious, bloated, badly CGI-ed mess and a wretchedly directed film. And yet critics keep making excuses for it because of its supposed social relevance.
Last week’s riot was an attempt to undermine the nation’s democratic procedures. The response from some political elites is unwittingly trying to do the same through calls for unnecessary new terror laws.
Israel and its supporters are ramping up efforts to outlaw solidarity with Palestinians in the name of combating antisemitism. But these authoritarian maneuvers can’t hide the fact that Israel is losing the battle for public opinion over its denial of Palestinian rights.
There is no twenty-first-century capitalism without the shipping and oil industries. And understanding the global economic system means understanding their operation in the Arabian Peninsula.
As far-right rioters rampaged through Congress, Britain’s centrist commentariat absurdly insisted that Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters are equally dangerous. Such allegations of left-wing extremism evoke the crudest Red Scare tactics — and whitewash the conservatives who have been enabling Trump for years.
Last week’s right-wing riot at the Capitol was egged on by politicians and organizations that have received substantial dark-money funding from corporate interests. It’s past time to enact reforms to end the era of dark money — and find out who exactly is bankrolling the anti-democratic far right.