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.
In November, Evo Morales was forced out of office in a right-wing coup. He was trying to avoid a campaign of terror from the Right — but under Bolivia’s new ultraconservative president, Jeanine Áñez, that terror, now carried out by paramilitaries, is still escalating.
We live in an Orwellian era, in which working-class people pilfering convenience store goods is called “looting.” Rich people stealing hundreds of billions of dollars, on the other hand, is just well-functioning “public policy.”
Benjamin Netayahu’s newly convened government, the largest in Israeli history, is also facing the country’s greatest economic crisis in decades. As signs of public disaffection start to grow, it may try to avoid challenges to its power by provoking a violent confrontation with Palestinians.
Lawmakers across the country are using identical legislative language to shield hospital and nursing home corporations from prosecution for COVID–19-related illness and deaths — after those companies pumped huge amounts of cash into state elections.
There’s a pandemic raging and Bernie Sanders is off the ballot, but other candidates inspired by his campaign are still running — like Rick Krajewski and Nikil Saval, two candidates for the Pennsylvania state legislature with roots in working-class fights, who are backed by Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Social media platforms have become a central element of modern political life — too important to allow them to be run according to the whims of either an unbalanced president like Donald Trump or a few tech billionaires like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
From the Black Panthers to the Communist Party, radical Los Angeles in the ’60s was a seething cauldron of unrest, united by the brutal, lawless repression of the LAPD. In a rollicking new book, Mike Davis and Jon Wiener tell the story of a decade of explosions.
Emily Gallagher is running to be the first socialist in a century to represent her North Brooklyn district in the New York state assembly. Her focus on residential displacement and workers’ rights is drawing a steady flow of small donations — while big corporate money from companies like Lyft is being mobilized against her.
The UK’s Boris Johnson had been coasting through the COVID-19 crisis — but that was before his aide Dominic Cummings’s flouting of social-distancing rules set off a nationwide furor. It’s reminded the country of everything they hate about the Tories: their privileged obliviousness and their belief that normal rules don’t apply to them.
Dave Rubin very much wants you to think of him as a serious man of ideas. But his new book shows him to be a shallow thinker who doesn’t even understand his own ideas.
Public health experts have been sounding the alarm about the spread of coronavirus in American prisons. Yet despite repeated warnings, newly released data show that America’s addiction to incarceration continues unabated — endangering all of us, both inside and outside prison walls.
Donald Trump’s erratic, dangerous response to the coronavirus crisis has sent an unmistakable message: better thousands die than I lose in November.
Former Bernie Sanders press secretary Briahna Joy Gray was viciously attacked throughout the primary for criticizing mainstream Democrats. In an interview with Jacobin, she spoke about what she learned from the campaign, how she came to the Left, and the empty, opportunistic anti-racism of neoliberal Democrats.
Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot has worked hard to portray herself as a “progressive” mayor. But her coronavirus response has largely shielded the city’s corporate elite — while rejecting policies pushed by democratic socialists on the city council that would benefit working-class residents.
Sigmund Freud often regretted the fact that most of his patients were drawn from the upper classes. But when socialists turned Vienna “red” after World War I, neurotics both rich and poor gained access to free treatment and new experimental methods.
The uprising in response to George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer this week has led to predictable calls to condemn looting. But the real looting in our society comes from the military, the police, the pharmaceutical companies, private equity, the landlords, the real estate speculators, and the billionaires — not protesters against police brutality.
Despite decades of protests against them, the IMF and World Bank continue to force the same discredited neoliberal policies on poor governments and their people. Countries in economic distress desperately need alternative sources of aid that won’t demand adherence to free-market orthodoxy.
Jerry Stiller was one of those mensches from a bygone era who is almost hard to believe in now, as startling to encounter as a member of a species thought to be extinct walking into your living room.
We have so many miseries in American society because rich people are hoarding all of our resources. We shouldn’t applaud them when they toss us a few dollars as philanthropy.
As nursing-home deaths spike during the COVID-19 crisis, hospital and nursing-home companies are pushing for state laws all over America that would shield their executives and owners from responsibility — and trying to convince lawmakers by spending serious cash.