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.
People often say that Margaret Thatcher’s austerity policies were a “tough pill to swallow” but ended up saving Britain from ruin. In fact, the evidence is that she left the UK economy weaker and more unequal. We must reject apologetics for Thatcherism.
This year’s election cycle was the most expensive in history — and, thanks to oligarch-friendly campaign finance laws, we don’t even know where much of it came from.
Working time reduction has always been used as a way of distributing available work and reducing unemployment. In our era of crisis, we need to fight for a four-day week.
Much of the American mainstream media adopted a highly combative, watchdog approach to covering the Trump White House. Will the media abandon that approach under a President Joe Biden?
During Spain’s Civil War, Dolores Ibárruri was famed worldwide as La Pasionaria, the brilliant orator who stirred anti-fascists’ souls. Fleeing to Moscow in 1939, she soon became the exiled Communists’ leader — both political guide for a defeated party and a “Spanish mother” confronting the expectations of her male comrades.
Tax records we’ve reviewed show a health care industry front group run by a former Hillary Clinton aide has already amassed millions to block a public health insurance option. Even small reform isn’t possible without confronting powerful interests.
Born 125 years ago today, communist leader Dolores Ibárruri was the most famous symbol of the Republican cause in Spain. Known as “La Pasionaria,” she coined the battle cry “¡No pasarán!” — expressing the fearlessness which made her a heroine for generations of anti-fascists.
We can’t win and carry out a Green New Deal without winning building trades workers and unions to an environmentalist agenda that also benefits them. New York’s recently announced massive investment in offshore wind, high-speed rail, and more, backed by both labor and environmental groups, shows how it can be done.
An undemocratic power grab by hard-right politicians in Peru was defeated by popular mobilization on the streets. The Peruvian political crisis has deep roots in a failed model of technocratic, neoliberal governance that has turned the state into a plaything of private interests.
Earlier this year, Spotify announced it would give artists and record labels a boost in promotion if they accepted a lower royalty rate — rates that are already abysmally low. Between fights over compensating artists and the unionization of podcast company workers, it’s clear that even the world of digital streaming has class conflict at its heart.
As Joe Biden staffs his incoming administration, battle lines have been drawn between progressives and centrists. But the real winner has been corporate America, whose lobbyists and consultants have been getting the bulk of the plum jobs.
Sometimes referred to as the “Soviet Bauhaus,” Vkhutemas featured a radical experiment in student democracy and design that went even further than its German counterpart.
As economic trouble mounts, Trump officials are letting Wall Street banks pay out billions in dividends to shareholders. Bankers are taking self-serving risks with the world economy, because they know that if anything goes wrong, they’ll be bailed out.
Forty years after his murder in New York City, we remember John Lennon’s record of political engagement as a champion of the anti-war movement and a self-styled “instinctive socialist” — which brought him into conflict with Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover.
Since normalizing relations in September, Israel and the United Arab Emirates have teamed up to do what both do best: trample on democratic freedoms, commit atrocities, and whitewash occupation.
Writer David Roth has been the preeminent chronicler of Donald Trump’s presidency. In an interview with Jacobin, Roth talks about four hallucinatory years and what makes the deranged president at the center of them tick.
In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, many hoped it would contain an inadvertent silver lining, in the form of reduced carbon emissions. But the real lesson of the past few months is now clear: we can’t stop global warming without radical systemic change.
Janos Marton says that the Manhattan district attorney’s office is “extremely punitive when prosecuting low-income communities of color and pretty weak when prosecuting the rich and powerful.” He says, in an interview with Jacobin, that he is running for DA to change that, aiming to reduce the number of people in jail, stop drug prosecutions, and go after bad bosses who steal workers’ wages.
If education is nothing but a provider of the “human capital” that will help students get a job, the argument to privatize public education will be far too convincing. Instead, we should look at our schools as institutions to educate kids to be citizens in a democracy with expectations for better lives.
Xavier Becerra advocated Medicare for All and tough action against Big Pharma. Too bad the incoming Biden administration he’s set to be a part of as Health and Human Services head has refused to take on the health insurance industry.