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 Immokalee, Florida, immigrant farmworkers are living and working in crowded conditions without sick leave, space to quarantine, or a nearby hospital. They’re afraid of an outbreak, and they’re making demands on the state to prevent one.
Tens of thousands of journalists are losing their jobs, newspaper chains are going under, and vulture capitalists are picking over the remains. We need a news bailout — but one that overhauls the existing corporate model and pushes the media to put the public before profits.
What made Bernie Sanders different from any major presidential candidate in our lifetimes was that he didn’t pitch himself as the most qualified pilot — he demanded that we pilot the plane ourselves.
African countries haven’t yet borne the brunt of COVID-19. But as the virus migrates into the cities and shacks and towns of Africa, it could spread rapidly — pummeling the continent’s austerity-wracked public health systems.
In office from 2007 to 2017, Ecuador’s left-wing president Rafael Correa more than doubled investment in health care. But Lenín Moreno’s austerian regime has abandoned that legacy — and is now using the courts to silence those who criticize its response to COVID-19.
We all love Joe Hill, but his famous piece of advice — “Don’t mourn, organize!” — is only half right. Given the state of the world today, with Bernie Sanders out of the presidential race and hundreds of thousands dead from the coronavirus, we ought to be doing both.
The coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a series of emergency measures to reorient our economies toward the public health care response. The crisis offers a glimpse of how production could be made to serve social needs — but only if we defeat those who want a return to capitalist normality.
The Australian “JobKeeper” scheme will subsidize the wages of many throughout the course of this pandemic, but more than 2 million workers are set to be left out entirely. What’s more, the scheme undermines collective bargaining agreements, giving more power to employers in a shift that threatens to far outlive this crisis.
The COVID-19 quarantine has exposed the importance of parks, sidewalks, and other public spaces to our collective well-being. To stitch the world back together once the pandemic recedes, we should enact a massive green stimulus that builds out our public infrastructure in beautiful, imaginative, low-carbon ways.
The Bernie Sanders campaign secured wide-ranging support from both young people and immigrants. Though our actual power is still incredibly weak, the socialist movement is also well-positioned to build a broad working-class coalition going forward.
Bernie Sanders made the slogan “fight for that person you don’t even know” central to his 2020 campaign. Now that Sanders’s campaign is finished, we shouldn’t abandon that broad ethic of solidarity.
Jared Kushner has gotten yet another nepotistic gig leading the Trump administration’s coronavirus “shadow task force.” The problem is, he doesn’t know anything about COVID-19, just like he doesn’t know anything about immigration reform or Middle East peace.
In the wake of the end of Bernie Sanders’s campaign, many pundits are asking: Should Bernie have campaigned like Elizabeth Warren? The answer is no, since she lost very badly.
We don’t need melodramatic hyperbole from New Leftists telling us to campaign for Joe Biden. We need to build a democratic-socialist movement that is the only real hope for the planet’s future.
As tech firms team up with governments to fight the coronavirus pandemic, we’re being asked to accept a trade-off between our digital privacy and our health. It’s a false choice: we can achieve the public health benefits of data without accepting abusive and illicit surveillance.
The coronavirus is plunging the global economy into an unprecedented recession. We need to wipe away the debt bondage of Global South countries and launch a Global Green New Deal that will allow workers around the world to prosper.
Go ahead and laugh: newly declassified sections of a Justice Department report suggest that the Russiagate conspiracy theory may itself have been part of a Kremlin disinformation campaign.
Socialists say they either want to “realign” the Democratic Party or break with it entirely. But those aren’t political strategies — they are outcomes of political struggle. We need a way to develop working-class politics without condemning ourselves to third-party marginality.
Coronavirus has emphasized a truth we knew before the pandemic: capitalist food systems are irrational and don’t serve human needs. Socialists have to demand a food system based on social and ecological needs — one that can provide food for all.
People in Kashmir have been suffering a militarized lockdown since August, when India put an end to the region’s semiautonomous status. In a pandemic, that lockdown is set to continue, extending the disciplinary powers of India’s armed forces in a region where tensions are already at boiling point.