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.
Blanche Lincoln, a former two-term “Blue Dog” conservative Democrat from Arkansas, is lobbying against increases in the corporate tax rate in Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan. It’s all about protecting the highly profitable business interests filling her wallet.
Jeffrey Sterling is a former CIA officer and whistleblower, jailed on trumped-up charges under the Espionage Act. He spoke to Jacobin about how he was victimized — and why the district court that convicted him is sure to be stacked against Julian Assange.
The Algerian struggle for freedom from French imperialism was absolutely central to the political landscape of the twentieth century. We should remember its heroic history and honor its legacy today.
The COVID-19 crisis has been a case study in the destructiveness of predatory financial institutions like private equity and hedge funds. From private-equity-owned hospitals that cut staff to the bone to the growing investor interest in disaster-driven industries like insurance, the pandemic has been a gold mine for some of the finance industry’s most rapacious and socially useless segments.
Facing down anti-union threats from an increasingly brazen management, educators at more than a dozen Pittsburgh-area charter schools are voting on unionization. For teachers already burdened by impossible workloads, the charters’ handling of the COVID-19 crisis prompted them to act.
The danger posed by California’s Proposition 22, the tech-backed ballot measure that dismantles existing labor protections for gig workers, isn’t just about low wages and poor working conditions. It signals the creation of an entirely new kind of servant class.
Last fall, Armenia was devastated by a six-week war with its neighbor Azerbaijan, ending in the deployment of Russian peacekeepers across the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh. Yet the “peace agreement” has done nothing to resolve the deeper reasons for the conflict, in the ethno-nationalist strife which has simmered since the fall of the USSR.
The Supreme Court may consider a case that could defang Joe Biden’s awful bankruptcy bill and protect the millions of Americans crushed by debt from student loans.
As the US military increasingly outsources the most important parts of war, American imperialism has evolved into something that can’t be measured merely by counting the number of boots on the ground. But it’s still highly profitable for corporate elites and spreads death and misery around the globe — and it still must be dismantled.
Last April, Keir Starmer was elected party leader on a promise to make Labour a “real opposition” again. Yet instead of pushing back on a dangerous right-wing government, he’s decided to make the socialist left his main enemy.
Why are powerful leaders all trying to be Oprah Winfrey? From Obama’s Netflix series to Bill Clinton’s podcast, the political elite aren’t content with being merely influential — they want to be influencers. But Pod Can’t Save America, and we shouldn’t come along for the ride.
Alberta’s United Conservative Party has whipped up a ludicrous hysteria against a children’s cartoon about Bigfoot — a typical case of the UCP’s diversionary scaremongering. But Alberta’s New Democratic Party has also been guilty of similar tactics that debase the standard of public discourse.
The push to rebuild the nation’s decrepit infrastructure is long overdue. But it isn’t enough to make our parks and public transit more functional — they must be beautiful spaces that affirm the public sphere is worthy of exaltation.
In Finland, high-quality free school meals are provided to all children between six and sixteen as a public service. Students in the United States and everywhere else deserve the same.
A cabal of tech corporations, real estate interests, and business lobbyists are trying to strip Kshama Sawant, the pathbreaking socialist on the Seattle City Council, of the seat to which she was elected by the city’s voters. Sawant deserves your support.
Real estate titans and landlords might just be New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s last base of support. The embattled governor is rewarding them handsomely for their loyalty.
The defeat of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and the ascension of Joe Biden and Keir Starmer hasn’t just meant the defeat of domestic working-class politics — it’s meant the defeat of an egalitarian internationalism that opposes war and imperialism.
It’s not just Jay Carney, the former Obama spokesman who now leads capital’s side of the class war at Amazon. A whole cohort of Obamanauts — those bright, young idealists who wanted to change the world — have positioned themselves in roles in the private sector where they can most effectively be part of the problem.
Media pundits hail the economist Karl Polanyi as a brilliant theorist of capitalism and a thinker for our time. In order to understand Polanyi’s ideas, however, we need to see him in the context of his own time: Europe’s “age of catastrophe” in the early twentieth century.
American police departments are armed to the teeth with military-grade weaponry like Humvees and assault rifles. Nothing is stopping President Biden from shutting down this military-to-police pipeline right away.